Victor Hugo The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

THE HUNCHBACK OF
NOTRE-DAME
Webster’s Thesaurus Edition for PSAT®, SAT®, GRE®, LSAT®,

GMAT®, and AP® English Test Preparation
Victor Hugo
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product. All rights reserved.
The Hunchback of Notre-
Dame
Webster’s Thesaurus Edition for PSAT®, SAT®, GRE®, LSAT®,
Victor Hugo
PSAT® is a registered trademark of the College Entrance Examination Board and the National Merit
Scholarship Corporation neither of which sponsors or endorses this book; SAT® is a registered
trademark of the College Board which neither sponsors nor endorses this book; GRE®, AP® and
Advanced Placement® are registered trademarks of the Educational Testing Service which neither
sponsors nor endorses this book, GMAT® is a registered trademark of the Graduate Management
Admissions Council which is neither affiliated with this book nor endorses this book, LSAT® is a
registered trademark of the Law School Admissions Council which neither sponsors nor endorses
this product. All rights reserved.
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The Hunchback of Notre-Dame: Webster’s Thesaurus Edition for PSAT®, SAT®, GRE®, LSAT®,
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ISBN 0-497-25330-5
iii
Contents
PREFACE FROM THE EDITOR .......................................................................................... 1
PREFACE.......................................................................................................................... 3
BOOK I ............................................................................................................................. 5
CHAPTER I THE GRAND HALL ............................................................................................................ 7
CHAPTER II PIERRE GRINGOIRE........................................................................................................ 23

CHAPTER III MONSIEUR THE CARDINAL ...................................................................................... 35
CHAPTER IV MASTER JACQUES COPPENOLE............................................................................... 43
CHAPTER V QUASIMODO.................................................................................................................... 53
CHAPTER VI ESMERALDA ................................................................................................................... 61
BOOK II .......................................................................................................................... 65
CHAPTER I FROM CHARYBDIS TO SCYLLA ................................................................................... 67
CHAPTER II THE PLACE DE GREVE .................................................................................................. 71

CHAPTER III KISSES FOR BLOWS ....................................................................................................... 75
CHAPTER IV THE INCONVENIENCES OF FOLLOWING A PRETTY WOMAN THROUGH

THE STREETS IN THE EVENING .......................................................................................................... 87
CHAPTER V RESULT OF THE DANGERS.......................................................................................... 93

CHAPTER VI THE BROKEN JUG ......................................................................................................... 97
CHAPTER VII A BRIDAL NIGHT ....................................................................................................... 117
BOOK III ....................................................................................................................... 129
CHAPTER I NOTRE-DAME ................................................................................................................. 131
CHAPTER II A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF PARIS ................................................................................... 141
BOOK IV ....................................................................................................................... 165
CHAPTER I GOOD SOULS................................................................................................................... 167
CHAPTER II CLAUDE FROLLO.......................................................................................................... 173

CHAPTER III IMMANIS PECORIS CUSTOS, IMMANIOR IPSE .................................................. 179
CHAPTER IV THE DOG AND HIS MASTER.................................................................................... 187
CHAPTER V MORE ABOUT CLAUDE FROLLO............................................................................. 189

CHAPTER VI UNPOPULARITY .......................................................................................................... 197
BOOK V ........................................................................................................................ 199
CHAPTER I ABBAS BEATI MARTINI................................................................................................ 201
CHAPTER II THIS WILL KILL THAT................................................................................................. 213
iv
BOOK VI ....................................................................................................................... 229
CHAPTER I AN IMPARTIAL GLANCE AT THE ANCIENT MAGISTRACY ............................ 231
CHAPTER II THE RAT-HOLE.............................................................................................................. 243
CHAPTER III HISTORY OF A LEAVENED CAKE OF MAIZE ..................................................... 249
CHAPTER IV A TEAR FOR A DROP OF WATER............................................................................ 271

CHAPTER V END OF THE STORY OF THE CAKE......................................................................... 283
BOOK VII...................................................................................................................... 285
CHAPTER I THE DANGER OF CONFIDING ONE'S SECRET TO A GOAT .............................. 287
CHAPTER II A PRIEST AND A PHILOSOPHER ARE TWO DIFFERENT THINGS ................. 305
CHAPTER III THE BELLS ..................................................................................................................... 315
CHAPTER IV ANArKH ......................................................................................................................... 319

CHAPTER V THE TWO MEN CLOTHED IN BLACK..................................................................... 335
CHAPTER VI THE EFFECT WHICH SEVEN OATHS IN THE OPEN AIR CAN PRODUCE.. 343
CHAPTER VII THE MYSTERIOUS MONK ....................................................................................... 349
CHAPTER VIII THE UTILITY OF WINDOWS WHICH OPEN ON THE RIVER ....................... 359
BOOK VIII..................................................................................................................... 369
CHAPTER I THE CROWN CHANGED INTO A DRY LEAF ......................................................... 371
CHAPTER II CONTINUATION OF THE CROWN WHICH WAS CHANGED INTO A DRY
LEAF ........................................................................................................................................................... 383
CHAPTER III END OF THE CROWN WHICH WAS TURNED INTO A DRY LEAF................ 389
CHAPTER IV LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA--LEAVE ALL HOPE BEHIND, YE WHO ENTER
HERE .......................................................................................................................................................... 393
CHAPTER V THE MOTHER................................................................................................................. 409

CHAPTER VI THREE HUMAN HEARTS DIFFERENTLY CONSTRUCTED ............................. 415
BOOK IX....................................................................................................................... 433
CHAPTER I DELIRIUM ......................................................................................................................... 435
CHAPTER II HUNCHBACKED, ONE EYED, LAME ...................................................................... 447
CHAPTER III DEAF................................................................................................................................ 453

CHAPTER IV EARTHENWARE AND CRYSTAL ............................................................................ 457
CHAPTER V THE KEY TO THE RED DOOR .................................................................................... 469
CHAPTER VI CONTINUATION OF THE KEY TO THE RED DOOR.......................................... 473
BOOK X ........................................................................................................................ 477
CHAPTER I GRINGOIRE HAS MANY GOOD IDEAS IN SUCCESSION--RUE DES
BERNARDINS .......................................................................................................................................... 479
CHAPTER II TURN VAGABOND ....................................................................................................... 493

v
CHAPTER III LONG LIVE MIRTH...................................................................................................... 497

CHAPTER IV AN AWKWARD FRIEND............................................................................................ 507
CHAPTER V THE RETREAT IN WHICH MONSIEUR LOUIS OF FRANCE SAYS HIS

PRAYERS ................................................................................................................................................... 529
CHAPTER VI LITTLE SWORD IN POCKET...................................................................................... 563

CHAPTER VII CHATEAUPERS TO THE RESCUE .......................................................................... 565
BOOK XI....................................................................................................................... 569
CHAPTER I THE LITTLE SHOE .......................................................................................................... 571
CHAPTER II THE BEAUTIFUL CREATURE CLAD IN WHITE (Dante) .................................... 607
CHAPTER III THE MARRIAGE OF PHOEBUS ................................................................................ 617
CHAPTER IV THE MARRIAGE OF QUASIMODO ......................................................................... 619
NOTE ADDED TO THE DEFINITIVE EDITION ................................................................ 623
GLOSSARY ................................................................................................................... 629
Victor Hugo 1
PREFACE FROM THE EDITOR
Designed for school districts, educators, and students seeking to maximize performance on
standardized tests, Webster’s paperbacks take advantage of the fact that classics are frequently
assigned readings in English courses. By using a running thesaurus at the bottom of each page, this
edition of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo was edited for students who are actively
building their vocabularies in anticipation of taking PSAT®, SAT®, AP® (Advanced Placement®),
GRE®, LSAT®, GMAT® or similar examinations.1
Webster’s edition of this classic is organized to expose the reader to a maximum number of
synonyms and antonyms for difficult and often ambiguous English words that are encountered in
other works of literature, conversation, or academic examinations. Extremely rare or idiosyncratic
words and expressions are given lower priority in the notes compared to words which are “difficult,
and often encountered” in examinations. Rather than supply a single synonym, many are provided
for a variety of meanings, allowing readers to better grasp the ambiguity of the English language,
and avoid using the notes as a pure crutch. Having the reader decipher a word’s meaning within
context serves to improve vocabulary retention and understanding. Each page covers words not
already highlighted on previous pages. If a difficult word is not noted on a page, chances are that it
has been highlighted on a previous page. A more complete thesaurus is supplied at the end of the
book; Synonyms and antonyms are extracted from Webster’s Online Dictionary.
Definitions of remaining terms as well as translations can be found at www.websters-online-

dictionary.org. Please send suggestions to websters@icongroupbooks.com
The Editor
Webster’s Online Dictionary
www.websters-online-dictionary.org
1 PSAT® is a registered trademark of the College Entrance Examination Board and the National Merit
Scholarship Corporation neither of which sponsors or endorses this book; SAT® is a registered
trademark of the College Board which neither sponsors nor endorses this book; GRE®, AP® and
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sponsors nor endorses this book, GMAT® is a registered trademark of the Graduate Management
Admissions Council which is neither affiliated with this book nor endorses this book, LSAT® is a
registered trademark of the Law School Admissions Council which neither sponsors nor endorses
this product. All rights reserved.
Victor Hugo 3
PREFACE
A few years ago, while visiting or, rather, rummaging about Notre-Dame, the
author of this book found, in an obscure nook of one of the towers, the following
word, engraved by hand upon the wall:
ANArKH.
These Greek capitals, black with age, and quite deeply graven in the stone,
with I know not what signs peculiar to Gothic calligraphy imprinted upon their
forms and upon their attitudes, as though with the purpose of revealing that it
had been a hand of the Middle Ages which had inscribed them there, and
especially the fatal and melancholy meaning contained in them, struck the
author deeply.
He questioned himself; he sought to divine who could have been that soul in
torment which had not been willing to quit this world without leaving this
stigma of crime or unhappiness upon the brow of the ancient church.
Afterwards, the wall was whitewashed or scraped down, I know not which,
and the inscription disappeared. For it is thus that people have been in the habit
of proceeding with the marvelous churches of the Middle Ages for the last two
hundred years. Mutilations come to them from every quarter, from within as
Thesaurus
calligraphy: (n) script, writing, embossed. v) low spirits; (n) gloominess,
penmanship, lettering, chirography, marvelous: (adj) wonderful, fantastic, depression. ANTONYMS: (n)
handwriting, letters, pencraft, incredible, fabulous, extraordinary, happiness, cheerfulness, hopefulness,
beautiful handwriting, print. tremendous, grand, astonishing, optimism; (adj) happy, bright, cheery,
engraved: (adj) carved, inscribed, terrific, great; (adj, v) prodigious. satisfied.
etched, sculptured, chased, cut in, ANTONYMS: (adj) ordinary, nook: (n) angle, niche, recess, hole,
graphic, graven; (prep) insculptured; mundane, abysmal, bad, dreadful, coign, bay, compartment, oriel, cove,
(v) fixed, imprinted. unworthy, dire, humdrum, refuge, haven.
graven: (adj) carved, engraved, etched, unimpressive, unremarkable, boring. towers: (n) edifice.
sculptured, sculptile, sculpted, melancholy: (adj, v) dreary; (adj, n) whitewashed: (adj) overpowered,
inscribed, carven. gloom, melancholic; (adj) depressed, overcome, crushed, conquered,
imprinted: (adj) printed, marked, dejected, dismal, gloomy, doleful; (n, beaten, routed, painted.
4 The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
well as from without. The priest whitewashes them, the archdeacon scrapes
them down; then the populace arrives and demolishes them.
Thus, with the exception of the fragile memory which the author of this book
here consecrates to it, there remains to-day nothing whatever of the mysterious
word engraved within the gloomy tower of Notre-Dame,-- nothing of the
destiny which it so sadly summed up. The man who wrote that word upon the
wall disappeared from the midst of the generations of man many centuries ago;
the word, in its turn, has been effaced from the wall of the church; the church
will, perhaps, itself soon disappear from the face of the earth.
It is upon this word that this book is founded. %
March, 1831.
Thesaurus
archdeacon: (n) reverend, suffragan, fragile: (adj, v) frail; (adj) delicate, cheery, cheerful, bright, hopeful,
prelate, archbishop, bishop, dainty, breakable, flimsy, brittle, light, promising, uplifting, joyful,
eminence, elder, diocesan, dean, weak, faint, slim, fine, feeble. sunny, clear.
metropolitan, primate. ANTONYMS: (adj) strong, midst: (adj, n) middle; (adv) mid,
centuries: (n) century. substantial, sturdy, permanent, between; (prep) among, amid; (n)
destiny: (n) fate, chance, fortune, robust, indestructible, stable. core, center, thick, interior, heart,
kismet, luck, lot, destination, portion, generations: (n) generation, family. waist.
weird, life; (n, v) doom. gloomy: (adj) black, desolate, dejected, populace: (n) multitude, masses,
ANTONYMS: (n) chance, design. cheerless, depressing, dismal, inhabitants, public, commonalty,
effaced: (adj) obliterated. downcast, disconsolate, melancholy, mob, crowd, population, nation,
founded: (prep) established, institute; funereal, downhearted. man, country.
(v) fusil, cast. ANTONYMS: (adj) encouraging,
Victor Hugo 5
BOOK I
Victor Hugo 7
CHAPTER I
THE GRAND HALL
Three hundred and forty-eight years, six months, and nineteen days ago to-
day, the Parisians awoke to the sound of all the bells in the triple circuit of the
city, the university, and the town ringing a full peal.%
The sixth of January, 1482, is not, however, a day of which history has
preserved the memory. There was nothing notable in the event which thus set
the bells and the bourgeois of Paris in a ferment from early morning. It was
neither an assault by the Picards nor the Burgundians, nor a hunt led along in
procession, nor a revolt of scholars in the town of Laas, nor an entry of "our
much dread lord, monsieur the king," nor even a pretty hanging of male and
female thieves by the courts of Paris. Neither was it the arrival, so frequent in
the fifteenth century, of some plumed and bedizened embassy. It was barely two
days since the last cavalcade of that nature, that of the Flemish ambassadors
charged with concluding the marriage between the dauphin and Marguerite of
Flanders, had made its entry into Paris, to the great annoyance of M. le Cardinal
de Bourbon, who, for the sake of pleasing the king, had been obliged to assume
an amiable mien towards this whole rustic rabble of Flemish burgomasters, and
to regale them at his Hôtel de Bourbon, with a very "pretty morality, allegorical
Thesaurus
ambassadors: (n) ambassador. defuse, soothe. regale: (v) entertain, treat, feed, divert,
awoke: (adj) awakened. mien: (n, v) deportment, carriage, amuse, crop, browse, graze; (n)
bedizened: (adj) gingerbread. bearing, demeanor; (n) look, banquet, regalia; (adj) refreshment.
cavalcade: (n) parade, pageant, countenance, appearance, guise, rustic: (n) countryman, peasant; (adj)
caravan, spectacle, celebration, manner, aspect, air. rural, pastoral, boorish, country,
column, convoy; (adj) rank and file, nineteen: (adj, n) XIX; (n) large integer. bucolic, provincial, hick, agrestic,
line of battle, cortege; (v) file. plumed: (adj) plumate, crested, countrified. ANTONYMS: (adj) town,
dauphin: (n) crown prince. emplumed, plumy, plumose, urbane, cultured, city, sophisticated.
ferment: (n) agitation, excitement, decorated, flying, feathery. triple: (adj) threefold, ternary, triplex,
barm, tumult, unrest, disturbance; rabble: (n) crowd, masses, trash, herd, trine, tripartite, Ternate, triplasian;
(adj, v) stew, pother; (v) effervesce, canaille, people, rout, ragtag, horde, (adj, n) thribble; (n) triad, safety,
turn, brew. ANTONYMS: (v) quiet, gang, riffraff. threesome.
satire, and farce," while a driving rain drenched the magnificent tapestries at his
door.%
What put the "whole population of Paris in commotion," as Jehan de Troyes
expresses it, on the sixth of January, was the double solemnity, united from time
immemorial, of the Epiphany and the Feast of Fools.
On that day, there was to be a bonfire on the Place de Grève, a maypole at the
Chapelle de Braque, and a mystery at the Palais de Justice. It had been cried, to
the sound of the trumpet, the preceding evening at all the cross roads, by the
provost's men, clad in handsome, short, sleeveless coats of violet camelot, with
large white crosses upon their breasts.
So the crowd of citizens, male and female, having closed their houses and
shops, thronged from every direction, at early morn, towards some one of the
three spots designated.
Each had made his choice; one, the bonfire; another, the maypole; another,
the mystery play. It must be stated, in honor of the good sense of the loungers of
Paris, that the greater part of this crowd directed their steps towards the bonfire,
which was quite in season, or towards the mystery play, which was to be
presented in the grand hall of the Palais de Justice (the courts of law), which was
well roofed and walled; and that the curious left the poor, scantily flowered
maypole to shiver all alone beneath the sky of January, in the cemetery of the
Chapel of Braque.
The populace thronged the avenues of the law courts in particular, because
they knew that the Flemish ambassadors, who had arrived two days previously,
intended to be present at the representation of the mystery, and at the election of
the Pope of the Fools, which was also to take place in the grand hall.
It was no easy matter on that day, to force one's way into that grand hall,
although it was then reputed to be the largest covered enclosure in the world (it
is true that Sauval had not yet measured the grand hall of the Château of
Montargis). The palace place, encumbered with people, offered to the curious
gazers at the windows the aspect of a sea; into which five or six streets, like so
many mouths of rivers, discharged every moment fresh floods of heads. The
Thesaurus
encumbered: (adj) burdened, discredit. open.
burdensome, weighed down, heavy, immemorial: (adj) ancient, scantily: (adv) sparingly, scarcely,
deep, clayey, cloggy. ANTONYM: prescriptive, pristine, primaeval, poorly, sparsely, insufficiently,
(adj) unencumbered. primeval, traditional, old, eternal, skimpily, meagerly, scantly,
flowered: (adj) flowering, flowery. customary. slenderly, sparely; (adj, adv) thinly.
honor: (n, v) respect, reputation, glory, maypole: (adj) pikestaff, pole, flagstaff. ANTONYMS: (adv) plentifully,
fame, reward; (n) award, accolade, morn: (n) dawn, daybreak, forenoon, profusely, fully.
reverence; (v) celebrate; (adj, n, v) period, prime, aurora, a, amount of sleeveless: (adj) bootless, futile, otiose,
worship, grace. ANTONYMS: (n, v) time, break of dawn, break of day, conceited, unproductive, vain,
dishonor, disgrace; (n) shame, break of the day. ineffectual, giddy, egotistic; (n)
humiliation, wickedness, contempt, roofed: (adj) testudinated, arched. frivolous, volatile. ANTONYM: (adj)
insult; (v) break, ignore, disrespect, ANTONYMS: (adj) roofless, exposed, sleeved.
Victor Hugo 9
waves of this crowd, augmented incessantly, dashed against the angles of the
houses which projected here and there, like so many promontories, into the
irregular basin of the place. In the centre of the lofty Gothic façade of the palace,
the grand staircase, incessantly ascended and descended by a double current,
which, after parting on the intermediate landing-place, flowed in broad waves
along its lateral slopes,-- the grand staircase, I say, trickled incessantly into the
place, like a cascade into a lake. The cries, the laughter, the trampling of those
thousands of feet, produced a great noise and a great clamor. From time to time,
this noise and clamor redoubled; the current which drove the crowd towards the
grand staircase flowed backwards, became troubled, formed whirlpools. This
was produced by the buffet of an archer, or the horse of one of the provost's
sergeants, which kicked to restore order; an admirable tradition which the
provostship has bequeathed to the constablery, the constablery to the
maréchaussée, the maréchaussée to our gendarmeri of Paris.%
Thousands of good, calm, bourgeois faces thronged the windows, the doors,
the dormer windows, the roofs, gazing at the palace, gazing at the populace, and
asking nothing more; for many Parisians content themselves with the spectacle of
the spectators, and a wall behind which something is going on becomes at once,
for us, a very curious thing indeed.
If it could be granted to us, the men of 1830, to mingle in thought with those
Parisians of the fifteenth century, and to enter with them, jostled, elbowed,
pulled about, into that immense hall of the palace, which was so cramped on that
sixth of January, 1482, the spectacle would not be devoid of either interest or
charm, and we should have about us only things that were so old that they
would seem new.
With the reader's consent, we will endeavor to retrace in thought, the
impression which he would have experienced in company with us on crossing
the threshold of that grand hall, in the midst of that tumultuous crowd in
surcoats, short, sleeveless jackets, and doublets.
And, first of all, there is a buzzing in the ears, a dazzlement in the eyes.
Above our heads is a double ogive vault, panelled with wood carving, painted
Thesaurus
bequeathed: (adj) hereditary. work; (v) strive, aim. ANTONYMS: v) reconsider; (n) flyback.
clamor: (n, v) outcry, cry, clamour, (n, v) neglect. thronged: (adj) throng, busy,
hullabaloo, roar, shout; (n) noise, mingle: (v) compound, combine, populous, brisk, teeming, swarming,
racket, uproar, exclamation, hubbub. merge, amalgamate, intermix, mix, sprightly, sensitive, replete,
ANTONYMS: (n) silence, serenity, commingle, associate, confuse, join, overflowing; (n) persistent.
tranquility; (v) whisper, mutter. intermingle. ANTONYM: (v) part. trampling: (n) trample; (adj) moving.
dazzlement: (v) resplendence. ogive: (n) dirt band, cumulative tumultuous: (adj, n) boisterous,
dormer: (n) window, lantern, dormer frequency curve, front. tempestuous; (adj) disorderly,
window. redoubled: (adj) ingeminate. riotous, turbulent, noisy, furious,
doublets: (n) span, dyad. retrace: (v) recollect, recall, trace, loud, troubled, disturbed; (adj, v)
endeavor: (n, v) struggle, try, strain; etymologize, recognize, construct, tumultuary. ANTONYMS: (adj)
(n) effort, trial, essay, shot, enterprise, call up, bethink oneself, speculate; (n, peaceful, calm.
azure, and sown with golden fleurs-de-lis; beneath our feet a pavement of black
and white marble, alternating. A few paces distant, an enormous pillar, then
another, then another; seven pillars in all, down the length of the hall, sustaining
the spring of the arches of the double vault, in the centre of its width. Around
four of the pillars, stalls of merchants, all sparkling with glass and tinsel; around
the last three, benches of oak, worn and polished by the trunk hose of the
litigants, and the robes of the attorneys. Around the hall, along the lofty wall,
between the doors, between the windows, between the pillars, the interminable
row of all the kings of France, from Pharamond down: the lazy kings, with
pendent arms and downcast eyes; the valiant and combative kings, with heads
and arms raised boldly heavenward. Then in the long, pointed windows, glass
of a thousand hues; at the wide entrances to the hall, rich doors, finely
sculptured; and all, the vaults, pillars, walls, jambs, panelling, doors, statues,
covered from top to bottom with a splendid blue and gold illumination, which, a
trifle tarnished at the epoch when we behold it, had almost entirely disappeared
beneath dust and spiders in the year of grace, 1549, when du Breul still admired
it from tradition.%
Let the reader picture to himself now, this immense, oblong hall, illuminated
by the pallid light of a January day, invaded by a motley and noisy throng which
drifts along the walls, and eddies round the seven pillars, and he will have a
confused idea of the whole effect of the picture, whose curious details we shall
make an effort to indicate with more precision.
It is certain, that if Ravaillac had not assassinated Henri IV., there would have
been no documents in the trial of Ravaillac deposited in the clerk's office of the
Palais de Justice, no accomplices interested in causing the said documents to
disappear; hence, no incendiaries obliged, for lack of better means, to burn the
clerk's office in order to burn the documents, and to burn the Palais de Justice in
order to burn the clerk's office; consequently, in short, no conflagration in 1618.
The old Palais would be standing still, with its ancient grand hall; I should be
able to say to the reader, "Go and look at it," and we should thus both escape the
Thesaurus
attorneys: (n) lawyers, bar. disconsolate, gloomy, low, sad, pendant, dangling, pending,
azure: (adj, n) cerulean, blue; (n) downhearted, discouraged. unsettled, undecided, pensile,
sapphire, blueness, indigo, lazuline, ANTONYMS: (adj) cheerful, drooping, projecting; (n) stipend.
heaven; (adj) chromatic, bright blue, vivacious, cheery, elated, joyous, up, tinsel: (adj, n) frippery, finery; (adj, v)
azurn, azureous. positive. meretricious; (v) gloss; (adj) gaudy,
conflagration: (n) blaze, inferno, eddies: (n) turbulence. trumpery, tawdry, showy; (n)
flame, wildfire, combustion, heavenward: (adj) skyward; (adj, adv) gimcrack, gewgaw, clinquant.
holocaust, burning, bonfire, toward heaven; (adv) heavenwardly. valiant: (adj) brave, courageous,
empyrosis, flagration; (n, v) oblong: (adj) oval, elliptical, intrepid, fearless, heroic, audacious,
deflagration. rectangular, rounded; (v) gallant, daring, dauntless, stout,
downcast: (adj) depressed, dejected, longitudinal; (n) block, quadrangle. stalwart. ANTONYMS: (adj) afraid,
dispirited, blue, desolate, pendent: (adj) pendulous, suspended, despicable.
Victor Hugo 11
necessity,--I of making, and he of reading, a description of it, such as it is. Which

demonstrates a new truth: that great events have incalculable results.%
It is true that it may be quite possible, in the first place, that Ravaillac had no
accomplices; and in the second, that if he had any, they were in no way
connected with the fire of 1618. Two other very plausible explanations exist:
First, the great flaming star, a foot broad, and a cubit high, which fell from
heaven, as every one knows, upon the law courts, after midnight on the seventh
of March; second, Théophile's quatrain,
"Sure, 'twas but a sorry game

When at Paris, Dame Justice,
Through having eaten too much spice,
Set the palace all aflame."
Whatever may be thought of this triple explanation, political, physical, and

poetical, of the burning of the law courts in 1618, the unfortunate fact of the fire
is certain. Very little to-day remains, thanks to this catastrophe,-- thanks, above
all, to the successive restorations which have completed what it spared,-- very
little remains of that first dwelling of the kings of France,-- of that elder palace of
the Louvre, already so old in the time of Philip the Handsome, that they sought
there for the traces of the magnificent buildings erected by King Robert and
described by Helgaldus. Nearly everything has disappeared. What has become
of the chamber of the chancellery, where Saint Louis consummated his
marriage? the garden where he administered justice, "clad in a coat of camelot, a
surcoat of linsey-woolsey, without sleeves, and a sur-mantle of black sandal, as
he lay upon the carpet with Joinville?" Where is the chamber of the Emperor
Sigismond? and that of Charles IV.? that of Jean the Landless? Where is the
staircase, from which Charles VI. promulgated his edict of pardon? the slab
where Marcel cut the throats of Robert de Clermont and the Marshal of
Champagne, in the presence of the dauphin? the wicket where the bulls of Pope
Benedict were torn, and whence those who had brought them departed decked
Thesaurus
carpet: (v) cover, drape, rebuke, incalculable: (adj) countless, line, heroic stanza, elegiac stanza,
encase, row, chew out; (n) rug, innumerable, numberless, boundless, verse, triplet.
carpeting, tapis, runner, covering. inestimable, immense, infinite, sandal: (n) shoe, boot, pump,
chancellery: (n) chancellory, building. myriad, numerous, invaluable, espadrille, pusher, huaraches,
consummated: (adj) perfected, done, unpredictable. ANTONYMS: (adj) sandals, sandalwood, galoche,
fulfilled; (v) completed, crowned. calculable, negligible, limited, goloshes, huarache.
cubit: (v) foot, hand, inch, line, nail, worthless, tiny, slight, finite, few, seventh: (n) common fraction,
palm; (n) coudee. definite, small, minor. interval.
eaten: (v) eat. midnight: (n) dark, noon, hour. surcoat: (n) chesterfield, capote,
edict: (n) act, command, writ, poetical: (adj) imaginative, rhetorical, greatcoat, tunic, coat, great coat,
declaration, ruling, rule, regulation, poematic, figurative, inventive. Ulster, hooded coat, overcoating,
directive, order, dictate, law. quatrain: (n) distich, couplet, canto, raincoat, topcoat.
out, in derision, in copes and mitres, and making an apology through all Paris?
and the grand hall, with its gilding, its azure, its statues, its pointed arches, its
pillars, its immense vault, all fretted with carvings? and the gilded chamber? and
the stone lion, which stood at the door, with lowered head and tail between his
legs, like the lions on the throne of Solomon, in the humiliated attitude which
befits force in the presence of justice? and the beautiful doors? and the stained
glass? and the chased ironwork, which drove Biscornette to despair? and the
delicate woodwork of Hancy? What has time, what have men done with these
marvels? What have they given us in return for all this Gallic history, for all this
Gothic art? The heavy flattened arches of M. de Brosse, that awkward architect
of the Saint-Gervais portal. So much for art; and, as for history, we have the
gossiping reminiscences of the great pillar, still ringing with the tattle of the
Patru.%
It is not much. Let us return to the veritable grand hall of the veritable old
palace. The two extremities of this gigantic parallelogram were occupied, the
one by the famous marble table, so long, so broad, and so thick that, as the
ancient land rolls-- in a style that would have given Gargantua an appetite-- say,
"such a slice of marble as was never beheld in the world"; the other by the chapel
where Louis XI. had himself sculptured on his knees before the Virgin, and
whither he caused to be brought, without heeding the two gaps thus made in the
row of royal statues, the statues of Charlemagne and of Saint Louis, two saints
whom he supposed to be great in favor in heaven, as kings of France. This
chapel, quite new, having been built only six years, was entirely in that charming
taste of delicate architecture, of marvellous sculpture, of fine and deep chasing,
which marks with us the end of the Gothic era, and which is perpetuated to
about the middle of the sixteenth century in the fairylike fancies of the
Renaissance. The little open-work rose window, pierced above the portal, was,
in particular, a masterpiece of lightness and grace; one would have pronounced
it a star of lace.
In the middle of the hall, opposite the great door, a platform of gold brocade,
placed against the wall, a special entrance to which had been effected through a
Thesaurus
beheld: (adj) visual. differ, thwart, reject, demean; (n) parallelogram: (n) rhomb, tetragon,
brocade: (n) brocatelle, cloth, fabric, derogation, disapproval, unkindness. quadrilateral, diamond, rhombus,
fringe, galloon, lace, trapping, fretted: (adj) latticed, haggard, rhomboidal, quadrangle, oblong,
edging, embroidery. magged, latticelike, reticulated, rhomboid, rhombic.
fairylike: (adj) magic, magical, reticular, interlaced. ANTONYM: perpetuated: (adj) perpetuate.
sprightly. (adj) unfretted. reminiscences: (n) memoirs.
fancies: (n) stock. gilding: (n) embellishment, ormolu, tattle: (v) gossip, babble, chat, chatter,
favor: (n, v) countenance, aid, grace, plating, beautification, cosmetics, blather, snitch, blabber, talk, prate,
support, benefit, boon; (adj, n) decoration, enamel, adornment, prattle, blither. ANTONYMS: (v)
kindness; (n) advantage; (v) befriend, prettification, coat, gold plating. hide, conceal.
encourage, patronize. ANTONYMS: gossiping: (adj) gabby, garrulous, whither: (adv) hither, thither,
(v) hinder, contradict, dislike, hurt, scandalous; (n) gossipmongering. whereunto, whereto, for.
Victor Hugo 13
window in the corridor of the gold chamber, had been erected for the Flemish
emissaries and the other great personages invited to the presentation of the
mystery play.%
It was upon the marble table that the mystery was to be enacted, as usual. It
had been arranged for the purpose, early in the morning; its rich slabs of marble,
all scratched by the heels of law clerks, supported a cage of carpenter's work of
considerable height, the upper surface of which, within view of the whole hall,
was to serve as the theatre, and whose interior, masked by tapestries, was to take
the place of dressing-rooms for the personages of the piece. A ladder, naively
placed on the outside, was to serve as means of communication between the
dressing-room and the stage, and lend its rude rungs to entrances as well as to
exits. There was no personage, however unexpected, no sudden change, no
theatrical effect, which was not obliged to mount that ladder. Innocent and
venerable infancy of art and contrivances!
Four of the bailiff of the palace's sergeants, perfunctory guardians of all the
pleasures of the people, on days of festival as well as on days of execution, stood
at the four corners of the marble table.
The piece was only to begin with the twelfth stroke of the great palace clock
sounding midday. It was very late, no doubt, for a theatrical representation, but
they had been obliged to fix the hour to suit the convenience of the ambassadors.
Now, this whole multitude had been waiting since morning. A goodly
number of curious, good people had been shivering since daybreak before the
grand staircase of the palace; some even affirmed that they had passed the night
across the threshold of the great door, in order to make sure that they should be
the first to pass in. The crowd grew more dense every moment, and, like water,
which rises above its normal level, began to mount along the walls, to swell
around the pillars, to spread out on the entablatures, on the cornices, on the
window-sills, on all the salient points of the architecture, on all the reliefs of the
sculpture. Hence, discomfort, impatience, weariness, the liberty of a day of
cynicism and folly, the quarrels which break forth for all sorts of causes-- a
pointed elbow, an iron-shod shoe, the fatigue of long waiting-- had already, long
Thesaurus
bailiff: (n) officer, underwriter, virtuously, soundly, uprightly; (adj) offhand, mechanical, indifferent,
castellan, solicitor, seneschal, sizable, handsome, respectable. hurried, sketchy, formal.
secretary, proctor, official, naively: (adv) ingenuously, ANTONYMS: (adj) careful,
middleman, functionary, broker. credulously, unsophisticatedly, thoughtful.
daybreak: (adj, n) break of day; (n) artlessly, inexperiencedly, simplely, personage: (n) person, notable,
sunrise, prime, morning, light, candidly, frankly, trustingly, celebrity, personality, individual,
dawning, cockcrow, dayspring, childishly, unaffectedly. bigwig, figure, somebody, human,
aurora, sunup, daylight. ANTONYMS: (adv) deliberately, character, being.
ANTONYMS: (n) sunset, sundown, astutely, sensibly, dishonestly, weariness: (n) exhaustion, tiredness,
darkness, eventide, nightfall. artfully. lassitude, languor, asthenopia,
goodly: (adv) benignly, kindly, perfunctory: (adj) cursory, casual, defatigation, grogginess, listlessness,
strongly, rightly, graciously, automatic, passing, superficial, boredom, ennui, prostration.
before the hour appointed for the arrival of the ambassadors, imparted a harsh
and bitter accent to the clamor of these people who were shut in, fitted into each
other, pressed, trampled upon, stifled. Nothing was to be heard but
imprecations on the Flemish, the provost of the merchants, the Cardinal de
Bourbon, the bailiff of the courts, Madame Marguerite of Austria, the sergeants
with their rods, the cold, the heat, the bad weather, the Bishop of Paris, the Pope
of the Fools, the pillars, the statues, that closed door, that open window; all to the
vast amusement of a band of scholars and lackeys scattered through the mass,
who mingled with all this discontent their teasing remarks, and their malicious
suggestions, and pricked the general bad temper with a pin, so to speak.%
Among the rest there was a group of those merry imps, who, after smashing
the glass in a window, had seated themselves hardily on the entablature, and
from that point despatched their gaze and their railleries both within and
without, upon the throng in the hall, and the throng upon the Place. It was easy
to see, from their parodied gestures, their ringing laughter, the bantering appeals
which they exchanged with their comrades, from one end of the hall to the other,
that these young clerks did not share the weariness and fatigue of the rest of the
spectators, and that they understood very well the art of extracting, for their own
private diversion from that which they had under their eyes, a spectacle which
made them await the other with patience.
"Upon my soul, so it's you, 'Joannes Frollo de Molendino!'" cried one of them,
to a sort of little, light-haired imp, with a well-favored and malign countenance,
clinging to the acanthus leaves of a capital; "you are well named John of the Mill,
for your two arms and your two legs have the air of four wings fluttering on the
breeze. How long have you been here?"
"By the mercy of the devil," retorted Joannes Frollo, "these four hours and
more; and I hope that they will be reckoned to my credit in purgatory. I heard
the eight singers of the King of Sicily intone the first verse of seven o'clock mass
in the Sainte-Chapelle."
"Fine singers!" replied the other, "with voices even more pointed than their
caps! Before founding a mass for Monsieur Saint John, the king should have
Thesaurus
acanthus: (n) cartouche, zigzag, intrepidly, strongly, powerfully, indiscriminate, heterogeneous,
astragal. ruggedly, sturdily, toughly. medley, confused, eclectic, motley,
bantering: (adj) banteringly, satirical, intone: (v) intonate, cantillate, sing, different; (v) blended, blent.
jovial, facetious, humorous. give benediction, recite, mouth, provost: (n) burgomaster, chancellor,
caps: (n) brevier, bourgeois, pica speak, label, judge, talk, verbalize. magistrate, prefect, archon, syndic,
boldface. malign: (v) defame, disparage, rector, warden, lieutenant, academic
entablature: (n) cornice, architrave, asperse, libel, badmouth, vilify; (adj) administrator, consul.
capital, coping stone, structure, malevolent, harmful, malefic, purgatory: (n) limbo, abyss, purgation,
epistyle, entablement, construction, injurious, evil. ANTONYMS: (v) hell, situation, imaginary place, living
zoophorus, sconce, pediment. praise, compliment; (adj) benign, death, punishment, Gehenna, grief.
hardily: (adv) robustly, vigorously, beneficial, harmless. trampled: (adj) crushed, damaged,
stoutly, courageously, hardly, mingled: (adj) miscellaneous, complex, flattened, compressed, packed down.
Victor Hugo 15
inquired whether Monsieur Saint John likes Latin droned out in a Provençal
accent."
"He did it for the sake of employing those accursed singers of the King of
Sicily!" cried an old woman sharply from among the crowd beneath the window.
"I just put it to you! A thousand livres parisi for a mass! and out of the tax on sea
fish in the markets of Paris, to boot!"
"Peace, old crone," said a tall, grave person, stopping up his nose on the side
towards the fishwife; "a mass had to be founded. Would you wish the king to
fall ill again?"
"Bravely spoken, Sire Gilles Lecornu, master furrier of king's robes!" cried the
little student, clinging to the capital.%
A shout of laughter from all the students greeted the unlucky name of the
poor furrier of the king's robes.
"Lecornu! Gilles Lecornu!" said some.
"Cornutus et hirsutus, horned and hairy," another went on.
"He! of course," continued the small imp on the capital, "What are they
laughing at? An honorable man is Gilles Lecornu, brother of Master Jehan
Lecornu, provost of the king's house, son of Master Mahiet Lecornu, first porter
of the Bois de Vincennes,-- all bourgeois of Paris, all married, from father to son."
The gayety redoubled. The big furrier, without uttering a word in reply,
tried to escape all the eyes riveted upon him from all sides; but he perspired and
panted in vain; like a wedge entering the wood, his efforts served only to bury
still more deeply in the shoulders of his neighbors, his large, apoplectic face,
purple with spite and rage.
At length one of these, as fat, short, and venerable as himself, came to his
rescue.
"Abomination! scholars addressing a bourgeois in that fashion in my day
would have been flogged with a fagot, which would have afterwards been used
to burn them."
Thesaurus
abomination: (n) abhorrence, apoplectic: (adj) motionless. honorable: (adj) good, estimable,
revulsion, atrocity, hatred, fagot: (n) bundle, fag, poof, fairy, exalted, respectable, fair, decent,
detestation, execration, hate, pansy, queer, poove, pouf, fascicle, reputable, ethical, honor; (adj, v)
loathing, repugnance, outrage, tuft, sheaf. great, noble. ANTONYMS: (adj)
aversion. ANTONYMS: (n) fishwife: (n) fishmonger, shameful, disgraceful, corrupt,
adoration, affection, appreciation, merchandiser, merchant, shrew. degenerate, immoral, humiliating,
approval, benefit, delight, esteem, furrier: (n) cloakmaker, dishonest, unethical, decadent, bad,
gratification, joy, kindness, blessing. garmentmaker, garmentworker. deceitful.
accursed: (adj) execrable, abominable, gayety: (n) hilarity, glee, cheer, likes: (n) kind, sort, type.
detestable, accurst, hateful, damned, jocundity, joviality, happiness, neighbors: (n) neighbourhood.
damnable, maledict, blasted; (v) pleasure; (adj) good humor, robes: (n) garb, fine clothes, costume,
atrocious, stranded. L'Allegro, spirits; (adj, n) mirth. best clothes.
The whole band burst into laughter.%

"Holà hé! who is scolding so? Who is that screech owl of evil fortune?"
"Hold, I know him" said one of them; "'tis Master Andry Musnier."
"Because he is one of the four sworn booksellers of the university!" said the
other.
"Everything goes by fours in that shop," cried a third; "the four nations, the
four faculties, the four feasts, the four procurators, the four electors, the four
booksellers."
"Well," began Jean Frollo once more," we must play the devil with them."
"Musnier, we'll burn your books."
"Musnier, we'll beat your lackeys."
"Musnier, we'll kiss your wife."
"That fine, big Mademoiselle Oudarde."
"Who is as fresh and as gay as though she were a widow."
"Devil take you!" growled Master Andry Musnier.
"Master Andry," pursued Jean Jehan, still clinging to his capital, "hold your
tongue, or I'll drop on your head!"
Master Andry raised his eyes, seemed to measure in an instant the height of
the pillar, the weight of the scamp, mentally multiplied that weight by the
square of the velocity and remained silent.
Jehan, master of the field of battle, pursued triumphantly:
"That's what I'll do, even if I am the brother of an archdeacon!"
"Fine gentry are our people of the university, not to have caused our
privileges to be respected on such a day as this! However, there is a maypole and
a bonfire in the town; a mystery, Pope of the Fools, and Flemish ambassadors in
the city; and, at the university, nothing!"
"Nevertheless, the Place Maubert is sufficiently large!" interposed one of the
clerks established on the window-sill.
Thesaurus
bonfire: (n) fire, balefire, blaze, studded, thick, increased, frequent; castigation, admonition, reproof,
conflagration, firecracker, fireworks, (v) absorb, acquisition. objurgation, chiding, dressing,
salute, beacon, campfire, feu de joie, pillar: (n) brace, mainstay, post, jobation, scold, rating. ANTONYMS:
flames. obelisk, foundation, pier, monument, (n) compliment, approval.
electors: (n) country, electoral college. stanchion, backbone, buttress; (adj, n) screech: (n, v) cry, shout, shriek, yell,
faculties: (n) mother wit. tower. screak, yelp, yowl, roar; (n)
interposed: (adj) interjacent, pursued: (n) hunted person. screaming; (v) squawk, pipe.
intercedent, intervenient, scamp: (n) rascal, imp, miscreant, triumphantly: (adv) exultantly,
parenthetical, intermediate colors, scalawag, rogue, monkey, villain, winningly, jubilantly, elatedly,
mediate. brat, scallywag, rapscallion; (v) proudly, successfully, triumphally,
multiplied: (adj) many, multitudinous, skimp. conqueringly, gleefully, delightedly,
teeming, peopled, populous, scolding: (n) rebuke, lecture, gloriously.
Victor Hugo 17
"Down with the rector, the electors, and the procurators!" cried Joannes.%
"We must have a bonfire this evening in the Champ-Gaillard," went on the
other, "made of Master Andry's books."
"And the desks of the scribes!" added his neighbor.
"And the beadles' wands!"
"And the spittoons of the deans!"
"And the cupboards of the procurators!"
"And the hutches of the electors!"
"And the stools of the rector!"
"Down with them!" put in little Jehan, as counterpoint; "down with Master
Andry, the beadles and the scribes; the theologians, the doctors and the
decretists; the procurators, the electors and the rector!"
"The end of the world has come!,' muttered Master Andry, stopping up his
ears.
"By the way, there's the rector! see, he is passing through the Place," cried one
of those in the window.
Each rivalled his neighbor in his haste to turn towards the Place.
"Is it really our venerable rector, Master Thibaut?" demanded Jehan Frollo du
Moulin, who, as he was clinging to one of the inner pillars, could not see what
was going on outside.
"Yes, yes," replied all the others, "it is really he, Master Thibaut, the rector."
It was, in fact, the rector and all the dignitaries of the university, who were
marching in procession in front of the embassy, and at that moment traversing
the Place. The students crowded into the window, saluted them as they passed
with sarcasms and ironical applause. The rector, who was walking at the head
of his company, had to support the first broadside; it was severe.
"Good day, monsieur le recteur! Holà hé! good day there!"
Thesaurus
broadside: (n, v) bill, poster; (n) rapidity, speed, bustle, hastiness, (n) foreigner.
pamphlet, hail, circular, quickness. ANTONYMS: (n) delay, stools: (n) shit, excrement, evacuation,
denunciation, denouncement, firing, patience, forethought, caution. dejection.
salvo, leaflet; (v) affiche. ironical: (adj) sarcastic, satirical, dry, traversing: (n) traverse,
counterpoint: (v) differ, oppose, be burlesque, wry, sardonic, satiric, perambulation, crossing; (adj)
different; (adj) corresponding, derisive, caustic, quizzical; (n) moving.
counterbalanced, opposing, opposed, humorous. venerable: (adj) ancient, reverend,
conflicting; (n) polyphony, foiling, neighbor: (v) abut, adjoin, populate, estimable, August, respectable, aged,
concerted music. touch; (n) acquaintance, distinguished, sacred, worthy, of
ears: (n) antenna. neighborhood, national; (adj) long standing, revered. ANTONYMS:
haste: (n, v) hurry, dash, dispatch, neighborly, neighbouring, (adj) unworthy, unimpressive,
rush; (n) celerity, expedition, neighboring, adjacent. ANTONYM: undignified, disreputable.
"How does he manage to be here, the old gambler? Has he abandoned his
dice?"
"How he trots along on his mule! her ears are not so long as his!"
"Holà hé! good day, monsieur le recteur Thibaut! Tybalde aleator! Old fool!
old gambler!"
"God preserve you! Did you throw double six often last night?"
"Oh! what a decrepit face, livid and haggard and drawn with the love of
gambling and of dice!"
"Where are you bound for in that fashion, Thibaut, Tybalde ad dados, with
your back turned to the university, and trotting towards the town?"
"He is on his way, no doubt, to seek a lodging in the Rue Thibautodé?" cried
Jehan du M. Moulin.%
The entire band repeated this quip in a voice of thunder, clapping their
hands furiously.
"You are going to seek a lodging in the Rue Thibautodé, are you not,
monsieur le recteur, gamester on the side of the devil?"
Then came the turns of the other dignitaries.
"Down with the beadles! down with the mace-bearers!"
"Tell me, Robin Pouissepain, who is that yonder?"
"He is Gilbert de Suilly, Gilbertus de Soliaco, the chancellor of the College of
Autun."
"Hold on, here's my shoe; you are better placed than I, fling it in his face."
"Saturnalitias mittimus ecce nuces."
"Down with the six theologians, with their white surplices!"
"Are those the theologians? I thought they were the white geese given by
Sainte-Geneviève to the city, for the fief of Roogny."
"Down with the doctors!"
"Down with the cardinal disputations, and quibblers!"
Thesaurus
came: (v) arrive, come. fief: (n) feoff, demesne, feud, fee, flushed, happy, pleased.
clapping: (n) clap, acclaim, hand, benefice, land, possession, tenement, mittimus: (n) brevet, bull, decretal,
clapping of hands, cheering, estate, deadly hatred, acres. dispensation, edict, firman, passport,
handclap, ovation, slapping, plaudit, gambler: (n) gamester, adventurer, placit, prescription, ukase, warrant.
round, approval. punter, plunger, croupier, bettor, mule: (n) ass, donkey, jackass, hinny,
decrepit: (adj) infirm, senile, feeble, bookmaker, speculator, gamblers, mules, scuff, bullhead, slipper; (adj)
effete, seedy, worn, dilapidated, high roller, shooter. hybrid, crossbreed, Metis.
shabby, old, rickety, frail. gamester: (n) sportsman, player, quip: (n, v) joke, gag, jest, jeer, flout;
ANTONYMS: (adj) fit, strong, sound, reveler, dicer, hazarder. (n) gibe, epigram, crack, wisecrack,
robust, powerful, healthy, hearty, livid: (adj) furious, irate, ashen, mad, conceit, remark.
sturdy. blue, gray, ghastly, leaden, colorless, trots: (n) Aztec two-step, Montezuma's
disputations: (adj) polemic. angry, enraged. ANTONYMS: (adj) revenge; (adj) ill.
Victor Hugo 19
"My cap to you, Chancellor of Sainte-Geneviève! You have done me a wrong.

'Tis true; he gave my place in the nation of Normandy to little Ascanio
Falzapada, who comes from the province of Bourges, since he is an Italian."%
"That is an injustice," said all the scholars. "Down with the Chancellor of
Sainte-Geneviève!"
"Ho hé! Master Joachim de Ladehors! Ho hé! Louis Dahuille! Ho he
Lambert Hoctement!"
"May the devil stifle the procurator of the German nation!"
"And the chaplains of the Sainte-Chapelle, with their gray amices; cum tunices
grisis!"
"Seu de pellibus grisis fourratis!"
"Holà hé! Masters of Arts! All the beautiful black copes! all the fine red
copes!"
"They make a fine tail for the rector."
"One would say that he was a Doge of Venice on his way to his bridal with
the sea."
"Say, Jehan! here are the canons of Sainte-Geneviève!"
"To the deuce with the whole set of canons!"
"Abbé Claude Choart! Doctor Claude Choart! Are you in search of Marie la
Giffarde?"
"She is in the Rue de Glatigny."
"She is making the bed of the king of the debauchees." She is paying her four
deniers quatuor denarios."
"Aut unum bombum."
"Would you like to have her pay you in the face?"
"Comrades! Master Simon Sanguin, the Elector of Picardy, with his wife on
the crupper!"
"Post equitem seclet atra eura-- behind the horseman sits black care."
Thesaurus
bridal: (adj, v) spousal; (adj, n) monster, Lucifer, Satan, Beelzebub, attorney, substitute, lawyer, deputy,
wedding; (n) nuptials, matrimony, deuce, daemon; (v) torment, rag. vicegerent, placeholder, bureaucrat,
espousal, hymen, marriage ANTONYM: (n) angel. administrative official.
ceremony, adoption, betrothal; (v) gray: (adj) dull, dim, bleak, gloomy, province: (n, v) district, department;
hymeneal; (adj) marriage. pale, grizzled, hoary, leaden, old, (n) field, county, land, region,
ANTONYM: (adj) unmarried. overcast; (n) grizzle. ANTONYMS: domain, colony, duty, sphere, line.
canons: (n) system of opinions, school, (adj) sunny, cheerful, clear, youthful. sits: (n) sat.
doctrine. horseman: (n) cavalier, rider, jockey, stifle: (v) smother, suffocate, repress,
deuce: (n) devil, couple, two, dyad, horse fancier, horseback rider, dampen, muffle, extinguish, strangle,
demon, duo, duet, Twain, Dickens, trooper, trainer, knight, cavalryman, quell, hush up, asphyxiate, check.
brace, craps. animal fancier, postilion. ANTONYMS: (v) express, arouse,
devil: (n) fiend, demon, ghost, procurator: (n) agent, proxy, assignee, stimulate, light, exacerbate, show.
"Courage, Master Simon!"

"Good day, Mister Elector!"
"Good night, Madame Electress!"
"How happy they are to see all that!" sighed Joannes de Molendino, still
perched in the foliage of his capital.%
Meanwhile, the sworn bookseller of the university, Master Andry Musnier,
was inclining his ear to the furrier of the king's robes, Master Gilles Lecornu.
"I tell you, sir, that the end of the world has come. No one has ever beheld
such outbreaks among the students! It is the accursed inventions of this century
that are ruining everything,-- artilleries, bombards, and, above all, printing, that
other German pest. No more manuscripts, no more books! printing will kill
bookselling. It is the end of the world that is drawing nigh."
"I see that plainly, from the progress of velvet stuffs," said the fur-merchant.
At this moment, midday sounded.
"Ha!" exclaimed the entire crowd, in one voice.
The scholars held their peace. Then a great hurly-burly ensued; a vast
movement of feet, hands, and heads; a general outbreak of coughs and
handkerchiefs; each one arranged himself, assumed his post, raised himself up,
and grouped himself. Then came a great silence; all necks remained
outstretched, all mouths remained open, all glances were directed towards the
marble table. Nothing made its appearance there. The bailiff's four sergeants
were still there, stiff, motionless, as painted statues. All eyes turned to the
estrade reserved for the Flemish envoys. The door remained closed, the
platform empty. This crowd had been waiting since daybreak for three things:
noonday, the embassy from Flanders, the mystery play. Noonday alone had
arrived on time.
On this occasion, it was too much.
They waited one, two, three, five minutes, a quarter of an hour; nothing
came. The dais remained empty, the theatre dumb. In the meantime, wrath had
Thesaurus
bookseller: (n) bookshop, bookstore, bustle, clamor, hassle, storm. edge, balanced, poised, on the brink,
owner, proprietor, publisher. inclining: (adj) oblique, shelving; (n) suspended, perked up.
dais: (n) platform, podium, rostrum, leaning, tendency, disposition, ruining: (n) ruin, laying waste,
stage, chair, pedestal, pulpit, seat, movement, proclivity, sentiment, devastation, wrecking, razing,
ambo, woolsack, estrade. propensity, predilection, partiality. damage, collapse, desolation,
envoys: (n) embassy. noonday: (n) noontide, noon, high destruction, dilapidation; (adj)
estrade: (adj) parterre, rostrum, noon, hour, twelve noon, afternoon; deleterious.
platform, dais, terrace, esplanade. (v) tide; (adj) meridional. wrath: (n) rage, resentment, ire, fury,
grouped: (adj) sorted, classified, outstretched: (adj) extended, lengthy, displeasure, indignation, passion,
collective, gather. flat, open, unfolded, stretched, broad, madness, choler, irritation; (adj)
hurly-burly: (n) hubbub, tumult, wiredrawn, wide, long. angry. ANTONYMS: (n) happiness,
uproar, to-do, commotion, haste, perched: (adj) perked, alert, on the love, composure, serenity.
Victor Hugo 21
succeeded to impatience. Irritated words circulated in a low tone, still, it is true.

"The mystery! the mystery!" they murmured, in hollow voices. Heads began to
ferment. A tempest, which was only rumbling in the distance as yet, was
floating on the surface of this crowd. It was Jehan du Moulin who struck the first
spark from it.%
"The mystery, and to the devil with the Flemings!" he exclaimed at the full
force of his lungs, twining like a serpent around his pillar.
The crowd clapped their hands.
"The mystery!" it repeated, "and may all the devils take Flanders!"
"We must have the mystery instantly," resumed the student; "or else, my
advice is that we should hang the bailiff of the courts, by way of a morality and a
comedy."
"Well said," cried the people, "and let us begin the hanging with his
sergeants."
A grand acclamation followed. The four poor fellows began to turn pale, and
to exchange glances. The crowd hurled itself towards them, and they already
beheld the frail wooden railing, which separated them from it, giving way and
bending before the pressure of the throng.
It was a critical moment.
"To the sack, to the sack!" rose the cry on all sides.
At that moment, the tapestry of the dressing-room, which we have described
above, was raised, and afforded passage to a personage, the mere sight of whom
suddenly stopped the crowd, and changed its wrath into curiosity as by
enchantment.
"Silence! silence!"
The personage, but little reassured, and trembling in every limb, advanced to
the edge of the marble table with a vast amount of bows, which, in proportion as
he drew nearer, more and more resembled genuflections.
Thesaurus
acclamation: (n) applause, ovation, displeasure, discomfort. embroidery, hanging, carpet, cloth,
plaudit, praise, cheer, eclat, approval, railing: (n) balustrade, rail, barrier, complexness, fabric, material,
commendation, vox populi, guardrail, banister, fence, pale, mending.
adulation, hand. ANTONYMS: (n) paling, breastwork, handrail; (adj, n) tempest: (adj, n) storm, gust; (n) gale,
razzing, jeers, hisses, heckles, catcalls, invective. hurricane, squall, disturbance,
vituperation, disapproval. reassured: (adj) hopeful, reinsured, cyclone, typhoon, agitation, tornado,
devils: (n) unclean spirits. secure, confident. blizzard. ANTONYM: (n) serenity.
enchantment: (n) attraction, rumbling: (adj, n) grumbling; (n) throng: (n, v) swarm, herd, mob, flock,
captivation, charm, conjuration, grumble, noise, boom, thunder, roll, press; (n) multitude, host, horde,
sorcery, spell, bewitchment, roar; (adj) hollow, low; (v) mass, assembly, concourse.
incantation, delight, bewitchery; (adj, bombination, berloque. ANTONYMS: (n) trickle, few; (v)
n) rapture. ANTONYMS: (n) tapestry: (n) arras, tapis, textile, disperse.
In the meanwhile, tranquillity had gradually been restored. A1l that

remained was that slight murmur which always rises above the silence of a
crowd.%
"Messieurs the bourgeois," said he, "and mesdemoiselles the bourgeoises, we
shall have the honor of declaiming and representing, before his eminence,
monsieur the cardinal, a very beautiful morality which has for its title, 'The Good
Judgment of Madame the Virgin Mary.' I am to play Jupiter. His eminence is, at
this moment, escorting the very honorable embassy of the Duke of Austria;
which is detained, at present, listening to the harangue of monsieur the rector of
the university, at the gate Baudets. As soon as his illustrious eminence, the
cardinal, arrives, we will begin."
It is certain, that nothing less than the intervention of Jupiter was required to
save the four unfortunate sergeants of the bailiff of the courts. If we had the
happiness of having invented this very veracious tale, and of being, in
consequence, responsible for it before our Lady Criticism, it is not against us that
the classic precept, Nec deus intersit, could be invoked. Moreover, the costume of
Seigneur Jupiter, was very handsome, and contributed not a little towards
calming the crowd, by attracting all its attention. Jupiter was clad in a coat of
mail, covered with black velvet, with gilt nails; and had it not been for the rouge,
and the huge red beard, each of which covered one-half of his face,-- had it not
been for the roll of gilded cardboard, spangled, and all bristling with strips of
tinsel, which he held in his hand, and in which the eyes of the initiated easily
recognized thunderbolts,-- had not his feet been flesh-colored, and banded with
ribbons in Greek fashion, he might have borne comparison, so far as the severity
of his mien was concerned, with a Breton archer from the guard of Monsieur de
Berry.
Thesaurus
banded: (adj) connected, striped, eminence: (n) distinction, elevation, mandate, charge, lesson, injunction,
agouti, with stripes, stripy, belted. altitude, celebrity, superiority, rank, law, commandment, principle; (adj,
bristling: (n) brisling; (adj) thorny, excellence, fame, glory, prominence, n) rule.
muricated, pectinated, studded, status. ANTONYMS: (n) spangled: (adj) sequined, jeweled,
thistly, bristled, bushy, teeming, insignificance, cavity, depression, bejewelled, jewelled, bejeweled,
horrid, horrent. unimportance, dip, commonness, beady, beaded, bespangled,
clad: (adj) dressed, attired, clothed, inferiority. buttonlike, spangly, twinkling.
coated, garbed; (n) cladding; (prep) harangue: (v) declaim; (n) rant, screed, ANTONYM: (adj) dull.
gowned; (v) costume, shod, dress, address, tirade, oration, diatribe, veracious: (adj) truthful, true, reliable,
attire. ANTONYMS: (adj) undressed, sermon; (n, v) lecture, discourse, accurate, trustworthy, faithful,
unclothed. stump. veridical, frank, right, just, exact.
contributed: (adj) collatitious, unpaid. precept: (n) canon, decree, command, ANTONYM: (adj) untrue.
Victor Hugo 23
CHAPTER II
PIERRE GRINGOIRE
Nevertheless, as be harangued them, the satisfaction and admiration

unanimously excited by his costume were dissipated by his words; and when he
reached that untoward conclusion: "As soon as his illustrious eminence, the
cardinal, arrives, we will begin," his voice was drowned in a thunder of
hooting.%
"Begin instantly! The mystery! the mystery immediately!" shrieked the
people. And above all the voices, that of Johannes de Molendino was audible,
piercing the uproar like the fife's derisive serenade: "Commence instantly!"
yelped the scholar.
"Down with Jupiter and the Cardinal de Bourbon!" vociferated Robin
Poussepain and the other clerks perched in the window.
"The morality this very instant!" repeated the crowd; "this very instant! the
sack and the rope for the comedians, and the cardinal!"
Poor Jupiter, haggard, frightened, pale beneath his rouge, dropped his
thunderbolt, took his cap in his hand; then he bowed and trembled and
stammered: "His eminence-- the ambassadors-- Madame Marguerite of Flanders-
- ." He did not know what to say. In truth, he was afraid of being hung.
Thesaurus
derisive: (adj) ironic, sarcastic, cadaverous, careworn, tired, worn, court.
derisory, contemptuous, cynical, lean, thin, wasted, pinched, squalid. thunderbolt: (n) bolt of lightning,
mordant, sardonic, jeering, scornful, ANTONYMS: (adj) relaxed, carefree, lightning, thunder, thunderclap,
quizzical, satirical. ANTONYMS: healthy. bombshell, surprise, flash, shackle,
(adj) complimentary, approving, piercing: (adj, n) sharp, cutting; (adj, v) quarrel, streak of lightning, streak.
flattering, praising, sympathetic. keen, penetrating, biting, bitter, untoward: (adj) unlucky, unfortunate,
dissipated: (adj, v) fast; (adj) dissolute, harsh, shrill; (adj) high, raw, loud. inauspicious, unbecoming,
immoral, abandoned, profligate, ANTONYMS: (adj) quiet, dull, soft, inopportune, indecent, unfavorable,
prodigal, gay, rakish, degenerate, hot. unseemly, improper, clumsy,
squandered, licentious. serenade: (n) divertimento, chivaree, stubborn. ANTONYMS: (adj)
ANTONYMS: (adj) upright, moral. cheer, canon, callithump, callathump, auspicious, suitable, lucky,
haggard: (adj) emaciated, gaunt, belling, charivari, song, opus; (v) acceptable, happy, fortunate.
Hung by the populace for waiting, hung by the cardinal for not having
waited, he saw between the two dilemmas only an abyss; that is to say, a
gallows.%
Luckily, some one came to rescue him from his embarrassment, and assume
the responsibility.
An individual who was standing beyond the railing, in the free space around
the marble table, and whom no one had yet caught sight of, since his long, thin
body was completely sheltered from every visual ray by the diameter of the
pillar against which he was leaning; this individual, we say, tall, gaunt, pallid,
blond, still young, although already wrinkled about the brow and cheeks, with
brilliant eyes and a smiling mouth, clad in garments of black serge, worn and
shining with age, approached the marble table, and made a sign to the poor
sufferer. But the other was so confused that he did not see him. The new comer
advanced another step.
"Jupiter," said he, "my dear Jupiter!"
The other did not hear.
At last, the tall blond, driven out of patience, shrieked almost in his face,
"Michel Giborne!"
"Who calls me?" said Jupiter, as though awakened with a start.
"I," replied the person clad in black.
"Ah!" said Jupiter.
"Begin at once," went on the other. "Satisfy the populace; I undertake to
appease the bailiff, who will appease monsieur the cardinal."
Jupiter breathed once more.
"Messeigneurs the bourgeois," he cried, at the top of his lungs to the crowd,
which continued to hoot him, "we are going to begin at once."
"Evoe Jupiter! Plaudite cives! All hail, Jupiter! Applaud, citizens!" shouted the
scholars.
"Noel! Noel! good, good," shouted the people.
Thesaurus
abyss: (n) gorge, ravine, chasm, gulf, comer: (n) newcomer, arriver, traveler, Zeus, solar system, thunderer.
deep, purgatory, depth, hell, gap, traveller, contender, competitor, pallid: (adj) ghastly, wan, bloodless,
Gehenna, pit. ANTONYMS: (n) competition, visitor, whiz kid, Young lurid, cadaverous, sickly, ashen,
junction, juncture. Turk; (adj) fresh. white, pasty, livid, watery.
appease: (n, v) allay, alleviate; (adj, v) hail: (v) address, cry, acclaim, ANTONYMS: (adj) healthy, rosy,
pacify, still; (v) placate, quiet, applaud, summon, accost, fall, cheer, vivid.
conciliate, calm, mollify, abate, salute; (n, v) call; (n) greeting. serge: (n) cloth, fabric, material.
reconcile. ANTONYMS: (v) provoke, ANTONYMS: (v) ignore, criticize. wrinkled: (adj, n) rough, rugged; (adj)
annoy, antagonize, enrage, hoot: (n, v) hiss, boo, cry, jeer, mock, puckered, creased, wrinkly, wizened,
exacerbate, excite, irritate, intensify. beep; (n) gibe, honk, catcall; (v) call, crumpled, lined, gnarled, unironed,
awakened: (adj) excited, aroused, howl. crinkled. ANTONYMS: (adj)
awakens, awoke, interested. jupiter: (n) Jove, blazon, deity, father, unwrinkled, ironed, straight.
Victor Hugo 25
The hand clapping was deafening, and Jupiter had already withdrawn under
his tapestry, while the hall still trembled with acclamations.%
In the meanwhile, the personage who had so magically turned the tempest
into dead calm, as our old and dear Corneille puts it, had modestly retreated to
the half-shadow of his pillar, and would, no doubt, have remained invisible
there, motionless, and mute as before, had he not been plucked by the sleeve by
two young women, who, standing in the front row of the spectators, had noticed
his colloquy with Michel Giborne-Jupiter.
"Master," said one of them, making him a sign to approach. "Hold your
tongue, my dear Liénarde," said her neighbor, pretty, fresh, and very brave, in
consequence of being dressed up in her best attire. "He is not a clerk, he is a
layman; you must not say master to him, but messire."
"Messire," said Liénarde.
The stranger approached the railing.
"What would you have of me, damsels?" he asked, with alacrity.
"Oh! nothing," replied Liénarde, in great confusion; "it is my neighbor,
Gisquette la Gencienne, who wishes to speak with you."
"Not so," replied Gisquette, blushing; "it was Liénarde who called you
master; I only told her to say messire."
The two young girls dropped their eyes. The man, who asked nothing better
than to enter into conversation, looked at them with a smile.
"So you have nothing to say to me, damsels?"
"Oh! nothing at all," replied Gisquette.
"Nothing," said Liénarde.
The tall, light-haired young man retreated a step; but the two curious
maidens had no mind to let slip their prize.
"Messire," said Gisquette, with the impetuosity of an open sluice, or of a
woman who has made up her mind, "do you know that soldier who is to play the
part of Madame the Virgin in the mystery?"
Thesaurus
alacrity: (n) rapidity, speed, unclothe; (n) nakedness. tremendous; (v) thundering.
promptness, activity, preparedness, blushing: (adj) rosy, coy, blushful, ANTONYM: (adj) tranquil.
velocity, haste, swiftness, quickness, flushed, red, shy, bashful, impetuosity: (n) eagerness, haste, heat,
expedition; (adj) life. ANTONYMS: overmodest, ruddy; (adv) blushingly, violence, vehemence, impulsiveness,
(n) aversion, reservation, reluctance, ablush. ANTONYM: (adj) pale. impetuousness, excitability, temerity,
indifference, hesitance, dullness, colloquy: (n) talk, conference, precipitation, fervency.
disinclination, apathy, tardiness, conversation, dialog, chat, dialogue, ANTONYMS: (n) deliberation,
delay. collocution, verbal intercourse, patience, consideration, carefulness.
attire: (n, v) array, garb, apparel, wear; meeting, parley, interview. retreated: (adj) withdrawn, people.
(n) costume, garment, outfit, clothes; deafening: (adj) earsplitting, sluice: (n) lock, floodgate, channel,
(v) enrobe, clothe, dress up. thunderous, shrill, piercing, noisy, valve; (v) flush, flow, stream, wash,
ANTONYMS: (v) disrobe, bare, strip, massive, roaring, enormous, gigantic, pour, outlet, scour.
"You mean the part of Jupiter?" replied the stranger.%

"Hé! yes," said Liénarde, "isn't she stupid? So you know Jupiter?"
"Michel Giborne?" replied the unknown; "yes, madam."
"He has a fine beard!" said Liénarde.
"Will what they are about to say here be fine?" inquired Gisquette, timidly.
"Very fine, mademoiselle," replied the unknown, without the slightest
hesitation.
"What is it to be?" said Liénarde.
"'The Good Judgment of Madame the Virgin,'-- a morality, if you please,
damsel."
"Ah! that makes a difference," responded Liénarde.
A brief silence ensued-- broken by the stranger.
"It is a perfectly new morality, and one which has never yet been played."
"Then it is not the same one," said Gisquette, "that was given two years ago,
on the day of the entrance of monsieur the legate, and where three handsome
maids played the parts"
"Of sirens," said Liénarde.
"And all naked," added the young man.
Liénarde lowered her eyes modestly. Gisquette glanced at her and did the
same. He continued, with a smile,
"It was a very pleasant thing to see. To-day it is a morality made expressly
for Madame the Demoiselle of Flanders."
"Will they sing shepherd songs?" inquired Gisquette.
"Fie!" said the stranger, "in a morality? you must not confound styles. If it
were a farce, well and good."
"That is a pity," resumed Gisquette. "That day, at the Ponceau Fountain, there
were wild men and women, who fought and assumed many aspects, as they
sang little motets and bergerettes."
Thesaurus
aspects: (adj) moods, features. legate: (n) envoy, delegate, emissary, boastfully, brazenly, excessively.
confound: (v) bewilder, baffle, deputy, minister, representative, sang: (n) panax quinquefolius, sing,
nonplus, perplex, astonish, puzzle, messenger, internuncio, consul, herb, herbaceous plant.
amaze, astound, mistake; (adj, v) nuncio, ambassador. slightest: (adj) minimal, first, smallest
confuse, stupefy. ANTONYMS: (v) modestly: (adv) unassumingly, amount.
explain, clarify, comfort, lose, demurely, humbly, reservedly, timidly: (adv) fearfully, timorously,
distinguish; (n) understanding. retiringly, unpretentiously, cautiously, shyly, diffidently,
farce: (n) comedy, travesty, joke, diffidently, soberly, timidly, meekly, anxiously, nervously, shily, gingerly,
mockery, sham, play, charade, moderately. ANTONYMS: (adv) modestly, apprehensively.
caricature, dressing, forcemeat, ostentatiously, arrogantly, ANTONYMS: (adv) confidently,
buffoonery. ANTONYMS: (n) immodestly, elaborately, boldly, bravely, daringly, brashly, fearlessly,
tragedy, drama. radically, proudly, brashly, decisively, brazenly.
Victor Hugo 27
"That which is suitable for a legate," returned the stranger, with a good deal
of dryness, "is not suitable for a princess."
"And beside them," resumed Liénarde, "played many brass instruments,
making great melodies."
"And for the refreshment of the passers-by," continued Gisquette, "the
fountain spouted through three mouths, wine, milk, and hippocrass, of which
every one drank who wished."
"And a little below the Ponceau, at the Trinity," pursued Liénarde, "there was
a passion performed, and without any speaking."
"How well I remember that!" exclaimed Gisquette; "God on the cross, and the
two thieves on the right and the left." Here the young gossips, growing warm at
the memory of the entrance of monsieur the legate, both began to talk at once.%
"And, further on, at the Painters' Gate, there were other personages, very
richly clad."
"And at the fountain of Saint-Innocent, that huntsman, who was chasing a
hind with great clamor of dogs and hunting-horns."
"And, at the Paris slaughter-houses, stages, representing the fortress of
Dieppe!"
"And when the legate passed, you remember, Gisquette? they made the
assault, and the English all had their throats cut."
"And against the gate of the Châtelet, there were very fine personages!"
"And on the Port au Change, which was all draped above!"
"And when the legate passed, they let fly on the bridge more than two
hundred sorts of birds; wasn't it beautiful, Liénarde?"
"It will be better to-day," finally resumed their interlocutor, who seemed to
listen to them with impatience.
"Do you promise us that this mystery will be fine?" said Gisquette.
"Without doubt," he replied; then he added, with a certain emphasis,-- "I am
the author of it, damsels."
Thesaurus
draped: (adj) mantled, covered, tower, presidio, redoubt; (n, v) keep. partner, middleman, contact; (v)
cloaked, clothed, curtained, fountain: (n, v) fount, well; (n) jet, prolocutor.
disguised, absorbed, clad. font, source, reservoir, origin, refreshment: (n) bite, drink,
dryness: (n) drought, aridity, derivation, repository, root, squirt. recreation, collation, repose, relief,
dehydration, aridness, thirst, hind: (adj, n) rear; (adj) after, posterior, rest, entertainment, treat; (v)
desiccation, barrenness, monotony, hindermost; (n) doe, clown, peasant, invigoration; (n, v) regalement.
status, drying, insensibility. roe, countryman, servant; (v) hinder. richly: (adv) wealthily, copiously,
ANTONYMS: (n) damp, humidity, huntsman: (n) fowler, trapper, opulently, lavishly, abundantly,
wetness, moisture, succulence, hawker, huntress, falconer, sumptuously, affluently, profusely,
exaggeration, juiciness. pothunter, jaeger, seeker, tracker, amply, plentifully, fully.
fortress: (n) fort, bulwark, fortification, stalker; (v) sportsman. ANTONYMS: (adv) meagerly, poorly,
castle, stronghold, citadel, alcazar, interlocutor: (n) conversational simply, barely.
"Truly?" said the young girls, quite taken aback.%

"Truly!" replied the poet, bridling a little; "that is, to say, there are two of us;
Jehan Marchand, who has sawed the planks and erected the framework of the
theatre and the woodwork; and I, who have made the piece. My name is Pierre
Gringoire."
The author of the "Cid" could not have said "Pierre Corneille" with more
pride.
Our readers have been able to observe, that a certain amount of time must
have already elapsed from the moment when Jupiter had retired beneath the
tapestry to the instant when the author of the new morality had thus abruptly
revealed himself to the innocent admiration of Gisquette and Liénarde.
Remarkable fact: that whole crowd, so tumultuous but a few moments before,
now waited amiably on the word of the comedian; which proves the eternal
truth, still experienced every day in our theatres, that the best means of making
the public wait patiently is to assure them that one is about to begin instantly.
However, scholar Johannes had not fallen asleep.
"Holà hé!" he shouted suddenly, in the midst of the peaceable waiting which
had followed the tumult. "Jupiter, Madame the Virgin, buffoons of the devil! are
you jeering at us? The piece! the piece! commence or we will commence again!"
This was all that was needed.
The music of high and low instruments immediately became audible from
the interior of the stage; the tapestry was raised; four personages, in motley attire
and painted faces, emerged from it, climbed the steep ladder of the theatre, and,
arrived upon the upper platform, arranged themselves in a line before the public,
whom they saluted with profound reverences; then the symphony ceased.
The mystery was about to begin.
The four personages, after having reaped a rich reward of applause for their
reverences, began, in the midst of profound silence, a prologue, which we gladly
spare the reader. Moreover, as happens in our own day, the public was more
occupied with the costumes that the actors wore than with the roles that they
Thesaurus
amiably: (adv) kindly, affably, (v) deride. ANTONYM: (n) clapping. disruptive, harsh, disordered.
graciously, decently, courteously, motley: (adj) miscellaneous, mottled, prologue: (n) preface, introduction,
thoughtfully, cordially, lovelily, in a assorted, colorful, heterogeneous, preamble, foreword, Prolog,
friendly way, favorably, pleasantly. multicolored, checkered; (n) medley, overture, proem, preliminary,
ANTONYMS: (adv) unkindly, miscellany, mixture, assortment. beginning, prolegomena, opening.
disagreeably. ANTONYM: (adj) homogeneous. ANTONYMS: (n) conclusion,
elapsed: (adj) gone, forgotten, lapsed, peaceable: (adj) gentle, calm, pacific, postscript.
back, beyond, onwards, over and amicable, quiet, friendly, inoffensive, tumult: (adj, n, v) hubbub, disturbance;
done. moderate, meek, serene; (adj, v) (n) stir, commotion, bustle, din, fuss,
jeering: (adj, n) mocking; (n) jeer, peaceful. ANTONYMS: (adj) excitement; (n, v) clamor, disorder,
scoffing, mockery, derision, scoff, argumentative, belligerent, brawl. ANTONYMS: (n) peace, push,
scorn, banter; (adj) taunting, gibelike; intemperate, quarrelsome, crooked, serenity, order, calm.
Victor Hugo 29
were enacting; and, in truth, they were right. All four were dressed in parti-
colored robes of yellow and white, which were distinguished from each other
only by the nature of the stuff; the first was of gold and silver brocade; the
second, of silk; the third, of wool; the fourth, of linen. The first of these
personages carried in his right hand a sword; the second, two golden keys; the
third, a pair of scales; the fourth, a spade: and, in order to aid sluggish minds
which would not have seen clearly through the transparency of these attributes,
there was to be read, in large, black letters, on the hem of the robe of brocade,
MY NAME IS NOBILITY; on the hem of the silken robe, MY NAME IS CLERGY;
on the hem of the woolen robe, MY NAME IS MERCHANDISE; on the hem of
the linen robe, MY NAME IS LABOR. The sex of the two male characters was
briefly indicated to every judicious spectator, by their shorter robes, and by the
cap which they wore on their heads; while the two female characters, less briefly
clad, were covered with hoods.%
Much ill-will would also have been required, not to comprehend, through
the medium of the poetry of the prologue, that Labor was wedded to
Merchandise, and Clergy to Nobility, and that the two happy couples possessed
in common a magnificent golden dolphin, which they desired to adjudge to the
fairest only. So they were roaming about the world seeking and searching for
this beauty, and, after having successively rejected the Queen of Golconda, the
Princess of Trebizonde, the daughter of the Grand Khan of Tartary, etc., Labor
and Clergy, Nobility and Merchandise, had come to rest upon the marble table of
the Palais de Justice, and to utter, in the presence of the honest audience, as many
sentences and maxims as could then be dispensed at the Faculty of Arts, at
examinations, sophisms, determinances, figures, and acts, where the masters
took their degrees.
All this was, in fact, very fine.
Nevertheless, in that throng, upon which the four allegories vied with each
other in pouring out floods of metaphors, there was no ear more attentive, no
heart that palpitated more, not an eye was more haggard, no neck more
outstretched, than the eye, the ear, the neck, and the heart of the author, of the
Thesaurus
adjudge: (v) adjudicate, condemn, reckless, illogical, extreme, untimely. successively: (adv) in turn, one after
award, acknowledge, decide, declare, metaphors: (n) images, descriptions. the other, in succession, sequentially,
convict, pronounce, admit, sentence; parti-colored: (adj) varicolored, serially, running, in order, gradually,
(n) give. multicolored, dappled, speckled. subsequently, repeatedly, one after
attributes: (n) nature, property. roaming: (adj) wandering, roving, another.
enacting: (adj) legislative; (n) acting. errant, itinerant, Peripatetic, wedded: (adj, v) marital, connubial,
ill-will: (n) enmity. traveling, vagabond, astray; (n) matrimonial, conjugal, wed; (adj)
judicious: (adj, v) discreet; (adj) ramble, journey, ubiquity. nuptial, bridal. ANTONYMS: (adj)
careful, discerning, sensible, prudent, silken: (adj) glossy, silk, sleek, soft, unmarried, unattached.
rational, sagacious, sound, cautious, satiny, satin, shiny, smooth, slick, woolen: (adj, n) woollen; (n) fleece,
reasonable, advisable. ANTONYMS: downy, mild. ANTONYMS: (adj) tweed, fabric, cloth, woolen goods;
(adj) stupid, tactless, indiscriminate, coarse, dull, rough. (adj) woolly.
poet, of that brave Pierre Gringoire, who had not been able to resist, a moment
before, the joy of telling his name to two pretty girls. He had retreated a few
paces from them, behind his pillar, and there he listened, looked, enjoyed. The
amiable applause which had greeted the beginning of his prologue was still
echoing in his bosom, and he was completely absorbed in that species of ecstatic
contemplation with which an author beholds his ideas fall, one by one, from the
mouth of the actor into the vast silence of the audience. Worthy Pierre Gringoire!
It pains us to say it, but this first ecstasy was speedily disturbed. Hardly had
Gringoire raised this intoxicating cup of joy and triumph to his lips, when a drop
of bitterness was mingled with it.%
A tattered mendicant, who could not collect any coins, lost as he was in the
midst of the crowd, and who had not probably found sufficient indemnity in the
pockets of his neighbors, had hit upon the idea of perching himself upon some
conspicuous point, in order to attract looks and alms. He had, accordingly,
hoisted himself, during the first verses of the prologue, with the aid of the pillars
of the reserve gallery, to the cornice which ran round the balustrade at its lower
edge; and there he had seated himself, soliciting the attention and the pity of the
multitude, with his rags and a hideous sore which covered his right arm.
However, he uttered not a word.
The silence which he preserved allowed the prologue to proceed without
hindrance, and no perceptible disorder would have ensued, if ill-luck had not
willed that the scholar Joannes should catch sight, from the heights of his pillar,
of the mendicant and his grimaces. A wild fit of laughter took possession of the
young scamp, who, without caring that he was interrupting the spectacle, and
disturbing the universal composure, shouted boldly,
"Look! see that sickly creature asking alms!"
Any one who has thrown a stone into a frog pond, or fired a shot into a covey
of birds, can form an idea of the effect produced by these incongruous words, in
the midst of the general attention. It made Gringoire shudder as though it had
been an electric shock. The prologue stopped short, and all heads turned
tumultuously towards the beggar, who, far from being disconcerted by this, saw,
Thesaurus
alms: (n) handout, charity, covey: (adj, n) bevy, shoal, herd; (n) perching: (adj) insessorial.
benefaction, gift, donation, cluster, school, assemblage, group, rags: (adj) refuse, rubble, scourings,
contribution, offering, bounty; (n, v) party; (adj) drove, flock, flight. sweepings, trash, waste; (n) clothing,
sportula, largess; (v) relieve. intoxicating: (adj) intoxicant, strong, tatter, orts, odds and ends, dress.
balustrade: (n) fence, banisters, alcoholic, effective, exciting, soliciting: (n) traffic, suit; (adj)
banister, bannister, barrier, handrail, impetuous, inebriant, inebrious, petitory, petitioning.
pale, balusters, guardrail, powerful, provocative, forcible. tumultuously: (adv) turbulently,
circumvallation, ring fence. ANTONYMS: (adj) soft, weak. tempestuously, violently,
cornice: (n) architrave, zoophorus, mendicant: (n) pauper, cadger, friar, uproariously, boisterously,
entablature, epistyle, framing, maund, abbot, beggarwoman, lay tumultuarily, noisily, furiously,
framework, pediment, projection, brother, conventual, cenobite, loudly, agitatedly; (adj, adv) madly.
sconce; (v) furnish, provide. beadsman, pilgrim. willed: (adj) voluntary, hereditary.
Victor Hugo 31
in this incident, a good opportunity for reaping his harvest, and who began to
whine in a doleful way, half closing his eyes the while,-- "Charity, please!"
"Well-- upon my soul," resumed Joannes, "it's Clopin Trouillefou! Holà he,
my friend, did your sore bother you on the leg, that you have transferred it to
your arm?" So saying, with the dexterity of a monkey, he flung a bit of silver into
the gray felt hat which the beggar held in his ailing arm. The mendicant
received both the alms and the sarcasm without wincing, and continued, in
lamentable tones,
"Charity, please!"
This episode considerably distracted the attention of the audience; and a
goodly number of spectators, among them Robin Poussepain, and all the clerks
at their head, gayly applauded this eccentric duet, which the scholar, with his
shrill voice, and the mendicant had just improvised in the middle of the
prologue.%
Gringoire was highly displeased. On recovering from his first stupefaction,
he bestirred himself to shout, to the four personages on the stage, "Go on! What
the devil!-- go on!"-- without even deigning to cast a glance of disdain upon the
two interrupters.
At that moment, he felt some one pluck at the hem of his surtout; he turned
round, and not without ill-humor, and found considerable difficulty in smiling;
but he was obliged to do so, nevertheless. It was the pretty arm of Gisquette la
Gencienne, which, passed through the railing, was soliciting his attention in this
manner.
"Monsieur," said the young girl, "are they going to continue?"
"Of course," replied Gringoire, a good deal shocked by the question.
"In that case, messire," she resumed, "would you have the courtesy to explain
to me"
"What they are about to say?" interrupted Gringoire. "Well, listen."
"No," said Gisquette, "but what they have said so far."
Thesaurus
ailing: (adj) sickly, poorly, ill, unwell, doleful: (adj) mournful, sorrowful, distressing, sad, dismal, sorrowful,
bad, indisposed, unhealthy, invalid, sad, disconsolate, melancholy, piteous, unfortunate, lugubrious; (adj,
morbid, weak; (n) illness. miserable, piteous, dolorous, somber, v) pitiable, mournful. ANTONYMS:
ANTONYMS: (adj) well, healthy, fit, woeful; (adj, v) dolesome. (adj) laudable, fortunate.
robust, vigorous. ANTONYMS: (adj) gleeful, happy, reaping: (n) harvesting, crop,
began: (v) Gan. glad, cheery, elated, euphoric. attainment, farming.
displeased: (adj) disgruntled, gayly: (adv) cheerfully, merrily, stupefaction: (adj, n) stupor; (n)
dissatisfied, angry, annoyed, mirthfully, gaily, jovially, airily, astonishment, daze, amazement,
unhappy, peeved, irritated, lightly, sportively, easily, finely, shock, bewilderment, perplexity,
disgusted, indignant; (v) pained, courageously. surprise, awe, grogginess,
afflicted. ANTONYMS: (adj) ill-humor: (n) chagrin. semiconsciousness.
contented, satisfied, calm. lamentable: (adj) grievous, pitiful, surtout: (n) spencer.
Gringoire started, like a man whose wound has been probed to the quick.%
"A plague on the stupid and dull-witted little girl!" he muttered, between his
teeth.
From that moment forth, Gisquette was nothing to him.
In the meantime, the actors had obeyed his injunction, and the public, seeing
that they were beginning to speak again, began once more to listen, not without
having lost many beauties in the sort of soldered joint which was formed
between the two portions of the piece thus abruptly cut short. Gringoire
commented on it bitterly to himself. Nevertheless, tranquillity was gradually
restored, the scholar held his peace, the mendicant counted over some coins in
his hat, and the piece resumed the upper hand.
It was, in fact, a very fine work, and one which, as it seems to us, might be
put to use to-day, by the aid of a little rearrangement. The exposition, rather
long and rather empty, that is to say, according to the rules, was simple; and
Gringoire, in the candid sanctuary of his own conscience, admired its clearness.
As the reader may surmise, the four allegorical personages were somewhat
weary with having traversed the three sections of the world, without having
found suitable opportunity for getting rid of their golden dolphin. Thereupon a
eulogy of the marvellous fish, with a thousand delicate allusions to the young
betrothed of Marguerite of Flanders, then sadly cloistered in at Amboise, and
without a suspicion that Labor and Clergy, Nobility and Merchandise had just
made the circuit of the world in his behalf. The said dauphin was then young,
was handsome, was stout, and, above all (magnificent origin of all royal virtues),
he was the son of the Lion of France. I declare that this bold metaphor is
admirable, and that the natural history of the theatre, on a day of allegory and
royal marriage songs, is not in the least startled by a dolphin who is the son of a
lion. It is precisely these rare and Pindaric mixtures which prove the poet's
enthusiasm. Nevertheless, in order to play the part of critic also, the poet might
have developed this beautiful idea in something less than two hundred lines. It
is true that the mystery was to last from noon until four o'clock, in accordance
Thesaurus
betrothed: (adj) affianced, intended, cloistered: (adj) secluded, solitary, behest, bidding, commandment, fiat,
bespoken, busy, occupied, claustral, isolated, recluse, cloistral, direction, enjoinment, enjoining,
contracted, attached, bargained for; conventual, monastic, monastical, order, instruction.
(n) fiance, fiancee; (v) engage. private, sequestered. ANTONYMS: sanctuary: (n) refuge, asylum, retreat,
clearness: (n) clarity, brightness, (adj) public, conspicuous, open. shrine, haven, safety, reservation,
distinctness, perspicuity, lucidity, eulogy: (n, v) encomium, praise; (n) shelter, chancel, protection, church.
explicitness, sharpness, simplicity, compliment, eulogium, paean, surmise: (n, v) guess; (v) suppose,
purity, limpidity, intelligibility. panegyric, speech, tribute; (v) suspect, presume, imagine, divine,
ANTONYMS: (n) ambiguity, opacity, applause, acclaim, eulogize. doubt; (n) hypothesis, supposition,
dirtiness, vagueness, unclearness, ANTONYMS: (n) damning, speculation, assumption.
obscureness, indistinctness, clutter, vilification, condemnation. ANTONYMS: (n) knowledge,
haziness, mustiness. injunction: (n) dictate, command, measurement.
Victor Hugo 33
with the orders of monsieur the provost, and that it was necessary to say
something. Besides, the people listened patiently.%
All at once, in the very middle of a quarrel between Mademoiselle
Merchandise and Madame Nobility, at the moment when Monsieur Labor was
giving utterance to this wonderful line,
In forest ne'er was seen a more triumphant beast;
the door of the reserved gallery which had hitherto remained so
inopportunely closed, opened still more inopportunely; and the ringing voice of
the usher announced abruptly, "His eminence, Monseigneur the Cardinal de
Bourbon."
Thesaurus
beast: (n) animal, monster, swine, quarrel: (adj, n, v) dispute; (n, v) fight, failing, losing, defeated, miserable,
fiend, creature, scavenger, savage, feud, brawl, row, altercation, argue, sorrowful.
critter, animate being, barbarian; (adj) conflict, squabble; (n) dissension, usher: (v) lead, escort, accompany,
bear. ANTONYM: (n) man. difference. ANTONYMS: (n) marshal, show, conduct, bring,
inopportunely: (adv) unfortunately, agreement, reconciliation, attend; (n) attendant, porter,
inappropriately, awkwardly, acceptance, concord, consensus; (v) doorman.
unfittingly, inadequately, untimely, agree. utterance: (n) pronunciation,
inexpediently, improperly, triumphant: (adj) victorious, expression, speech, exclamation,
incorrectly, prematurely, wrongly. successful, triumphal, exulting, statement, remark, articulation,
ANTONYMS: (adv) opportunely, winning, joyful, rejoicing, elated, observation, language, phrase,
conveniently, suitably. conquering, prideful; (adj, v) exultant. speaking.
ne'er: (adv) never, certainly not. ANTONYMS: (adj) disappointed,
Victor Hugo 35
CHAPTER III
MONSIEUR THE CARDINAL
Poor Gringoire! the din of all the great double petards of the Saint-Jean, the
discharge of twenty arquebuses on supports, the detonation of that famous
serpentine of the Tower of Billy, which, during the siege of Paris, on Sunday, the
twenty-sixth of September, 1465, killed seven Burgundians at one blow, the
explosion of all the powder stored at the gate of the Temple, would have rent his
ears less rudely at that solemn and dramatic moment, than these few words,
which fell from the lips of the usher, "His eminence, Monseigneur the Cardinal
de Bourbon."%
It is not that Pierre Gringoire either feared or disdained monsieur the
cardinal. He had neither the weakness nor the audacity for that. A true eclectic,
as it would be expressed nowadays, Gringoire was one of those firm and lofty,
moderate and calm spirits, which always know how to bear themselves amid all
circumstances (stare in dimidio rerum), and who are full of reason and of liberal
philosophy, while still setting store by cardinals. A rare, precious, and never
interrupted race of philosophers to whom wisdom, like another Ariadne, seems
to have given a clew of thread which they have been walking along unwinding
since the beginning of the world, through the labyrinth of human affairs. One
finds them in all ages, ever the same; that is to say, always according to all times.
Thesaurus
according: (adj) pursuant, consonant, respect, spinelessness, reticence. uncivilly, indelicately, impolitely,
equal, agreeable, harmonious, cardinals: (n) buntings, canaries, roughly, harshly, vulgarly, brutally,
conformable, consistent, family Fringillidae, Fringillidae, meanly, wildly. ANTONYMS: (adv)
corresponding, respondent; (adv) genus Richmondena, Richmondena. respectfully, graciously, decently,
correspondingly, accordingly. clew: (n) cue, clod, glob, knob, civilly, properly, attentively,
audacity: (n) nerve, audaciousness, footmark, footprint, vestige; (v) point agreeably, tactfully, thoughtfully,
effrontery, arrogance, temerity, out; (adj) pellet, globule, Pelote. acceptably, gently.
cheek, impertinence, insolence, detonation: (adj, n, v) explosion, burst; serpentine: (adj, v) snaky; (adj)
courage; (n, v) impudence; (adj, n) (n) bang, report, roar, blowback; (adj, insidious, crooked, snakelike,
presumption. ANTONYMS: (n) v) discharge; (adj) blow up, bounce, tortuous, winding, sinuous, curved,
cowardice, propriety, decorum, rush; (v) salvo. cunning; (v) circling, meander.
circumspection, courtesy, fear, rudely: (adv) crudely, coarsely, unwinding: (adj) moving.
And, without reckoning our Pierre Gringoire, who may represent them in the
fifteenth century if we succeed in bestowing upon him the distinction which he
deserves, it certainly was their spirit which animated Father du Breul, when he
wrote, in the sixteenth, these naively sublime words, worthy of all centuries: "I
am a Parisian by nation, and a Parrhisian in language, for parrhisia in Greek
signifies liberty of speech; of which I have made use even towards messeigneurs
the cardinals, uncle and brother to Monsieur the Prince de Conty, always with
respect to their greatness, and without offending any one of their suite, which is
much to say."
There was then neither hatred for the cardinal, nor disdain for his presence,
in the disagreeable impression produced upon Pierre Gringoire. Quite the
contrary; our poet had too much good sense and too threadbare a coat, not to
attach particular importance to having the numerous allusions in his prologue,
and, in particular, the glorification of the dauphin, son of the Lion of France, fall
upon the most eminent ear. But it is not interest which predominates in the
noble nature of poets. I suppose that the entity of the poet may be represented
by the number ten; it is certain that a chemist on analyzing and
pharmacopolizing it, as Rabelais says, would find it composed of one part
interest to nine parts of self-esteem.%
Now, at the moment when the door had opened to admit the cardinal, the
nine parts of self-esteem in Gringoire, swollen and expanded by the breath of
popular admiration, were in a state of prodigious augmentation, beneath which
disappeared, as though stifled, that imperceptible molecule of which we have
just remarked upon in the constitution of poets; a precious ingredient, by the
way, a ballast of reality and humanity, without which they would not touch the
earth. Gringoire enjoyed seeing, feeling, fingering, so to speak an entire
assembly (of knaves, it is true, but what matters that ?) stupefied, petrified, and
as though asphyxiated in the presence of the incommensurable tirades which
welled up every instant from all parts of his bridal song. I affirm that he shared
the general beatitude, and that, quite the reverse of La Fontaine, who, at the
presentation of his comedy of the "Florentine," asked, "Who is the ill-bred lout
Thesaurus
analyzing: (n) study. fingering: (n) location, placement, incommensurable: (adj)
augmentation: (n) addition, feeling, emplacement. incommensurate, divisible, fractional,
enlargement, aggrandizement, glorification: (n) adoration, praise, figurate, decimal, complementary,
accession, development, expansion, admiration, worship, eulogy, aliquot, incomparable, infinite,
growth, increment, multiplication; (n, apotheosis, glory, appreciation, innumerable, unfathomable.
v) extension, augment. ANTONYMS: idealization; (adj, n) celebration, stupefied: (adj) stunned, amazed,
(n) diminishment, reduction, dedication. ANTONYM: (n) astonished, bewildered, astounded,
lessening, drop, decline. disparagement. dumbfounded, stupid, confused,
beatitude: (n) bliss, benediction, ill-bred: (adj) boorish, discourteous, flabbergasted, dumfounded, groggy.
beatification, felicity, happiness, impertinent, graceless, gruff, ANTONYMS: (adj) precise,
saying, expression, locution, benison, uncouth, uncivil, ill-mannered, unimpressed.
blissfulness, blessing. crude, inurbane, indelicate.
Victor Hugo 37
who made that rhapsody?" Gringoire would gladly have inquired of his
neighbor, "Whose masterpiece is this?"
The reader can now judge of the effect produced upon him by the abrupt and
unseasonable arrival of the cardinal.%
That which he had to fear was only too fully realized. The entrance of his
eminence upset the audience. All heads turned towards the gallery. It was no
longer possible to hear one's self. "The cardinal! The cardinal!" repeated all
mouths. The unhappy prologue stopped short for the second time.
The cardinal halted for a moment on the threshold of the estrade. While he
was sending a rather indifferent glance around the audience, the tumult
redoubled. Each person wished to get a better view of him. Each man vied with
the other in thrusting his head over his neighbor's shoulder.
He was, in fact, an exalted personage, the sight of whom was well worth any
other comedy. Charles, Cardinal de Bourbon, Archbishop and Comte of Lyon,
Primate of the Gauls, was allied both to Louis XI., through his brother, Pierre,
Seigneur de Beaujeu, who had married the king's eldest daughter, and to Charles
the Bold through his mother, Agnes of Burgundy. Now, the dominating trait, the
peculiar and distinctive trait of the character of the Primate of the Gauls, was the
spirit of the courtier, and devotion to the powers that be. The reader can form an
idea of the numberless embarrassments which this double relationship had
caused him, and of all the temporal reefs among which his spiritual bark had
been forced to tack, in order not to suffer shipwreck on either Louis or Charles,
that Scylla and that Charybdis which had devoured the Duc de Nemours and the
Constable de Saint-Pol. Thanks to Heaven's mercy, he had made the voyage
successfully, and had reached home without hindrance. But although he was in
port, and precisely because he was in port, he never recalled without disquiet
the varied haps of his political career, so long uneasy and laborious. Thus, he
was in the habit of saying that the year 1476 had been "white and black" for him--
meaning thereby, that in the course of that year he had lost his mother, the
Duchesse de la Bourbonnais, and his cousin, the Duke of Burgundy, and that one
grief had consoled him for the other.
Thesaurus
courtier: (n) aristocrat, official, high, August, elated, dignified, great, innumerable, multitudinous, infinite,
attendant, suckling. sublime, grand, big. ANTONYMS: incalculable, endless, uncounted,
devoured: (adj) eaten up. (adj) belittled, condemned, criticized, unnumbered, innumerous, legion,
disquiet: (v) discompose, perturb; (n, debased, humble, humiliated, low, untold. ANTONYM: (adj) few.
v) worry, alarm, trouble, disorder, lowly, minor, ridiculed, base. shipwreck: (n, v) ruin; (adj, v) sink; (v)
dismay, discomfort, concern; (n) laborious: (adj) hard, arduous, defeat, scuttle, destroy, fail; (n) hulk,
anxiety, apprehension. ANTONYMS: backbreaking, heavy, industrious, accident, wreckage, wrack, ruination.
(n) reassurance, quiet, tranquility, diligent, grueling, assiduous, unseasonable: (adj) inopportune,
serenity, calmness, optimism; (v) exhausting, formidable, tough. inappropriate, premature, ill timed,
soothe, settle, relax, compose, ANTONYMS: (adj) simple, effortless, improper, immature, inconvenient,
tranquilize. undemanding, light, brisk. ill-timed, inept, unchancy; (v)
exalted: (adj) elevated, eminent, noble, numberless: (adj) countless, illtimed.
Nevertheless, he was a fine man; he led a joyous cardinal's life, liked to

enliven himself with the royal vintage of Challuau, did not hate Richarde la
Garmoise and Thomasse la Saillarde, bestowed alms on pretty girls rather than
on old women,-- and for all these reasons was very agreeable to the populace of
Paris. He never went about otherwise than surrounded by a small court of
bishops and abbés of high lineage, gallant, jovial, and given to carousing on
occasion; and more than once the good and devout women of Saint Germain d'
Auxerre, when passing at night beneath the brightly illuminated windows of
Bourbon, had been scandalized to hear the same voices which had intoned
vespers for them during the day carolling, to the clinking of glasses, the bacchic
proverb of Benedict XII., that pope who had added a third crown to the Tiara--
Bibamus papaliter.%
It was this justly acquired popularity, no doubt, which preserved him on his
entrance from any bad reception at the hands of the mob, which had been so
displeased but a moment before, and very little disposed to respect a cardinal on
the very day when it was to elect a pope. But the Parisians cherish little rancor;
and then, having forced the beginning of the play by their authority, the good
bourgeois had got the upper hand of the cardinal, and this triumph was
sufficient for them. Moreover, the Cardinal de Bourbon was a handsome man,--
he wore a fine scarlet robe, which he carried off very well,-- that is to say, he had
all the women on his side, and, consequently, the best half of the audience.
Assuredly, it would be injustice and bad taste to hoot a cardinal for having come
late to the spectacle, when he is a handsome man, and when he wears his scarlet
robe well.
He entered, then, bowed to those present with the hereditary smile of the
great for the people, and directed his course slowly towards his scarlet velvet
arm-chair, with the air of thinking of something quite different. His cortege--
what we should nowadays call his staff-- of bishops and abbés invaded the
estrade in his train, not without causing redoubled tumult and curiosity among
the audience. Each man vied with his neighbor in pointing them out and naming
them, in seeing who should recognize at least one of them: this one, the Bishop of
Thesaurus
bacchic: (adj) bacchanal, bacchanalian, v) brighten. ANTONYMS: (v) bore, motto, expression; (n, v) maxim, saw.
bacchiac, Bacchical, drunk, orgiastic, subdue, tire, spoil, dull, deflate, rancor: (adj, n) gall, venom; (n) grudge,
carousing. dampen, deaden, exhaust, depress. enmity, hostility, ill will, spite,
carousing: (n) revelry, revels, intoned: (adj) rhythmical, singsong, malice, animosity, hatred, hate.
celebrations, skylarking, partying, rhythmic. ANTONYMS: (n) amicability,
party, merriment; (adj) orgiastic, jovial: (adj, n) gay; (adj) jolly, genial, goodwill, harmony, affection.
bacchic, bacchanal, bacchant. glad, festive, joyful, gleeful, merry, vespers: (n) matins, mass, divine
clinking: (adj) tinkle, jingle, tinkling, jocund, cheerful, blithe. service, canonical hour, early
cacophonous, reverberant, ringing. ANTONYMS: (adj) miserable, evening, Evening Prayer, placebo,
enliven: (v) animate, inspire, refresh, gloomy, frosty, serious, hostile. religious service, service, nightfall,
encourage, exhilarate, elate, liven up, proverb: (n) adage, byword, aphorism, worship.
stimulate, invigorate, energize; (adj, dictum, saying, axiom, parable, voices: (n) chorus.
Victor Hugo 39
Marseilles (Alaudet, if my memory serves me right);-- this one, the primicier of

Saint-Denis;-- this one, Robert de Lespinasse, Abbé of Saint-Germain des Prés,
that libertine brother of a mistress of Louis XI.; all with many errors and
absurdities. As for the scholars, they swore. This was their day, their feast of
fools, their saturnalia, the annual orgy of the corporation of Law clerks and of
the school. There was no turpitude which was not sacred on that day. And then
there were gay gossips in the crowd-- Simone Quatrelivres, Agnes la Gadine, and
Rabine Piédebou. Was it not the least that one could do to swear at one's ease
and revile the name of God a little, on so fine a day, in such good company as
dignitaries of the church and loose women? So they did not abstain; and, in the
midst of the uproar, there was a frightful concert of blasphemies and enormities
of all the unbridled tongues, the tongues of clerks and students restrained during
the rest of the year, by the fear of the hot iron of Saint Louis. Poor Saint Louis!
how they set him at defiance in his own court of law! Each one of them selected
from the new-comers on the platform, a black, gray, white, or violet cassock as
his target. Joannes Frollo de Molendin, in his quality of brother to an
archdeacon, boldly attacked the scarlet; he sang in deafening tones, with his
impudent eyes fastened on the cardinal, "Cappa repleta mero!"
All these details which we here lay bare for the edification of the reader,
were so covered by the general uproar, that they were lost in it before reaching
the reserved platforms; moreover, they would have moved the cardinal but little,
so much a part of the customs were the liberties of that day. Moreover, he had
another cause for solicitude, and his mien as wholly preoccupied with it, which
entered the estrade the same time as himself; this was the embassy from
Flanders.%
Not that he was a profound politician, nor was he borrowing trouble about
the possible consequences of the marriage of his cousin Marguerite de
Bourgoyne to his cousin Charles, Dauphin de Vienne; nor as to how long the
good understanding which had been patched up between the Duke of Austria
and the King of France would last; nor how the King of England would take this
disdain of his daughter. All that troubled him but little; and he gave a warm
Thesaurus
cassock: (n) clergyman, gown, casa, brash, cheeky. ANTONYMS: (adj) revelry, revel, riot, debauchery,
casino, vestment, frock, tunicle, polite, cowardly. drunken revelry; (adj) jollification,
priest, surplice, garment, Geneva libertine: (adj) dissolute, dissipated, carousal, drinking bout, Babel.
gown frock. debauched, fast, lewd, lascivious, solicitude: (n) care, consideration,
edification: (n) enlightenment, loose, licentious; (n, v) debauchee; (n) anxiety, thought, apprehension,
education, illumination, building, rake; (adj, n) wanton. regard, attention, fear, disquietude,
disenchantment, architecture, platforms: (n) chopine, chopines. heed, fret. ANTONYMS: (n)
disillusionment, civilization, revile: (v) abuse, rail, vilify, reproach, negligence, serenity, thoughtlessness.
schooling, teaching, learning. taunt, vituperate, attack, denounce; turpitude: (n) depravity, evil,
impudent: (adj, n) bold, daring; (adj) (n, v) malign; (adj, v) profane, corruption, degeneracy, depravation,
disrespectful, audacious, impertinent, blaspheme. ANTONYM: (v) praise. wickedness, trimming, transgression,
brassy, barefaced, brazen, insolent, saturnalia: (adj, n) debauch; (n) orgy, shuffling; (adj) debasement, abjection.
reception every evening to the wine of the royal vintage of Chaillot, without a
suspicion that several flasks of that same wine (somewhat revised and corrected,
it is true, by Doctor Coictier), cordially offered to Edward IV. by Louis XI.,
would, some fine morning, rid Louis XI. of Edward IV. "The much honored
embassy of Monsieur the Duke of Austria," brought the cardinal none of these
cares, but it troubled him in another direction. It was, in fact, somewhat hard,
and we have already hinted at it on the second page of this book,-- for him,
Charles de Bourbon, to be obliged to feast and receive cordially no one knows
what bourgeois;-- for him, a cardinal, to receive aldermen;-- for him, a
Frenchman, and a jolly companion, to receive Flemish beer-drinkers,-- and that
in public! This was, certainly, one of the most irksome grimaces that he had ever
executed for the good pleasure of the king.%
So he turned toward the door, and with the best grace in the world (so well
had he trained himself to it), when the usher announced, in a sonorous voice,
"Messieurs the Envoys of Monsieur the Duke of Austria." It is useless to add that
the whole hall did the same.
Then arrived, two by two, with a gravity which made a contrast in the midst
of the frisky ecclesiastical escort of Charles de Bourbon, the eight and forty
ambassadors of Maximilian of Austria, having at their head the reverend Father
in God, Jehan, Abbot of Saint-Bertin, Chancellor of the Golden Fleece, and
Jacques de Goy, Sieur Dauby, Grand Bailiff of Ghent. A deep silence settled over
the assembly, accompanied by stifled laughter at the preposterous names and all
the bourgeois designations which each of these personages transmitted with
imperturbable gravity to the usher, who then tossed names and titles pell-mell
and mutilated to the crowd below. There were Master Loys Roelof, alderman of
the city of Louvain; Messire Clays d'Etuelde, alderman of Brussels; Messire Paul
de Baeust, Sieur de Voirmizelle, President of Flanders; Master Jehan Coleghens,
burgomaster of the city of Antwerp; Master George de la Moere, first alderman
of the kuere of the city of Ghent; Master Gheldolf van der Hage, first alderman of
the parchous of the said town; and the Sieur de Bierbecque, and Jehan Pinnock,
and Jehan Dymaerzelle, etc., etc., etc.; bailiffs, aldermen, burgomasters;
Thesaurus
burgomaster: (n) burghmaster, kittenish, tricksy, buoyant, mirthful. impassive, composed, placid,
burghermaster, portreeve, constable, ANTONYMS: (adj) lethargic, demure, unflappable, cool, quiet, peaceful,
seneschal, warden, Corregidor, sedate, solemn. still, equable, steady. ANTONYMS:
mayor, alderman. hinted: (adj) veiled, roundabout, not (adj) edgy, concerned, agitated,
cordially: (adv) warmly, genially, explicit, implicit, coded, oblique. excited, nervous.
kindly, sincerely, heartfeltly, honored: (adj) esteemed, reputable, pell-mell: (adv) helter-skelter, blindly;
ardently, friendly, jovially, earnestly, respected, honoured, privileged, (adj, adv) posthaste.
affectionately, harmoniously. glorious, distinguished, honorable, sonorous: (adj) rotund, resonant, clear,
ANTONYMS: (adv) disagreeably, worshipful, exalted, revered. rich, resounding, harmonious, round,
frostily. ANTONYMS: (adj) disadvantaged, full, ringing, vibrant, sonant.
frisky: (adj) playful, brisk, lively, disreputable. ANTONYMS: (adj) shrill, thin.
coltish, perky, blithe, breezy, imperturbable: (adj) dispassionate,
Victor Hugo 41
burgomasters, aldermen, bailiffs-- all stiff, affectedly grave, formal, dressed out
in velvet and damask, hooded with caps of black velvet, with great tufts of
Cyprus gold thread; good Flemish heads, after all, severe and worthy faces, of
the family which Rembrandt makes to stand out so strong and grave from the
black background of his "Night Patrol "; personages all of whom bore, written on
their brows, that Maximilian of Austria had done well in "trusting implicitly," as
the manifest ran, "in their sense, valor, experience, loyalty, and good wisdom."
There was one exception, however. It was a subtle, intelligent, crafty-looking
face, a sort of combined monkey and diplomat phiz, before whom the cardinal
made three steps and a profound bow, and whose name, nevertheless, was only,
"Guillaume Rym, counsellor and pensioner of the City of Ghent."
Few persons were then aware who Guillaume Rym was. A rare genius who
in a time of revolution would have made a brilliant appearance on the surface of
events, but who in the fifteenth century was reduced to cavernous intrigues, and
to "living in mines," as the Duc de Saint-Simon expresses it. Nevertheless, he was
appreciated by the "miner" of Europe; he plotted familiarly with Louis XI., and
often lent a hand to the king's secret jobs. All which things were quite unknown
to that throng, who were amazed at the cardinal's politeness to that frail figure of
a Flemish bailiff.%
Thesaurus
affectedly: (adv) pretentiously, crowded, shallow, small, tiny, draped, enclosed, kerchieft.
pompously, insincerely, stiltedly, confined, narrow. lent: (n) Quadragesima, Lententide.
unnaturally, theatrically, feignedly, damask: (n) fabric, napery, purple, phiz: (n) countenance, visage,
snobbishly, contrivedly, pedantically, magenta, red, fancier, cloth. physiognomy, face, mug, forehead,
pedanticly. ANTONYMS: (adv) familiarly: (adv) intimately, usually, contour, brow, Artemus ward, mark,
modestly, naturally. ordinarily, nearly, frequently, smiler.
brows: (n) brow. commonly, regularly, informally, plotted: (adj) planned, aforethought,
cavernous: (adj) profound, concave, closely, acquaintedly, conventionally. arranged, studied.
echoing, resonant, sepulchral, ANTONYM: (adv) distantly. valor: (n) bravery, courage, heroism,
yawning, huge, deep, depressed, hooded: (v) cucullate, encuirassed, valiancy, daring, spirit, pluck,
sunken, vast. ANTONYMS: (adj) dermatoid, squamiferous, tectiform; audacity, boldness; (adj, n) gallantry,
cramped, claustrophobic, convex, (adj) covered, capistrate, cucullated, prowess.
Victor Hugo 43
CHAPTER IV
MASTER JACQUES COPPENOLE
While the pensioner of Ghent and his eminence were exchanging very low
bows and a few words in voices still lower, a man of lofty stature, with a large
face and broad shoulders, presented himself, in order to enter abreast with
Guillaume Rym; one would have pronounced him a bull-dog by the side of a fox.
His felt doublet and leather jerkin made a spot on the velvet and silk which
surrounded him. Presuming that he was some groom who had stolen in, the
usher stopped him.%
"Hold, my friend, you cannot pass!"
The man in the leather jerkin shouldered him aside.
"What does this knave want with me?" said he, in stentorian tones, which
rendered the entire hall attentive to this strange colloquy. "Don't you see that I
am one of them?"
"Your name?" demanded the usher.
"Jacques Coppenole."
"Your titles?"
"Hosier at the sign of the 'Three Little Chains,' of Ghent."
Thesaurus
abreast: (adv) opposite, acquainted, rude, unprepared, unconscious, knave: (n) cheat, jack, blackguard,
off, au fait, alongside, on one side, uncaring, inconsiderate. crook, rascal, villain, cad, scalawag,
abeam; (adj) near, aligned, doublet: (n) pair, couple, waistcoat, scallywag, scoundrel, varlet.
knowledgeable; (prep) against. CHUDDER, barbe, gabardine, presuming: (adj) forward, arrogant,
ANTONYMS: (adv) uninformed, lost, double, jacket, jubbah, oilskins, insolent, familiar, overconfident,
unaware. camisole. conceited, assuming, rash, brash,
attentive: (adj) assiduous, diligent, hosier: (n) cordwainer, storekeeper, pretentious, confident.
heedful, watchful, observant, tradesman, shopkeeper, hatter. stentorian: (adj) booming, vocal,
advertent, mindful, careful, aware, jerkin: (n) jacket, doublet, barbe, piercing, strident, resonant,
alert, respectful. ANTONYMS: (adj) CHUDDER, waistcoat, jubbah, talma powerful, flourishing, full, fuller,
unfocused, negligent, neglectful, jacket, pilot jacket, pajamas, oilskins, palmy, stentorophonic.
forgetful, heedless, unobservant, gabardine.
The usher recoiled. One might bring one's self to announce aldermen and
burgomasters, but a hosier was too much. The cardinal was on thorns. All the
people were staring and listening. For two days his eminence had been exerting
his utmost efforts to lick these Flemish bears into shape, and to render them a
little more presentable to the public, and this freak was startling. But Guillaume
Rym, with his polished smile, approached the usher.%
"Announce Master Jacques Coppenole, clerk of the aldermen of the city of
Ghent," he whispered, very low.
"Usher," interposed the cardinal, aloud, "announce Master Jacques
Coppenole, clerk of the aldermen of the illustrious city of Ghent."
This was a mistake. Guillaume Rym alone might have conjured away the
difficulty, but Coppenole had heard the cardinal.
"No, cross of God?" he exclaimed, in his voice of thunder, "Jacques
Coppenole, hosier. Do you hear, usher? Nothing more, nothing less. Cross of
God! hosier; that's fine enough. Monsieur the Archduke has more than once
sought his gant in my hose."
Laughter and applause burst forth. A jest is always understood in Paris, and,
consequently, always applauded.
Let us add that Coppenole was of the people, and that the auditors which
surrounded him were also of the people. Thus the communication between him
and them had been prompt, electric, and, so to speak, on a level. The haughty air
of the Flemish hosier, by humiliating the courtiers, had touched in all these
plebeian souls that latent sentiment of dignity still vague and indistinct in the
fifteenth century.
This hosier was an equal, who had just held his own before monsieur the
cardinal. A very sweet reflection to poor fellows habituated to respect and
obedience towards the underlings of the sergeants of the bailiff of Sainte-
Geneviève, the cardinal's train-bearer.
Coppenole proudly saluted his eminence, who returned the salute of the all-
powerful bourgeois feared by Louis XI. Then, while Guillaume Rym, a "sage and
Thesaurus
conjured: (adj) invented, made up, grand; (n) boastful. ANTONYMS: plebeian: (adj) low, vulgar, ignoble,
pretended, untrue. ANTONYM: (adj) (adj) modest, meek, subservient, humble, coarse, mean; (n) pleb,
factual. unassuming, considerate, deferential. commoner; (adj, n) proletarian; (adj,
exerting: (n) push. indistinct: (adj) indefinite, inarticulate, v) ordinary, general. ANTONYMS:
habituated: (v) given to, addicted to, faint, dull, fuzzy, indeterminate, (adj) cultivated, proletarian, patrician,
attuned to; (adj, v) used to; (adj) hazy, neutral; (adj, n) confused, refined; (n) aristocrat, noble.
addicted, wont, trained, inured, used, cloudy, dark. ANTONYMS: (adj) presentable: (adj) decent, personable,
inveterate, hardened. ANTONYM: clear, slight, separate, certain, precise, satisfactory, acceptable, suitable,
(adj) untrained. audible, strong, definite. passable, comely, tidy, neat,
haughty: (adj) supercilious, arrogant, jest: (n) gag, gibe, quip, game; (n, v) becoming, sufficient. ANTONYMS:
assuming, contemptuous, proud, jape; (v) banter, jeer, deride, gird, (adj) unsatisfactory, untidy,
lordly, cavalier, vain, contumelious, sneer, clown. inadequate.
Victor Hugo 45
malicious man," as Philippe de Comines puts it, watched them both with a smile
of raillery and superiority, each sought his place, the cardinal quite abashed and
troubled, Coppenole tranquil and haughty, and thinking, no doubt, that his title
of hosier was as good as any other, after all, and that Marie of Burgundy, mother
to that Marguerite whom Coppenole was to-day bestowing in marriage, would
have been less afraid of the cardinal than of the hosier; for it is not a cardinal who
would have stirred up a revolt among the men of Ghent against the favorites of
the daughter of Charles the Bold; it is not a cardinal who could have fortified the
populace with a word against her tears and prayers, when the Maid of Flanders
came to supplicate her people in their behalf, even at the very foot of the
scaffold; while the hosier had only to raise his leather elbow, in order to cause to
fall your two heads, most illustrious seigneurs, Guy d'Hymbercourt and
Chancellor Guillaume Hugonet.%
Nevertheless, all was over for the poor cardinal, and he was obliged to quaff
to the dregs the bitter cup of being in such b ad company.
The reader has, probably, not forgotten the impudent beggar who had been
clinging fast to the fringes of the cardinal's gallery ever since the beginning of the
prologue. The arrival of the illustrious guests had by no means caused him to
relax his hold, and, while the prelates and ambassadors were packing themselves
into the stalls-- like genuine Flemish herrings-- he settled himself at his ease, and
boldly crossed his legs on the architrave. The insolence of this proceeding was
extraordinary, yet no one noticed it at first, the attention of all being directed
elsewhere. He, on his side, perceived nothing that was going on in the hall; he
wagged his head with the unconcern of a Neapolitan, repeating from time to
time, amid the clamor, as from a mechanical habit, "Charity, please!" And,
assuredly, he was, out of all those present, the only one who had not deigned to
turn his head at the altercation between Coppenole and the usher. Now, chance
ordained that the master hosier of Ghent, with whom the people were already in
lively sympathy, and upon whom all eyes were riveted-- should come and seat
himself in the front row of the gallery, directly above the mendicant; and people
were not a little amazed to see the Flemish ambassador, on concluding his
Thesaurus
abashed: (adj, v) discomfited; (adj) stone, epistyle. persiflage, derision, ridicule,
mortified, sheepish, embarrassed, assuredly: (adv) certainly, confidently, pleasantry, tease, jest, badinage.
ashamed, confused, humiliated, positively, securely, indeed, supplicate: (v) plead, entreat, beseech,
afraid, shamefaced, confounded; (v) definitely, undoubtedly, admittedly, request, pray, solicit, implore, beg,
dashed. ANTONYMS: (adj) proud, safely, insuredly, decidedly. invoke, crave, petition.
undaunted, reassured, pleased, dregs: (n) residue, grounds, refuse, unconcern: (n) apathy, nonchalance,
heartened, emboldened, cool, sediment, dreg, remains, settlings, insouciance, coldness, detachment,
confident, composed, relaxed, feces, trash, waste, dross. impassiveness, insensibility,
unabashed. quaff: (v) drink, gulp, swig, guzzle, disregard, phlegm, carelessness,
architrave: (n) frieze, cornice, molding, drain, sup, sip, swill, swallow, lethargy. ANTONYMS: (n)
moulding, pediment, sconce, carouse; (n) potation. responsiveness, worry, anxiety,
support, zoophorus, capital, coping raillery: (n) mockery, joke, irony, quiz, interest.
inspection of the knave thus placed beneath his eyes, bestow a friendly tap on
that ragged shoulder. The beggar turned round; there was surprise, recognition,
a lighting up of the two countenances, and so forth; then, without paying the
slightest heed in the world to the spectators, the hosier and the wretched being
began to converse in a low tone, holding each other's hands, in the meantime,
while the rags of Clopin Trouillefou, spread out upon the cloth of gold of the
dais, produced the effect of a caterpillar on an orange.%
The novelty of this singular scene excited such a murmur of mirth and gayety
in the hall, that the cardinal was not slow to perceive it; he half bent forward,
and, as from the point where he was placed he could catch only an imperfect
view of Trouillerfou's ignominious doublet, he very naturally imagined that the
mendicant was asking alms, and, disgusted with his audacity, he exclaimed:
"Bailiff of the Courts, toss me that knave into the river!"
"Cross of God! monseigneur the cardinal," said Coppenole, without quitting
Clopin's hand, "he's a friend of mine."
"Good! good!" shouted the populace. From that moment, Master Coppenole
enjoyed in Paris as in Ghent, "great favor with the people; for men of that sort do
enjoy it," says Philippe de Comines, "when they are thus disorderly." The
cardinal bit his lips. He bent towards his neighbor, the Abbé of Saint Geneviéve,
and said to him in a low tone,-- "Fine ambassadors monsieur the archduke sends
here, to announce to us Madame Marguerite!"
"Your eminence," replied the abbé, "wastes your politeness on these Flemish
swine. Margaritas ante porcos, pearls before swine."
"Say rather," retorted the cardinal, with a smile, "Porcos ante Margaritam,
swine before the pearl."
The whole little court in cassocks went into ecstacies over this play upon
words. The cardinal felt a little relieved; he was quits with Coppenole, he also
had had his jest applauded.
Now, will those of our readers who possess the power of generalizing an
image or an idea, as the expression runs in the style of to-day, permit us to ask
Thesaurus
ante: (n) wager, stake, craps, roulette, ANTONYMS: (v) deprive, refuse, mirth: (adj, n) merriment, jollity; (n)
pitch and toss, farthing, cup tossing, withhold, retrieve, withdraw. amusement, happiness, delight, joy,
chuck, faro, gamble; (adv, prep) caterpillar: (n) cutworm, larva, hilarity, cheerfulness, festivity,
before. Aurelia, cabbageworm, armyworm, gladness, exhilaration. ANTONYMS:
archduke: (n) elector, doge, grandee. bollworm, cankerworm, worm, (n) gloom, sadness, misery.
beggar: (n) mendicant, mumper, maggot, orphan, cocoon. monseigneur: (n) Your Highness.
pauper, tramp, sponger, joker, poor ignominious: (adj) dishonorable, quits: (n) quit, par, even, equal,
man, cadger, bloke; (v) beg, shameful, disreputable, infamous, abandon, leave, quittance, a wash.
pauperize. ANTONYM: (n) giver. base, discreditable, dishonourable, quitting: (n) departure, resignation.
bestow: (v) give, confer, grant, impart, inglorious, black, despicable, swine: (n) hog, boar, beast, sow,
contribute, donate, apply, award; degrading. ANTONYMS: (adj) Eohyus, babiroussa, babirussa,
(adj, v) accord, allow, present. honorable, glorious. barrow, brute, razorback, grunter.
Victor Hugo 47
them if they have formed a very clear conception of the spectacle presented at
this moment, upon which we have arrested their attention, by the vast
parallelogram of the grand hall of the palace.%
In the middle of the hall, backed against the western wall, a large and
magnificent gallery draped with cloth of gold, into which enter in procession,
through a small, arched door, grave personages, announced successively by the
shrill voice of an usher. On the front benches were already a number of
venerable figures, muffled in ermine, velvet, and scarlet. Around the dais--
which remains silent and dignified-- below, opposite, everywhere, a great crowd
and a great murmur. Thousands of glances directed by the people on each face
upon the dais, a thousand whispers over each name. Certainly, the spectacle is
curious, and well deserves the attention of the spectators. But yonder, quite at
the end, what is that sort of trestle work with four motley puppets upon it, and
more below? Who is that man beside the trestle, with a black doublet and a pale
face? Alas! my dear reader, it is Pierre Gringoire and his prologue.
We have all forgotten him completely.
This is precisely what he feared.
From the moment of the cardinal's entrance, Gringoire had never ceased to
tremble for the safety of his prologue. At first he had enjoined the actors, who
had stopped in suspense, to continue, and to raise their voices; then, perceiving
that no one was listening, he had stopped them; and, during the entire quarter of
an hour that the interruption lasted, he had not ceased to stamp, to flounce
about, to appeal to Gisquette and Liénarde, and to urge his neighbors to the
continuance of the prologue; all in vain. No one quitted the cardinal, the
embassy, and the gallery-- sole centre of this vast circle of visual rays. We must
also believe, and we say it with regret, that the prologue had begun slightly to
weary the audience at the moment when his eminence had arrived, and created a
diversion in so terrible a fashion. After all, on the gallery as well as on the
marble table, the spectacle was the same: the conflict of Labor and Clergy, of
Nobility and Merchandise. And many people preferred to see them alive,
breathing, moving, elbowing each other in flesh and blood, in this Flemish
Thesaurus
benches: (n) bleachers. bounce, dance; (n) ruffle, frill, fringe, tremble: (adj, n, v) shiver; (n, v) quiver,
continuance: (n) duration, abidance, trimming, furbelow, frame. shudder, thrill, palpitate; (adj, v)
existence, endurance, protraction, perceiving: (n) feeling, sensing, totter, quake; (n) throb; (v) flutter,
adjournment, resumption, hearing, looking at, recognition, quail, falter. ANTONYMS: (v) steady,
prolongation, time, standing, thought, vision, lipreading; (adj) calm.
perseverance. ANTONYMS: (n) conscious, percipient, reasonable. trestle: (n) rack, table, bench, pedestal,
discontinuation, destruction. suspense: (n) doubt, expectancy, bridge, beam, tressel, supporting
enjoined: (adj) lawful. anticipation, indecision, insecurity, tower; (v) fragment, bit, scantling.
ermine: (n) purple, pelt, fur, weasel, unrest, expectation, irresolution, yonder: (adv) beyond, further, farther,
pall, shorttail weasel, mantle, toga, suspension, tension; (adj, n) abroad, thither, further away, at that
millinery, robes of state. hesitation. ANTONYM: (n) place; (adj) distant, yond, furious,
flounce: (v) fling, flounder, bob, knowledge. fierce.
embassy, in this Episcopal court, under the cardinal's robe, under Coppenole's
jerkin, than painted, decked out, talking in verse, and, so to speak, stuffed
beneath the yellow amid white tunics in which Gringoire had so ridiculously
clothed them.%
Nevertheless, when our poet beheld quiet reestablished to some extent, he
devised a stratagem which might have redeemed all.
"Monsieur," he said, turning towards one of his neighbors, a fine, big man,
with a patient face, "suppose we begin again."
"What?" said his neighbor.
"Hé! the Mystery," said Gringoire.
"As you like," returned his neighbor.
This semi-approbation sufficed for Gringoire, and, conducting his own
affairs, he began to shout, confounding himself with the crowd as much as
possible: "Begin the mystery again! begin again!"
"The devil!" said Joannes de Molendino, "what are they jabbering down
yonder, at the end of the hall?" (for Gringoire was making noise enough for four.)
"Say, comrades, isn't that mystery finished? They want to begin it all over again.
That's not fair!"
"No, no!" shouted all the scholars. "Down with the mystery! Down with it!"
But Gringoire had multiplied himself, and only shouted the more vigorously:
"Begin again! begin again!"
These clamors attracted the attention of the cardinal.
"Monsieur Bailiff of the Courts," said he to a tall, black man, placed a few
paces from him, "are those knaves in a holy-water vessel, that they make such a
hellish noise?"
The bailiff of the courts was a sort of amphibious magistrate, a sort of bat of
the judicial order, related to both the rat and the bird, the judge and the soldier.
He approached his eminence, and not without a good deal of fear of the
latter's displeasure, he awkwardly explained to him the seeming disrespect of
Thesaurus
amphibious: (adj) amorphous, (v) confound; (n) misunderstanding, hellish: (adj, v) diabolic, satanic; (adj)
epicene, half blood, hybrid, aquatic, confusion. infernal, diabolical, fiendish,
heteroclite, heterogeneous, mongrel. decked: (adj) bedecked, decked out, demonic, beastly, wicked, unholy,
ANTONYM: (adj) terrestrial. ornamented, decorated, festooned. detestable; (v) mephistophelian.
clothed: (adj) dressed, wrapped, disrespect: (n) contempt, cheek, jabbering: (adj) babbling, blithering,
cloaked, robed, covered, attired, impertinence, neglect, blasphemy, blathering, loquacious, voluble,
vested, absorbed, decent; (v) impudence, disdain, insolence; (n, v) gabby; (n) jabber, gabble, babble,
accustomed, arrayed. ANTONYM: insult, slight; (v) disesteem. gibberish.
(adj) unclothed. ANTONYMS: (n, v) respect; (n) stratagem: (n) scheme, ruse, plan,
confounding: (adj) baffling, puzzling, admiration, regard, value, reverence, trick, dodge, ploy; (n, v) contrivance,
contradictory, devious, difficult, politeness, civility, approval, maneuver, deceit, intrigue; (adj, n)
marvelous, misleading, astounding; decency, seriousness. artifice.
Victor Hugo 49
the audience: that noonday had arrived before his eminence, and that the
comedians had been forced to begin without waiting for his eminence.%
The cardinal burst into a laugh.
"On my faith, the rector of the university ought to have done the same. What
say you, Master Guillaume Rym?"
"Monseigneur," replied Guillaume Rym, "let us be content with having
escaped half of the comedy. There is at least that much gained."
"Can these rascals continue their farce?" asked the bailiff.
"Continue, continue," said the cardinal, "it's all the same to me. I'll read my
breviary in the meantime."
The bailiff advanced to the edge of the estrade, and cried, after having
invoked silence by a wave of the hand,
"Bourgeois, rustics, and citizens, in order to satisfy those who wish the play
to begin again, and those who wish it to end, his eminence orders that it be
continued."
Both parties were forced to resign themselves. But the public and the author
long cherished a grudge against the cardinal.
So the personages on the stage took up their parts, and Gringoire hoped that
the rest of his work, at least, would be listened to. This hope was speedily
dispelled like his other illusions; silence had indeed, been restored in the
audience, after a fashion; but Gringoire had not observed that at the moment
when the cardinal gave the order to continue, the gallery was far from full, and
that after the Flemish envoys there had arrived new personages forming part of
the cortege, whose names and ranks, shouted out in the midst of his dialogue by
the intermittent cry of the usher, produced considerable ravages in it. Let the
reader imagine the effect in the midst of a theatrical piece, of the yelping of an
usher, flinging in between two rhymes, and often in the middle of a line,
parentheses like the following,
"Master Jacques Charmolue, procurator to the king in the Ecclesiastical
Courts!"
Thesaurus
breviary: (n) epitome, portass, flinging: (n) casting, cast. spasmodic, unbroken, common.
portuary, condensation, synopsis. grudge: (v) begrudge, covet; (n, v) parentheses: (n) bracket, brackets.
cherished: (adj) dear, precious, loved, spite; (n) malice, anger, umbrage, ranks: (n) rank and file.
treasured, prized, intimate, wanted, resentment, rancor, gall, pique, feud. ravages: (n) devastation, destruction,
valued, pet, valuable, close. illusions: (n) fantasy. negative effects.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unremarkable, intermittent: (adj) broken, sporadic, shouted: (adj) screamed, loud.
hated, distant. fitful, discontinuous, spasmodic, speedily: (adj, adv) quickly, quick,
cortege: (adj, n) retinue; (n) suite, irregular, periodic, uneven, recurrent; immediately; (adv) rapidly, promptly,
escort, entourage, train, court, (adj, v) occasional; (adv) hastily, swiftly, fast, apace, hurriedly,
gathering; (n, v) procession; (v) intermittently. ANTONYMS: (adj) fleetly. ANTONYMS: (adv) later,
cavalcade, caravan; (adj) rank and constant, repeated, continual, steady, eventually.
file. regular, recurring, frequent, yelping: (n) cry, wapping.
"Jehan de Harlay, equerry guardian of the office of chevalier of the night

watch of the city of Paris!"
"Messire Galiot de Genoilhac, chevalier, seigneur de Brussac, master of the
king's artillery!"
"Master Dreux-Raguier, surveyor of the woods and forests of the king our
sovereign, in the land of France, Champagne and Brie!"
"Messire Louis de Graville, chevalier, councillor, and chamberlain of the king,
admiral of France, keeper of the Forest of Vincennes!"
"Master Denis le Mercier, guardian of the house of the blind at Paris!" etc.,
etc., etc.%
This was becoming unbearable.
This strange accompaniment, which rendered it difficult to follow the piece,
made Gringoire all the more indignant because he could not conceal from
himself the fact that the interest was continually increasing, and that all his work
required was a chance of being heard.
It was, in fact, difficult to imagine a more ingenious and more dramatic
composition. The four personages of the prologue were bewailing themselves in
their mortal embarrassment, when Venus in person, (vera incessa patuit dea)
presented herself to them, clad in a fine robe bearing the heraldic device of the
ship of the city of Paris. She had come herself to claim the dolphin promised to
the most beautiful. Jupiter, whose thunder could be heard rumbling in the
dressing-room, supported her claim, and Venus was on the point of carrying it
off,-- that is to say, without allegory, of marrying monsieur the dauphin, when a
young child clad in white damask, and holding in her hand a daisy (a
transparent personification of Mademoiselle Marguerite of Flanders) came to
contest it with Venus.
Theatrical effect and change.
After a dispute, Venus, Marguerite, and the assistants agreed to submit to the
good judgment of time holy Virgin. There was another good part, that of the king
Thesaurus
allegory: (n) fable, parable, figure of Querry, attendant. manifestation, trope; (adj, n) type;
speech, metaphor, symbol, emblem, heraldic: (adj) communicative, (adj) metalepsis, anagoge.
apologue, story, symbolization; (adj, communicatory. seigneur: (n) lord, seignior, overlord,
n) simile; (adj) type. ANTONYMS: (n) indignant: (adj) angry, incensed, master.
history, fact, chronicle. furious, enraged, wrathful, hurt, unbearable: (adj) insufferable,
assistants: (n) cabinet. rage, provoked, hot, anger, irate. excruciating, insupportable,
bewailing: (n) cry, grief, noise; (adj) ANTONYMS: (adj) cool, content, unendurable, hateful, unacceptable,
lamenting; (v) querulous. unaffected. repugnant, impossible, grievous,
chevalier: (n) maharaja, nawab, marrying: (adj) married. enormous, dreadful. ANTONYMS:
palsgrave, pasha, rajah, waldgrave, personification: (n) incarnation, (adj) bearable, manageable,
knight, Maurice chevalier. avatar, epitome, personation, imperceptible, tolerable, wonderful,
equerry: (n) functionary, groom, prosopopoeia, figure of speech, lovable, nice, pleasant.
Victor Hugo 51
of Mesopotamia; but through so many interruptions, it was difficult to make out

what end he served. All these persons had ascended by the ladder to the stage.%
But all was over; none of these beauties had been felt nor understood. On the
entrance of the cardinal, one would have said that an invisible magic thread had
suddenly drawn all glances from the marble table to the gallery, from the
southern to the western extremity of the hall. Nothing could disenchant the
audience; all eyes remained fixed there, and the new-comers and their accursed
names, and their faces, and their costumes, afforded a continual diversion. This
was very distressing. With the exception of Gisquette and Liénarde, who turned
round from time to time when Gringoire plucked them by the sleeve; with the
exception of the big, patient neighbor, no one listened, no one looked at the poor,
deserted morality full face. Gringoire saw only profiles.
With what bitterness did he behold his whole erection of glory and of poetry
crumble away bit by bit! And to think that these people had been upon the point
of instituting a revolt against the bailiff through impatience to hear his work!
now that they had it they did not care for it. This same representation which had
been begun amid so unanimous an acclamation! Eternal flood and ebb of
popular favor! To think that they had been on the point of hanging the bailiff's
sergeant! What would he not have given to be still at that hour of honey!
But the usher's brutal monologue came to an end; every one had arrived, and
Gringoire breathed freely once more; the actors continued bravely. But Master
Coppenole, the hosier, must needs rise of a sudden, and Gringoire was forced to
listen to him deliver, amid universal attention, the following abominable
harangue.
"Messieurs the bourgeois and squires of Paris, I don't know, cross of God!
what we are doing here. I certainly do see yonder in the corner on that stage,
some people who appear to be fighting. I don't know whether that is what you
call a "mystery," but it is not amusing; they quarrel with their tongues and
nothing more. I have been waiting for the first blow this quarter of an hour;
nothing comes; they are cowards who only scratch each other with insults. You
ought to send for the fighters of London or Rotterdam; and, I can tell you! you
Thesaurus
abominable: (adj, v) odious, foul; (adj) ignore, overlook. extremity: (n) end, member,
abhorrent, detestable, dreadful, crumble: (v) decay, shatter, perish, boundary, bound, close, appendage,
awful, execrable, terrible, loathsome, crush, fragment, decompose, fall limit, limb, ending, fringe,
cursed, wicked. ANTONYMS: (adj) apart, disintegrate, break down, conclusion. ANTONYMS: (n) trunk,
nice, lovable, admirable, alluring, collapse; (adj, v) crack. ANTONYMS: average, minimum, head, leniency.
appealing, commendable, laudable, (v) build, resist. instituting: (adj) elemental,
delightful, desirable, enjoyable, disenchant: (v) disappoint, disillusion, constitutive, determining.
likable. disgust, shock, dishearten, repel, insults: (adj) insulting; (n) abuse,
behold: (v) see, view, contemplate, offend, unspell, disencharm, swearing.
regard, perceive, observe, look, discourage, decharm. ANTONYMS: monologue: (n) soliloquy, speech,
consider, discern, descry, watch. (v) enchant, inspire. words, apostrophe, discourse,
ANTONYMS: (v) Miss, disregard, don't: (adv) not; (n) taboo, prohibition. language.
would have had blows of the fist that could be heard in the Place; but these men
excite our pity. They ought at least, to give us a moorish dance, or some other
mummer! That is not what was told me; I was promised a feast of fools, with the
election of a pope. We have our pope of fools at Ghent also; we're not
behindhand in that, cross of God! But this is the way we manage it; we collect a
crowd like this one here, then each person in turn passes his head through a hole,
and makes a grimace at the rest; time one who makes the ugliest, is elected pope
by general acclamation; that's the way it is. It is very diverting. Would you like
to make your pope after the fashion of my country? At all events, it will be less
wearisome than to listen to chatterers. If they wish to come and make their
grimaces through the hole, they can join the game. What say you, Messieurs les
bourgeois? You have here enough grotesque specimens of both sexes, to allow of
laughing in Flemish fashion, and there are enough of us ugly in countenance to
hope for a fine grinning match."
Gringoire would have liked to retort; stupefaction, rage, indignation,
deprived him of words. Moreover, the suggestion of the popular hosier was
received with such enthusiasm by these bourgeois who were flattered at being
called "squires," that all resistance was useless. There was nothing to be done but
to allow one's self to drift with the torrent. Gringoire hid his face between his two
hands, not being so fortunate as to have a mantle with which to veil his head,
like Agamemnon of Timantis.%
Thesaurus
behindhand: (adv) behind; (adj, adv) pacify, bore, soothe, stifle, pantomime, masque, clown, dumb
backward; (adj) tardy, slow, belated, tranquilize, placate, quiet, dampen. show, guisard.
overdue, dilatory, untimely, undone, flattered: (adj) pleased. retort: (n, v) answer, return, riposte;
serotine; (adj, v) remiss. grimace: (n, v) scowl, glower, sneer, (n) response, rejoinder, repartee,
diverting: (adj, v) entertaining; (adj) smile, roar; (n) face, mop, mouth, comeback; (v) respond, repay, rejoin,
comical, fun, amusive, droll, comic, expression; (v) pull a face, wince. alembic.
laughable, funny, humorous, liked: (adj) popular, loved, favorite, wearisome: (adj, v) tiresome, irksome,
recreative, intriguing. preferred. ANTONYM: (adj) disliked. troublesome; (adj) tedious, dull,
excite: (v) arouse, enliven, disturb, moorish: (adj) marshy, fenny, boggy, monotonous, boring, laborious,
agitate, awaken, incite, inspire, rouse, moory; (n) Moorish architecture. trying, slow, annoying. ANTONYMS:
electrify; (n, v) energize; (adj, v) mummer: (n) mime, pantomimist, (adj) satisfying, soothing, exciting,
quicken. ANTONYMS: (v) calm, mimer, guiser, thespian, player, refreshing, easy.
Victor Hugo 53
CHAPTER V
QUASIMODO
In the twinkling of an eye, all was ready to execute Coppenole's idea.

Bourgeois, scholars and law clerks all set to work. The little chapel situated
opposite the marble table was selected for the scene of the grinning match. A
pane broken in the pretty rose window above the door, left free a circle of stone
through which it was agreed that the competitors should thrust their heads. In
order to reach it, it was only necessary to mount upon a couple of hogsheads,
which had been produced from I know not where, and perched one upon the
other, after a fashion. It was settled that each candidate, man or woman (for it
was possible to choose a female pope), should, for the sake of leaving the
impression of his grimace fresh and complete, cover his face and remain
concealed in the chapel until the moment of his appearance. In less than an
instant, the chapel was crowded with competitors, upon whom the door was
then closed.%
Coppenole, from his post, ordered all, directed all, arranged all. During the
uproar, the cardinal, no less abashed than Gringoire, had retired with all his
suite, under the pretext of business and vespers, without the crowd which his
arrival had so deeply stirred being in the least moved by his departure.
Guillaume Rym was the only one who noticed his eminence's discomfiture. The
Thesaurus
discomfiture: (n) embarrassment, grinning: (n) grin, smile, facial affected, aroused, emotional, aflame,
confusion, perturbation, discomfort, expression, facial gesture, smiling; Stirn, horny, susceptible, stirred up.
discomfit, disconcertion, (adj) beaming. twinkling: (n) moment, jiffy, minute,
discomposure, humiliation, noticed: (adj) noted. second, flash, trice, twinkle, wink,
consternation; (adj) rebuff, rout. pane: (n) window pane, paneling, split second, breath; (adj) sparkling.
ANTONYMS: (n) contentment, pane of glass, panelling, ANTONYM: (adj) dull.
honor. windowpane, window-pane, board, uproar: (adj, n, v) hubbub, disturbance,
execute: (v) do, achieve, complete, square, sheet of glass, leaf, box. tumult; (n) din, noise, turmoil,
perform, accomplish, act, effect, carry pretext: (n) pretense, pretension, color, commotion, disorder, confusion; (adj,
out, enforce, make, fulfill. pretence, mask, plea, guise, sham, n) row; (n, v) brawl. ANTONYMS: (n)
ANTONYMS: (v) abandon, ignore, appearance; (n, v) excuse, cloak. calm, peace, serenity, order.
disregard, Miss, forget, shirk, revive. stirred: (adj) excited, agitated, moved,
attention of the populace, like the sun, pursued its revolution; having set out
from one end of the hall, and halted for a space in the middle, it had now
reached the other end. The marble table, the brocaded gallery had each had their
day; it was now the turn of the chapel of Louis XI. Henceforth, the field was open
to all folly. There was no one there now, but the Flemings and the rabble.%
The grimaces began. The first face which appeared at the aperture, with
eyelids turned up to the reds, a mouth open like a maw, and a brow wrinkled
like our hussar boots of the Empire, evoked such an inextinguishable peal of
laughter that Homer would have taken all these louts for gods. Nevertheless, the
grand hall was anything but Olympus, and Gringoire's poor Jupiter knew it
better than any one else. A second and third grimace followed, then another and
another; and the laughter and transports of delight went on increasing. There
was in this spectacle, a peculiar power of intoxication and fascination, of which it
would be difficult to convey to the reader of our day and our salons any idea.
Let the reader picture to himself a series of visages presenting successively all
geometrical forms, from the triangle to the trapezium, from the cone to the
polyhedron; all human expressions, from wrath to lewdness; all ages, from the
wrinkles of the new-born babe to the wrinkles of the aged and dying; all
religious phantasmagories, from Faun to Beelzebub; all animal profiles, from the
maw to the beak, from the jowl to the muzzle. Let the reader imagine all these
grotesque figures of the Pont Neuf, those nightmares petrified beneath the hand
of Germain Pilon, assuming life and breath, and coming in turn to stare you in
the face with burning eyes; all the masks of the Carnival of Venice passing in
succession before your glass,-- in a word, a human kaleidoscope.
The orgy grew more and more Flemish. Teniers could have given but a very
imperfect idea of it. Let the reader picture to himself in bacchanal form, Salvator
Rosa's battle. There were no longer either scholars or ambassadors or bourgeois
or men or women; there was no longer any Clopin Trouillefou, nor Gilles
Lecornu, nor Marie Quatrelivres, nor Robin Poussepain. All was universal
license. The grand hall was no longer anything but a vast furnace of effrontry
and joviality, where every mouth was a cry, every individual a posture;
Thesaurus
bacchanal: (n) Bacchanalia, revel, unquenchable; (v) incommutable, ANTONYM: (n) decency.
orgy, Saturnalia, bacchant, toper, indefeasible, volcanic, irreducible, polyhedron: (n) dodecahedron,
devotee, drinker, imbiber; (v) simmering. hexahedron, octahedron,
carouser; (adj) bacchic. joviality: (n) glee, cheerfulness, icosahedron, pentahedron,
brocaded: (adj) raised, decorated, happiness, mirth, merriment, gaiety, decahedron, trapezohedron, convex
kincob. festivity, conviviality, hilarity, polyhedron, ideal solid, concave
hussar: (n) dragoon, cavalry, artillery, geniality; (adj) jocundity. polyhedron; (adj) icosahedral.
horse artillery, cavalryman, mounted ANTONYMS: (n) misery, sadness. trapezium: (n) os trapezium, carpal,
rifles, uhlan, voltigeur, light horse. lewdness: (n) bawdiness, indecency, carpal bone, quadrangle,
inextinguishable: (adj) indomitable, debauchery, sensuality, quadrilateral, tetragon, the
impregnable, dominating, lasciviousness, lechery, dirtiness, trapezium, trapezium bone.
quenchless, indestructible, lubricity, salacity, lust, salaciousness. wrinkles: (n) crow's feet.
Victor Hugo 55
everything shouted and howled. The strange visages which came, in turn, to
gnash their teeth in the rose window, were like so many brands cast into the
brazier; and from the whole of this effervescing crowd, there escaped, as from a
furnace, a sharp, piercing, stinging noise, hissing like the wings of a gnat.%
"Ho hé! curse it!"
"Just look at that face!"
"It's not good for anything."
"Guillemette Maugerepuis, just look at that bull's muzzle; it only lacks the
horns. It can't be your husband."
"Another!"
"Belly of the pope! what sort of a grimace is that?"
"Hola hé! that's cheating. One must show only one's face."
"That damned Perrette Callebotte! she's capable of that!"
"Good! Good!"
"I'm stifling!"
"There's a fellow whose ears won't go through!"
But we must do justice to our friend Jehan. In the midst of this witches'
sabbath, he was still to be seen on the top of his pillar, like the cabin-boy on the
topmast. He floundered about with incredible fury. His mouth was wide open,
and from it there escaped a cry which no one heard, not that it was covered by
the general clamor, great as that was but because it attained, no doubt, the limit
of perceptible sharp sounds, the thousand vibrations of Sauveur, or the eight
thousand of Biot.
As for Gringoire, the first moment of depression having passed, he had
regained his composure. He had hardened himself against adversity.---
"Continue!" he had said for the third time, to his comedians, speaking machines;
then as he was marching with great strides in front of the marble table, a fancy
seized him to go and appear in his turn at the aperture of the chapel, were it only
for the pleasure of making a grimace at that ungrateful populace.-- "But no, that
Thesaurus
aperture: (n) breach, slit, puncture, lower, knit the brow. prickling; (adj, v) caustic, acrid,
opening, gap, cleft, perforation, muzzle: (n) mouth, gunpoint, nose, piercing, poignant, biting, pungent,
loophole, mouth, hiatus, outlet. lip, gullet, nozzle, bit; (v) muffle, keen. ANTONYMS: (adj) stingless,
ANTONYM: (n) closure. silence, hush, curb. gentle.
brazier: (n) warmer, heater, bucket, perceptible: (adj) conspicuous, topmast: (n) topgallant, mast, royal
barbecue. appreciable, evident, discernible, mast, topgallant mast.
effervescing: (adj) effervescent, obvious, visible, palpable, apparent, ungrateful: (adj) unmindful,
bubbly, curl, ebullient, foaming, detectable, manifest, observable. unthankful, unappreciative,
foamy, frothy, crisp, crackling, ANTONYMS: (adj) intangible, unnatural, ingrate, unpleasant,
cheerful, brisk. unclear, inaudible, inconspicuous, distasteful, displeasing, unkind,
gnash: (v) grate, frown, gnarl, clench, obscure, undetectable, invisible. disagreeable, not kind. ANTONYMS:
snap, rasp, scrape, scowl, pout, stinging: (adj) cutting, bitter, piquant, (adj) grateful, thankful, appreciative.
would not be worthy of us; no, vengeance! let us combat until the end," he
repeated to himself; "the power of poetry over people is great; I will bring them
back. We shall see which will carry the day, grimaces or polite literature."
Alas! he had been left the sole spectator of his piece. It was far worse than it
had been a little while before. He no longer beheld anything but backs.%
I am mistaken. The big, patient man, whom he had already consulted in a
critical moment, had remained with his face turned towards the stage. As for
Gisquette and Liénarde, they had deserted him long ago.
Gringoire was touched to the heart by the fidelity of his only spectator. He
approached him and addressed him, shaking his arm slightly; for the good man
was leaning on the balustrade and dozing a little.
"Monsieur," said Gringoire, "I thank you!"
"Monsieur," replied the big man with a yawn, "for what?"
"I see what wearies you," resumed the poet; "'tis all this noise which prevents
your hearing comfortably. But be at ease! your name shall descend to posterity!
Your name, if you please?"
"Renauld Chateau, guardian of the seals of the Châtelet of Paris, at your
service."
"Monsieur, you are the only representive of the muses here," said Gringoire.
"You are too kind, sir," said the guardian of the seals at the Châtelet.
"You are the only one," resumed Gringoire, "who has listened to the piece
decorously. What do you think of it?"
"He! he!" replied the fat magistrate, half aroused, "it's tolerably jolly, that's a
fact."
Gringoire was forced to content himself with this eulogy; for a thunder of
applause, mingled with a prodigious acclamation, cut their conversation short.
The Pope of the Fools had been elected.
"Noel! Noel! Noel!" shouted the people on all sides. That was, in fact, a
marvellous grimace which was beaming at that moment through the aperture in
Thesaurus
beaming: (adj) bright, radiant, dozing: (adj) drowsy, dozy, nodding, tolerably: (adv) well enough, passably,
glowing, glad, beamy, cheerful, napping, asleep, sleepy, tired. acceptably, reasonably, enough,
refulgent, sunny, luminous, muses: (n) belles lettres, literature, moderately, to a tolerable degree,
resplendent, incandescent. republic of letters, classics, polite pretty, to an adequate degree; (adj,
ANTONYMS: (adj) gloomy, dark, literature, humanities. adv) somewhat; (adj) pretty well.
dusky, frowning, sad, sullen, prodigious: (adj) gigantic, enormous, ANTONYMS: (adv) unbearably,
tenebrous. huge, phenomenal, portentous, intolerably, unacceptably,
decorously: (adv) fitly, becomingly, stupendous, exceptional, colossal, unreasonably, insufficiently,
properly, seemly, courteously, immense, gargantuan; (adj, v) inadequately.
fittingly, appropriately, modestly, monstrous. ANTONYMS: (adj) yawn: (v) open, ope, yaw, look
sedately, correctly, politely. unexceptional, normal, average, tiny, stupidly, breathe; (n) yawning, nod,
ANTONYMS: (adv) rudely, boldly. weak. get sleep, tedium, bore, boredom.
Victor Hugo 57
the rose window. After all the pentagonal, hexagonal, and whimsical faces,
which had succeeded each other at that hole without realizing the ideal of the
grotesque which their imaginations, excited by the orgy, had constructed,
nothing less was needed to win their suffrages than the sublime grimace which
had just dazzled the assembly. Master Coppenole himself applauded, and
Clopin Trouillefou, who had been among the competitors (and God knows what
intensity of ugliness his visage could attain), confessed himself conquered: We
will do the same. We shall not try to give the reader an idea of that tetrahedral
nose, that horseshoe mouth; that little left eye obstructed with a red, bushy,
bristling eyebrow, while the right eye disappeared entirely beneath an enormous
wart; of those teeth in disarray, broken here and there, like the embattled parapet
of a fortress; of that callous lip, upon which one of these teeth encroached, like
the tusk of an elephant; of that forked chin; and above all, of the expression
spread over the whole; of that mixture of malice, amazement, and sadness. Let
the reader dream of this whole, if he can.%
The acclamation was unanimous; people rushed towards the chapel. They
made the lucky Pope of the Fools come forth in triumph. But it was then that
surprise and admiration attained their highest pitch; the grimace was his face.
Or rather, his whole person was a grimace. A huge head, bristling with red
hair; between his shoulders an enormous hump, a counterpart perceptible in
front; a system of thighs and legs so strangely astray that they could touch each
other only at the knees, and, viewed from the front, resembled the crescents of
two scythes joined by the handles; large feet, monstrous hands; and, with all this
deformity, an indescribable and redoubtable air of vigor, agility, and courage,--
strange exception to the eternal rule which wills that force as well as beauty shall
be the result of harmony. Such was the pope whom the fools had just chosen for
themselves.
One would have pronounced him a giant who had been broken and badly
put together again.
When this species of cyclops appeared on the threshold of the chapel,
motionless, squat, and almost as broad as he was tall; squared on the base, as a
Thesaurus
cyclops: (adj) Antaeus, atlas, redoubtable: (adj) dreadful, ANTONYMS: (n) weakness, apathy,
Brobdingnagian, Hercules, illustrious, glorious, horrid, frailty, laziness, enervation,
superman, Samson, mammoth; (adj, fearsome, fearful, terrible, alarming, inactivity, indifference, illness,
n) giant; (n) flat, Simple Simon, water dire, resolute, strong. lifelessness, sluggishness, tardiness.
flea. tetrahedral: (adj) subulate, setarious, visage: (n) face, look, mug,
indescribable: (adj) indefinable, xiphoid. physiognomy, expression, kisser,
ineffable, unutterable, vague, beyond tusk: (n) ivory, fang, torsk, dentine, appearance, aspect, brow, smiler,
expression, nameless, inexpressible, dentin, bone, tush; (adj) nib; (v) forehead.
nondescript, terrible, intangible, detusk, horn, take away. wart: (n) verruca, condyloma
termless. ANTONYMS: (adj) vigor: (n, v) energy; (adj, n) intensity; acuminatum, bulge, tit, growth,
explainable, conceivable, concrete. (n) spirit, vitality, force, life, strength, lump, swelling, exostosis, bump,
realizing: (n) thought. power, might, vim, stamina. protuberance, venereal wart.
great man says; with his doublet half red, half violet, sown with silver bells, and,
above all, in the perfection of his ugliness, the populace recognized him on the
instant, and shouted with one voice,
"'Tis Quasimodo, the bellringer! 'tis Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre-
Dame! Quasimodo, the one-eyed! Quasimodo, the bandy-legged! Noel! Noel!"
It will be seen that the poor fellow had a choice of surnames.%
"Let the women with child beware!" shouted the scholars.
"Or those who wish to be," resumed Joannes.
The women did, in fact, hide their faces.
"Oh! the horrible monkey!" said one of them.
"As wicked as he is ugly," retorted another.
"He's the devil," added a third.
"I have the misfortune to live near Notre-Dame; I hear him prowling round
the eaves by night."
"With the cats."
"He's always on our roofs."
"He throws spells down our chimneys."
"The other evening, he came and made a grimace at me through my attic
window. I thought that it was a man. Such a fright as I had!"
"I'm sure that he goes to the witches' sabbath. Once he left a broom on my
leads."
"Oh! what a displeasing hunchback's face!"
"Oh! what an ill-favored soul!"
"Whew!"
The men, on the contrary, were delighted and applauded. Quasimodo, the
object of the tumult, still stood on the threshold of the chapel, sombre and grave,
and allowed them to admire him.
Thesaurus
applauded: (adj) famous, highly agreeable. sabbath: (n) day of rest, Saturday,
praised, commended. eaves: (n) arch, balcony, cupola, dome, vacation, recess, holiday, dies non,
broom: (v) sweep, to sweep, bream, penthouse, eave, overhang, attic, loft, Pentecost, sabbat.
shovel, rake, screen, sieve; (n) brush, projection, roof space. sown: (adj) sowed, seeded, planted,
Scots heather, Calluna vulgaris, hunchback: (n) humpback, hump, sative.
heath. kyphosis, humpback whale; (adj) ugliness: (n) eyesore, offensiveness,
displeasing: (adj) distasteful, humpbacked, hunchbacked, hideousness, garishness, gaudiness,
offensive, disagreeable, obnoxious, humped, crookbacked, kyphotic, grotesqueness, grotesquery,
objectionable, unacceptable, gibbose, gibbous. repulsiveness, homeliness,
annoying, unwelcome, contrary; (adv) ill-favored: (adj) ugly, objectionable, unsightliness; (adj, n) unpleasantness.
displeasingly; (v) unpleasing. ill-favoured, unwelcome, ANTONYMS: (n) beauty,
ANTONYMS: (adj) pleasing, unacceptable, inadmissible. attractiveness, pleasantness.
Victor Hugo 59
One scholar (Robin Poussepain, I think), came and laughed in his face, and
too close. Quasimodo contented himself with taking him by the girdle, and
hurling him ten paces off amid the crowd; all without uttering a word.%
Master Coppenole, in amazement, approached him.
"Cross of God! Holy Father! you possess the handsomest ugliness that I have
ever beheld in my life. You would deserve to be pope at Rome, as well as at
Paris."
So saying, he placed his hand gayly on his shoulder. Quasimodo did not stir.
Coppenole went on,
"You are a rogue with whom I have a fancy for carousing, were it to cost me a
new dozen of twelve livres of Tours. How does it strike you?"
Quasimodo made no reply.
"Cross of God!" said the hosier, "are you deaf?"
He was, in truth, deaf.
Nevertheless, he began to grow impatient with Coppenole's behavior, and
suddenly turned towards him with so formidable a gnashing of teeth, that the
Flemish giant recoiled, like a bull-dog before a cat.
Then there was created around that strange personage, a circle of terror and
respect, whose radius was at least fifteen geometrical feet. An old woman
explained to Coppenole that Quasimodo was deaf.
"Deaf!" said the hosier, with his great Flemish laugh. "Cross of God! He's a
perfect pope!"
"He! I recognize him," exclaimed Jehan, who had, at last, descended from his
capital, in order to see Quasimodo at closer quarters, "he's the bellringer of my
brother, the archdeacon. Good-day, Quasimodo!"
"What a devil of a man!" said Robin Poussepain still all bruised with his fall.
"He shows himself; he's a hunchback. He walks; he's bandy-legged. He looks at
you; he's one-eyed. You speak to him; he's deaf. And what does this
Polyphemus do with his tongue?"
Thesaurus
amazement: (n) admiration, wonder, bruised: (adj) wounded, hurt, raw, mathematical.
surprise, consternation, stupefaction, sore, livid, tender, sensitive, rotten, girdle: (v) encircle, circle, compass,
stupor, wonderment, feeling, alarm, surbet, sore to the touch, painful. gird, enclose, encompass; (n, v) zone,
jolt; (v) amaze. ANTONYMS: (n) contented: (adj) content, happy, ring; (n) cincture, cummerbund, sash.
preparation, indifference, comfortable, quiet, cheerful, smug, hurling: (adj) moving; (n) field game.
expectation, coolness, cool, complacent, satisfied, easy, proud, radius: (n) length, spoke, range, beam,
composure, calmness, contempt, delighted. ANTONYMS: (adj) compass, scope, caliber, bore, line, r,
belief. discontented, unhappy, depressed, diameter.
behavior: (n, v) bearing, demeanor; (n) unsatisfied, sad, anxious. rogue: (n, v) rascal; (n) knave, imp,
carriage, conduct, deportment, act, descended: (v) extraught. miscreant, crook, cheat, impostor,
behaviour, manner, character, action, dozen: (adj, n) XII; (n) dozens, boxcars. swindler, cad, villain, scoundrel.
morality. geometrical: (adj) nonrepresentational, went: (v) walked, proceeded.
"He speaks when he chooses," said the old woman; "he became deaf through
ringing the bells. He is not dumb."
"That he lacks," remarks Jehan.%
"And he has one eye too many," added Robin Poussepain.
"Not at all," said Jehan wisely. "A one-eyed man is far less complete than a
blind man. He knows what he lacks."
In the meantime, all the beggars, all the lackeys, all the cutpurses, joined with
the scholars, had gone in procession to seek, in the cupboard of the law clerks'
company, the cardboard tiara, and the derisive robe of the Pope of the Fools.
Quasimodo allowed them to array him in them without wincing, and with a sort
of proud docility. Then they made him seat himself on a motley litter. Twelve
officers of the fraternity of fools raised him on their shoulders; and a sort of bitter
and disdainful joy lighted up the morose face of the cyclops, when he beheld
beneath his deformed feet all those heads of handsome, straight, well-made
men. Then the ragged and howling procession set out on its march, according to
custom, around the inner galleries of the Courts, before making the circuit of the
streets and squares.
Thesaurus
deformed: (adj) distorted, misshapen, reverential, praising, deferential. morose: (adj) grim, dismal, glum, dark,
bent, malformed, ugly, crippled, docility: (n) obedience, tractability, moody, grumpy, dour, depressed,
contorted, warped, shapeless, meekness, flexibility, docibleness, sullen, blue, dejected. ANTONYMS:
twisted, deform. ANTONYMS: (adj) submission, deference, humility, (adj) happy, cheery, stable.
beautiful, flawless, unflawed, perfect, gentleness, willingness, tractableness. robe: (n, v) dress, array, vest, garb,
straight. howling: (n) howl, cry; (adj) fierce, apparel; (v) clothe, attire, rig; (n)
disdainful: (adj) supercilious, fantastic, gross, glaring, marvelous, gown, cloak, garment.
haughty, scornful, arrogant, proud, wonderful, wondrous; (adj, n) tiara: (n) crown, coronet, circlet, miter,
cavalier, derogatory, lordly, weeping, sniveling. triple crown, cap of maintenance,
condescending, derisive, sneering. lighted: (adj) illuminated, lit, light, jewelled headdress, jewelry, tiar.
ANTONYMS: (adj) respectful, ablaze, bright, ignited, burn, burning, well-made: (adj) strong, fine, sturdy,
admiring, humble, approving, warm, ignite, kindled, lighten. buxom, dainty.
Victor Hugo 61
CHAPTER VI
ESMERALDA
We are delighted to be able to inform the reader, that during the whole of this
scene, Gringoire and his piece had stood firm. His actors, spurred on by him,
had not ceased to spout his comedy, and he had not ceased to listen to it. He had
made up his mind about the tumult, and was determined to proceed to the end,
not giving up the hope of a return of attention on the part of the public. This
gleam of hope acquired fresh life, when he saw Quasimodo, Coppenole, and the
deafening escort of the pope of the procession of fools quit the hall amid great
uproar. The throng rushed eagerly after them. "Good," he said to himself, "there
go all the mischief- makers." Unfortunately, all the mischief-makers constituted
the entire audience. In the twinkling of an eye, the grand hall was empty.%
To tell the truth, a few spectators still remained, some scattered, others in
groups around the pillars, women, old men, or children, who had had enough of
the uproar and tumult. Some scholars were still perched astride of the window-
sills, engaged in gazing into the Place.
"Well," thought Gringoire, "here are still as many as are required to hear the
end of my mystery. They are few in number, but it is a choice audience, a
lettered audience."
Thesaurus
ceased: (adj) finished. leave, follow. maleficence. ANTONYMS: (n)
eagerly: (adv) zealously, readily, gazing: (adj) fixed. obedience, beneficence, help.
keenly, fervently, avidly, greedily, gleam: (n, v) glance, beam, blaze, procession: (n) march, convoy,
enthusiastically, intently, earnestly, shine, glimmer, glow, flash, flicker, cortege, cavalcade, file, string,
impatiently, actively. ANTONYMS: sparkle, glitter; (v) twinkle. pageant, series, sequence, progress,
(adv) apathetically, nonchalantly, lettered: (adj, v) erudite; (adj) learned, column.
grudgingly, patiently, halfheartedly, educated, enlightened, literate, spectators: (n) spectator, gallery,
reluctantly, unenthusiastically. knowledgeable, scholarly, knowing, viewer, viewers, attendance.
escort: (n, v) chaperon, attend, convoy, literary; (v) instructed, leaned. spout: (n, v) jet, spurt, squirt, spirt,
guard, guide, conduct, date; (v) mischief: (adj, n) evil, hurt, harm; (n) outlet; (v) gush, burst; (n) nozzle,
accompany, see; (n) suite, attendant. damage, ill, detriment, disadvantage, pipe, nose, flow.
ANTONYMS: (v) abandon, desert, devilry, caper, devilment, spurred: (adj) barbed, calcarated.
An instant later, a symphony which had been intended to produce the

greatest effect on the arrival of the Virgin, was lacking. Gringoire perceived that
his music had been carried off by the procession of the Pope of the Fools. "Skip
it," said he, stoically.%
He approached a group of bourgeois, who seemed to him to be discussing his
piece. This is the fragment of conversation which he caught,
"You know, Master Cheneteau, the Hôtel de Navarre, which belonged to
Monsieur de Nemours?"
"Yes, opposite the Chapelle de Braque."
"Well, the treasury has just let it to Guillaume Alixandre, historian, for six
hivres, eight sols, parisian, a year."
"How rents are going up!"
"Come," said Gringoire to himself, with a sigh, "the others are listening."
"Comrades," suddenly shouted one of the young scamps from the window,
"La Esmeralda! La Esmeralda in the Place!"
This word produced a magical effect. Every one who was left in the hall flew
to the windows, climbing the walls in order to see, and repeating, "La
Esmeralda! La Esmeralda?" At the same time, a great sound of applause was
heard from without.
"What's the meaning of this, of the Esmeralda?" said Gringoire, wringing his
hands in despair. "Ah, good heavens! it seems to be the turn of the windows
now."
He returned towards the marble table, and saw that the representation had
been interrupted. It was precisely at the instant when Jupiter should have
appeared with his thunder. But Jupiter was standing motionless at the foot of
the stage.
"Michel Giborne!" cried the irritated poet, "what are you doing there? Is that
your part? Come up!"
"Alas!" said Jupiter, "a scholar has just seized the ladder."
Thesaurus
applause: (n, v) acclaim, praise; (n) (adj) calm, pleased, patient, sigh: (n, v) groan, suspire, murmur; (v)
admiration, approval, eulogy, contented. breathe, languish, pine; (n) breath,
compliment, plaudit, commendation, motionless: (adj) inactive, inert, wail, whimper, whine, suspiration.
clapping, clap, ovation. immobile, stationary, fixed, symphony: (n) concord, accord,
ANTONYMS: (n) disapproval, Boos, unmoving, quiescent, dead, torpid; sinfonie, cavatina, fantasia, overture,
booing, denigration, hisses, hissing, (adj, adv) calm, at rest. ANTONYMS: exordium, pastorale, concerto,
rejection, condemnation, criticism, (adj) mobile, active, alive, flowing. roulade, symphonic music.
jeering. repeating: (n) repeat, iteration, wringing: (adj) saturated, soaked,
irritated: (adj) annoyed, exasperated, renewal, repetition, redundancy, soaked to the skin, soaking wet,
incensed, enraged, aggravated, copying, reduplication; (adj) sodden, sopping, sopping wet, wet,
furious, irate, inflamed, sore, repetitious, iterating, iterative, wet through, wringing wet, soaking.
displeased, provoked. ANTONYMS: repetitive. ANTONYM: (adj) dry.
Victor Hugo 63
Gringoire looked. It was but too true. All communication between his plot
and its solution was intercepted.%
"The rascal," he murmured. "And why did he take that ladder?"
"In order to go and see the Esmeralda," replied Jupiter piteously. "He said,
'Come, here's a ladder that's of no use!' and he took it."
This was the last blow. Gringoire received it with resignation.
"May the devil fly away with you!" he said to the comedian, "and if I get my
pay, you shall receive yours."
Then he beat a retreat, with drooping head, but the last in the field, like a
general who has fought well.
And as he descended the winding stairs of the courts: "A fine rabble of asses
and dolts these Parisians!" he muttered between his teeth; "they come to hear a
mystery and don't listen to it at all! They are engrossed by every one, by Chopin
Trouillefou, by the cardinal, by Coppenole, by Quasimodo, by the devil! but by
Madame the Virgin Mary, not at all. If I had known, I'd have given you Virgin
Mary; you ninnies! And I! to come to see faces and behold only backs! to be a
poet, and to reap the success of an apothecary! It is true that Homerus begged
through the Greek towns, and that Naso died in exile among the Muscovites.
But may the devil flay me if I understand what they mean with their Esmeralda!
What is that word, in the first place?-- 'tis Egyptian!"
Thesaurus
apothecary: (n) druggist, pharmacy, limp, flaccid, cernuous, flagging, decorticate, pare, lash, flog, castigate,
chemist, caregiver, dispensing languid, floppy, lax, tired; (n) droop. scalp, shell, batter.
chemist, medical attendant, ANTONYMS: (adj) taut, firm. muttered: (adj) garbled, incoherent,
pothecary, potecary, pill pusher, engrossed: (adj) rapt, engaged, intent, broken, inarticulate.
pharmacopolist, pharmacologist. occupied, preoccupied, busy, piteously: (adj, adv) sadly; (adv)
asses: (n) equidae. fascinated, obsessed, thoughtful, pitifully, wretchedly, ruefully,
comedian: (n) clown, buffoon, comic, hooked; (adj, v) immersed. woefully, poorly, plaintively, sorrily,
actor, joker, performer, jester, ANTONYMS: (adj) disinterested, grievously, sorrowfully, dolefully.
entertainer, zany, comedians, bored, distracted, indifferent, reap: (v) harvest, gain, glean, gather,
jokester. unconcerned, uninterested, obtain, cut, receive, earn, acquire;
courts: (n) judges. inattentive, carefree. (adj, v) mow; (adj) clip. ANTONYMS:
drooping: (adj) flabby, pendulous, flay: (v) excoriate, peel, skin, (v) lose, scatter.
Victor Hugo 65
BOOK II
Victor Hugo 67
CHAPTER %I
FROM CHARYBDIS TO SCYLLA
Night comes on early in January. The streets were already dark when
Gringoire issued forth from the Courts. This gloom pleased him; he was in haste
to reach some obscure and deserted alley, in order there to meditate at his ease,
and in order that the philosopher might place the first dressing upon the wound
of the poet. Philosophy, moreover, was his sole refuge, for he did not know
where he was to lodge for the night. After the brilliant failure of his first
theatrical venture, he dared not return to the lodging which he occupied in the
Rue Grenier-sur-l'Eau, opposite to the Port-au-Foin, having depended upon
receiving from monsieur the provost for his epithalamium, the wherewithal to
pay Master Guillaume Doulx-Sire, farmer of the taxes on cloven-footed animals
in Paris, the rent which he owed him, that is to say, twelve sols parisian; twelve
times the value of all that he possessed in the world, including his trunk-hose,
his shirt, and his cap. After reflecting a moment, temporarily sheltered beneath
the little wicket of the prison of the treasurer of the Sainte- Chappelle, as to the
shelter which he would select for the night, having all the pavements of Paris to
choose from, he remembered to have noticed the week previously in the Rue de
la Savaterie, at the door of a councillor of the parliament, a stepping stone for
mounting a mule, and to have said to himself that that stone would furnish, on
occasion, a very excellent pillow for a mendicant or a poet. He thanked
Thesaurus
alley: (n) track, road, passage, lane, residence, quarter, home, lodgement, covered, shaded; (adj, v) private; (v)
alleyway, aisle, path, runway, address, hospice. covert. ANTONYMS: (adj)
pathway, street, back street. meditate: (n, v) muse; (v) contemplate, vulnerable, sunny, exposed, public,
epithalamium: (n) epithalamy. consider, cogitate, reflect, speculate, harsh, bleak.
furnish: (v) afford, provide, wonder, ruminate, ponder, think, stepping: (n) steps.
contribute, render, offer, bethink. wherewithal: (n) resources, funds,
accommodate, supply, outfit, yield, philosopher: (n) thinker, bacon, cash, capital, ways and means,
decorate; (n, v) give. ANTONYM: (v) libertarian, gymnosophist, empiricist, money, potential, supplies, purse,
divest. necessitarian, moralist, theorist, faculty; (adv) wherewith.
issued: (adj) executed, done. wisdom, pundit, mechanist. wicket: (n) lattice, hatch, door, grille,
lodging: (n) abode, apartment, sheltered: (adj) secure, comfortable, portal, hoop, ostiary, postern, porch,
accommodation, housing, hostel, screened, safe, secluded, cozy, snug, grill, vestibule.
Providence for having sent this happy idea to him; but, as he was preparing to
cross the Place, in order to reach the tortuous labyrinth of the city, where
meander all those old sister streets, the Rues de la Barillerie, de la Vielle-
Draperie, de la Savaterie, de la Juiverie, etc., still extant to-day, with their nine-
story houses, he saw the procession of the Pope of the Fools, which was also
emerging from the court house, and rushing across the courtyard, with great
cries, a great flashing of torches, and the music which belonged to him,
Gringoire. This sight revived the pain of his self-love; he fled. In the bitterness of
his dramatic misadventure, everything which reminded him of the festival of
that day irritated his wound and made it bleed.%
He was on the point of turning to the Pont Saint-Michel; children were
running about here and there with fire lances and rockets.
"Pest on firework candles!" said Gringoire; and he fell back on the Pont au
Change. To the house at the head of the bridge there had been affixed three
small banners, representing the king, the dauphin, and Marguerite of Flanders,
and six little pennons on which were portrayed the Duke of Austria, the Cardinal
de Bourbon, M. de Beaujeu, and Madame Jeanne de France, and Monsieur the
Bastard of Bourbon, and I know not whom else; all being illuminated with
torches. The rabble were admiring.
"Happy painter, Jehan Fourbault!" said Gringoire with a deep sigh; and he
turned his back upon the bannerets and pennons. A street opened before him; he
thought it so dark and deserted that he hoped to there escape from all the rumors
as well as from all the gleams of the festival. At the end of a few moments his
foot came in contact with an obstacle; he stumbled and fell. It was the May truss,
which the clerks of the clerks' law court had deposited that morning at the door
of a president of the parliament, in honor of the solemnity of the day. Gringoire
bore this new disaster heroically; he picked himself up, and reached the water's
edge. After leaving behind him the civic Tournelle and the criminal tower, and
skirted the great walls of the king's garden, on that unpaved strand where the
mud reached to his ankles, he reached the western point of the city, and
considered for some time the islet of the Passeur-aux-Vaches, which has
Thesaurus
affixed: (adj) additional. range, ramble, twist. ANTONYM: (v) ANTONYMS: (n) humor, levity,
heroically: (adj, adv) courageously, settle. cheerfulness, understatement.
daringly; (adv) intrepidly, fearlessly, misadventure: (n) calamity, disaster, tortuous: (adj) indirect, intricate,
gallantly, boldly, grandly, nobly, mischance, ill, plague, mishap, circuitous, complex, knotty, winding,
resolutely, splendidly, chivalrously. misfortune, bad luck, catastrophe, convoluted, sinuous, involved,
ANTONYMS: (adv) halfheartedly, woe, ill luck. devious, roundabout. ANTONYMS:
fearfully, execrably. self-love: (n) egoism, vanity, pride, (adj) straightforward, straight,
islet: (n) island, ait, reef, holm, atoll, arrogance. uncomplicated, untwisted, easy,
eyot, breaker, coral reef, coral Island, solemnity: (n) seriousness, sobriety, simple.
wight. earnestness, formality, ceremony, truss: (v) bandage, bind, fasten,
meander: (n, v) bend, curve, wander, impressiveness, austerity, sedateness, bundle, tie up; (n, v) pack, prop; (n)
turn, amble, saunter; (v) roam, stray, display, pomp, grandeur. frame, stay, fagot; (adj) pinion.
Victor Hugo 69
disappeared beneath the bronze horse of the Pont Neuf. The islet appeared to
him in the shadow like a black mass, beyond the narrow strip of whitish water
which separated him from it. One could divine by the ray of a tiny light the sort
of hut in the form of a beehive where the ferryman of cows took refuge at
night.%
"Happy ferryman!" thought Gringoire; "you do not dream of glory, and you
do not make marriage songs! What matters it to you, if kings and Duchesses of
Burgundy marry? You know no other daisies (marguerites) than those which your
April greensward gives your cows to browse upon; while I, a poet, am hooted,
and shiver, and owe twelve sous, and the soles of my shoes are so transparent,
that they might serve as glasses for your lantern! Thanks, ferryman, your cabin
rests my eyes, and makes me forget Paris!"
He was roused from his almost lyric ecstacy, by a big double Saint-Jean
cracker, which suddenly went off from the happy cabin. It was the cow
ferryman, who was taking his part in the rejoicings of the day, and letting off
fireworks.
This cracker made Gringoire's skin bristle up all over.
"Accursed festival!" he exclaimed, "wilt thou pursue me everywhere? Oh!
good God! even to the ferryman's!"
Then he looked at the Seine at his feet, and a horrible temptation took
possession of him:
"Oh!" said he, "I would gladly drown myself, were the water not so cold!"
Then a desperate resolution occurred to him. It was, since he could not
escape from the Pope of the Fools, from Jehan Fourbault's bannerets, from May
trusses, from squibs and crackers, to go to the Place de Grève.
"At least," he said to himself, "I shall there have a firebrand of joy wherewith
to warm myself, and I can sup on some crumbs of the three great armorial
bearings of royal sugar which have been erected on the public refreshment-stall
of the city.
Thesaurus
armorial: (v) typical, symptomatic, (v) calm. firebrand: (n) instigator, brand,
symbolic, representative, browse: (n) browsing; (v) scan, skim, troublemaker, inciter, incendiary,
pathognomonic, exponential, crop, explore, leaf, surf, pasture, firewood, pyromaniac, scalawag,
emblematic, diagnostic, diacritical, glance, peruse, wander. blade, radical, instigant.
demonstrative, characteristic. ANTONYMS: (v) study, scrutinize, greensward: (n) sward, turf, sod,
beehive: (n) hive, skep, yard, stare. green, lawn, ground, land, soil,
workplace, wharf, usine, receptacle, crackers: (adj) nuts, mad, kooky, nutty, meadow, bugger, field.
hairdo, forcing pit; (v) aviary, loony, bats, barmy, haywire, crazy, wherewith: (adv) therewith, herewith.
alveary. dotty, bonkers. whitish: (adj) pale, milklike, fair, milk,
bristle: (n) fiber, hair, whisker; (v) ferryman: (n) waterman, creamy, light, colorless, not clear,
teem, burn, seethe, rage, arise, fume, longshoreman, lighterman, boater, achromatic, opaque, blond.
blow up; (n, v) brustle. ANTONYM: shipman, bargeman, Charon, Ferrier. ANTONYMS: (adj) rosy, dark.
Victor Hugo 71
CHAPTER II
THE PLACE DE GREVE
There remains to-day but a very imperceptible vestige of the Place de Grève,
such as it existed then; it consists in the charming little turret, which occupies the
angle north of the Place, and which, already enshrouded in the ignoble plaster
which fills with paste the delicate lines of its sculpture, would soon have
disappeared, perhaps submerged by that flood of new houses which so rapidly
devours all the ancient façades of Paris.%
The persons who, like ourselves, never cross the Place de Grève without
casting a glance of pity and sympathy on that poor turret strangled between two
hovels of the time of Louis XV., can easily reconstruct in their minds the
aggregate of edifices to which it belonged, and find again entire in it the ancient
Gothic place of the fifteenth century.
It was then, as it is to-day, an irregular trapezoid, bordered on one side by
the quay, and on the other three by a series of lofty, narrow, and gloomy houses.
By day, one could admire the variety of its edifices, all sculptured in stone or
wood, and already presenting complete specimens of the different domestic
architectures of the Middle Ages, running back from the fifteenth to the eleventh
century, from the casement which had begun to dethrone the arch, to the Roman
semicircle, which had been supplanted by the ogive, and which still occupies,
Thesaurus
casement: (n) embrasure, casement imperceptible: (adj) invisible, in refief, etched, anaglyptic, shapely,
cloth. intangible, insensible, faint, carven.
dethrone: (v) remove, uncrown, evanescent, inaudible, negligible, semicircle: (n) arch, semi-circles, half
disenthrone, unthrone, oust, indiscernible, unseen, unnoticeable, circle, half-circle, plane figure, arc,
overthrow, divest, displace, unseat, gentle. ANTONYMS: (adj) obvious, curve.
deposit, disthronize. ANTONYMS: overwhelming, clear, visible, trapezoid: (adj) trapezoidal,
(v) enthrone, throne, install. perceptible, heavy, noticeable, trapezohedral, trapeziform; (n)
ignoble: (adj) contemptible, abject, definite, considerable, conspicuous, tetragon, quadrangle, carpal bone.
base, dishonorable, disgraceful, strong. vestige: (n, v) trace, remains, track,
beggarly, mean, humble, degraded, presenting: (adj) featuring. token, footprint; (n) relic, shadow,
despicable, caddish. ANTONYMS: sculptured: (adj) sculpted, graven, remnant, indication, evidence,
(adj) honorable, glorious. modeled, engraved, carved, incised, remainder.
below it, the first story of that ancient house de la Tour Roland, at the corner of
the Place upon the Seine, on the side of the street with the Tannerie. At night,
one could distinguish nothing of all that mass of buildings, except the black
indentation of the roofs, unrolling their chain of acute angles round the place; for
one of the radical differences between the cities of that time, and the cities of the
present day, lay in the façades which looked upon the places and streets, and
which were then gables. For the last two centuries the houses have been turned
round.%
In the centre of the eastern side of the Place, rose a heavy and hybrid
construction, formed of three buildings placed in juxtaposition. It was called by
three names which explain its history, its destination, and its architecture: "The
House of the Dauphin," because Charles V., when Dauphin, had inhabited it;
"The Marchandise," because it had served as town hall; and "The Pillared House"
(domus ad piloria), because of a series of large pillars which sustained the three
stories. The city found there all that is required for a city like Paris; a chapel in
which to pray to God; a plaidoyer, or pleading room, in which to hold hearings,
and to repel, at need, the King's people; and under the roof, an arsenac full of
artillery. For the bourgeois of Paris were aware that it is not sufficient to pray in
every conjuncture, and to plead for the franchises of the city, and they had
always in reserve, in the garret of the town hall, a few good rusty arquebuses.
The Grève had then that sinister aspect which it preserves to-day from the
execrable ideas which it awakens, and from the sombre town hall of Dominique
Bocador, which has replaced the Pillared House. It must be admitted that a
permanent gibbet and a pillory, "a justice and a ladder," as they were called in
that day, erected side by side in the centre of the pavement, contributed not a
little to cause eyes to be turned away from that fatal place, where so many beings
full of life and health have agonized; where, fifty years later, that fever of Saint
Vallier was destined to have its birth, that terror of the scaffold, the most
monstrous of all maladies because it comes not from God, but from man.
It is a consoling idea (let us remark in passing), to think that the death
penalty, which three hundred years ago still encumbered with its iron wheels, its
Thesaurus
agonized: (adj) distressed, painful, upsetting. pillory, brand, stigmatize, disgrace,
woeful, tormented, suffering, execrable: (adj, adv) abominable, string up.
miserable, hurt. nefarious; (adj, v) cursed, hateful, indentation: (n) pit, depression,
awakens: (adj) awakened. odious; (adj) deplorable, damnable, hollow, impression, indent, dip,
conjuncture: (n) event, coincidence, abhorrent, atrocious, accursed, notch, impress, concavity; (n, v) nick;
case, condition, emergency, situation, dreadful. ANTONYMS: (adj) savory, (adj) concave. ANTONYMS: (n)
combination, connection, accident, laudable, outstanding, dandy, swell, lump, bump.
circumstances; (adj) crisis. great, fabulous, superb, pillory: (n) stocks, whipping post,
consoling: (adj) consolatory, cheering, praiseworthy. instrument of punishment; (v)
encouraging, grateful, reassuring, franchises: (n) facility, freedom. punish, crucify, slate, attack, libel,
soothing, calming; (n) gibbet: (n) gallows, gallowstree, malign, penalize, pick holes in.
encouragement. ANTONYM: (adj) gallous, scaffold; (v) hang, expose, ANTONYMS: (v) compliment, praise.
Victor Hugo 73
stone gibbets, and all its paraphernalia of torture, permanent and riveted to the
pavement, the Grève, the Halles, the Place Dauphine, the Cross du Trahoir, the
Marché aux Pourceaux, that hideous Montfauçon, the barrier des Sergents, the
Place aux Chats, the Porte Saint-Denis, Champeaux, the Porte Baudets, the Porte
Saint Jacques, without reckoning the innumerable ladders of the provosts, the
bishop of the chapters, of the abbots, of the priors, who had the decree of life and
death,-- without reckoning the judicial drownings in the river Seine; it is
consoling to-day, after having lost successively all the pieces of its armor, its
luxury of torment, its penalty of imagination and fancy, its torture for which it
reconstructed every five years a leather bed at the Grand Châtelet, that ancient
suzerain of feudal society almost expunged from our laws and our cities, hunted
from code to code, chased from place to place, has no longer, in our immense
Paris, any more than a dishonored corner of the Grève,-- than a miserable
guillotine, furtive, uneasy, shameful, which seems always afraid of being caught
in the act, so quickly does it disappear after having dealt its blow.%
Thesaurus
armor: (n, v) armour, mask; (n) furtive: (adj) covert, stealthy, computation, bill, score, computing,
armature, defense, security, guard, surreptitious, secretive, concealed, liquidation, clearance; (n, v) count,
protection, safeguard, crust, shell, latent, cryptic, sneaky, backstairs, enumeration, account, estimation.
skin. secret, underhanded. ANTONYMS: riveted: (adj) immovable, immobile,
dishonored: (adj) shamed, discredited, (adj) blatant, aboveboard, obvious, irremovable, rooted, wrapped up,
shameful, corrupt, damaged, overt, honest. intent; (v) wrapped in, engrossed in,
disfigured, broken, mortified, ladders: (n) washboard. rapt, absorbed, transfixed.
dishonest; (n) degraded, derogate. paraphernalia: (n) gear, apparatus, ANTONYM: (adj) detached.
ANTONYMS: (adj) untarnished, outfit, kit, tackle, equipment, suzerain: (n) seignior, tyrant, thane,
pure. appurtenances, fitting, things, feudal lord, chief, despot, oligarch,
feudal: (adj) feudatory, medieval, belongings, baggage. country, sovereign, autocrat, body
feodal. reckoning: (n) calculation, politic.
Victor Hugo 75
CHAPTER III
KISSES FOR BLOWS
When Pierre Gringoire arrived on the Place de Grève, he was paralyzed. He

had directed his course across the Pont aux Meuniers, in order to avoid the
rabble on the Pont au Change, and the pennons of Jehan Fourbault; but the
wheels of all the bishop's mills had splashed him as he passed, and his doublet
was drenched; it seemed to him besides, that the failure of his piece had
rendered him still more sensible to cold than usual. Hence he made haste to
draw near the bonfire, which was burning magnificently in the middle of the
Place. But a considerable crowd formed a circle around it.%
"Accursed Parisians!" he said to himself (for Gringoire, like a true dramatic
poet, was subject to monologues) "there they are obstructing my fire!
Nevertheless, I am greatly in need of a chimney corner; my shoes drink in the
water, and all those cursed mills wept upon me! That devil of a Bishop of Paris,
with his mills! I'd just like to know what use a bishop can make of a mill! Does
he expect to become a miller instead of a bishop? If only my malediction is
needed for that, I bestow it upon him! and his cathedral, and his mills! Just see if
those boobies will put themselves out! Move aside! I'd like to know what they
are doing there! They are warming themselves, much pleasure may it give them!
They are watching a hundred fagots burn; a fine spectacle!"
Thesaurus
cursed: (adj) damned, doomed, majestically, gorgeously, obstructing: (adj) impedimental,
execrable, cussed, wretched, unlucky, sumptuously, marvelously, impeditive.
accursed, blamed, blasted, wonderfully, fantastically, showily. paralyzed: (adj) palsied, crippled,
confounded; (v) accurst. ANTONYMS: (adv) poorly, modestly, disabled, helpless, torpid, powerless,
ANTONYMS: (adj) commendable, badly, abysmally, simply, meagerly, prostrate, enervated, dead, impotent,
honorable, nice, sweet, kine. incompetently. inert.
drenched: (adj) saturated, soaked, malediction: (n) imprecation, splashed: (adj) dabbled, bespattered,
soaking, damp, soppy, wet through, anathema, execration, denunciation, besplashed, spattered, marked,
sodden, sopping, wringing wet, malison, oath, proscription, unclean, dirty, splattered,
soaked to the skin, dripping wet. maranatha, profanity, swear word, distributed, showy, dotted.
magnificently: (adv) beautifully, heavy calamity. ANTONYM: (n) wheels: (n) vehicle, truck, car, brush,
grandly, superbly, gloriously, blessing. force.
On looking more closely, he perceived that the circle was much larger than
was required simply for the purpose of getting warm at the king's fire, and that
this concourse of people had not been attracted solely by the beauty of the
hundred fagots which were burning.%
In a vast space left free between the crowd and the fire, a young girl was
dancing.
Whether this young girl was a human being, a fairy, or an angel, is what
Gringoire, sceptical philosopher and ironical poet that he was, could not decide
at the first moment, so fascinated was he by this dazzling vision.
She was not tall, though she seemed so, so boldly did her slender form dart
about. She was swarthy of complexion, but one divined that, by day, her skin
must possess that beautiful golden tone of the Andalusians and the Roman
women. Her little foot, too, was Andalusian, for it was both pinched and at ease
in its graceful shoe. She danced, she turned, she whirled rapidly about on an old
Persian rug, spread negligently under her feet; and each time that her radiant
face passed before you, as she whirled, her great black eyes darted a flash of
lightning at you.
All around her, all glances were riveted, all mouths open; and, in fact, when
she danced thus, to the humming of the Basque tambourine, which her two
pure, rounded arms raised above her head, slender, frail and vivacious as a
wasp, with her corsage of gold without a fold, her variegated gown puffing out,
her bare shoulders, her delicate limbs, which her petticoat revealed at times, her
black hair, her eyes of flame, she was a supernatural creature.
"In truth," said Gringoire to himself, "she is a salamander, she is a nymph,
she is a goddess, she is a bacchante of the Menelean Mount!"
At that moment, one of the salamander's braids of hair became unfastened,
and a piece of yellow copper which was attached to it, rolled to the ground.
"Hé, no!" said he, "she is a gypsy!"
All illusions had disappeared.
Thesaurus
bacchante: (n) votary, maenad. hellbender, fire hook, amphiuma, loose, unbuttoned, overt, opened,
corsage: (n) bouquet, bodice, corset, brasier, warming pan, opened out, slack, undecided,
posy, waist, corselet, spray, dicamptodontid, sow, alpine undetermined, assailable.
buttonhole, brassiere, nosegay, slip. salamander. ANTONYMS: (adj) buttoned, fixed,
nymph: (n) dryad, houri, cocoon, swarthy: (adj) dusky, black, swart, shut, tied.
naiad, Daphne, caterpillar, Aurelia, sable, somber, dun, tawny, coloured, vivacious: (adj) lively, animated,
Ariel, maiden, wench, staddle. colored, atramentous; (n) brunette. sprightly, vibrant, spry, effervescent,
petticoat: (adj, n) female; (n) ANTONYMS: (adj) fair, light. gay; (adj, v) cheerful, active, buoyant,
underskirt, skirt, she, woman, her, tambourine: (n) drum, tympan, brisk. ANTONYMS: (adj) dull,
crinoline, wife, undergarment, apron; timbrel, tamburin, tambourin, lethargic, listless, compliment,
(adj) petty. membranophone. inactive, praise, languid, lifeless,
salamander: (n) bear, poker, olm, unfastened: (adj) open, movable, serious, sluggish.
Victor Hugo 77
She began her dance once more; she took from the ground two swords,
whose points she rested against her brow, and which she made to turn in one
direction, while she turned in the other; it was a purely gypsy effect. But,
disenchanted though Gringoire was, the whole effect of this picture was not
without its charm and its magic; the bonfire illuminated, with a red flaring light,
which trembled, all alive, over the circle of faces in the crowd, on the brow of the
young girl, and at the background of the Place cast a pallid reflection, on one side
upon the ancient, black, and wrinkled façade of the House of Pillars, on the
other, upon the old stone gibbet.%
Among the thousands of visages which that light tinged with scarlet, there
was one which seemed, even more than all the others, absorbed in contemplation
of the dancer. It was the face of a man, austere, calm, and sombre. This man,
whose costume was concealed by the crowd which surrounded him, did not
appear to be more than five and thirty years of age; nevertheless, he was bald; he
had merely a few tufts of thin, gray hair on his temples; his broad, high forehead
had begun to be furrowed with wrinkles, but his deep-set eyes sparkled with
extraordinary youthfulness, an ardent life, a profound passion. He kept them
fixed incessantly on the gypsy, and, while the giddy young girl of sixteen
danced and whirled, for the pleasure of all, his revery seemed to become more
and more sombre. From time to time, a smile and a sigh met upon his lips, but
the smile was more melancholy than the sigh.
The young girl, stopped at length, breathless, and the people applauded her
lovingly.
"Djali!" said the gypsy.
Then Gringoire saw come up to her, a pretty little white goat, alert, wide-
awake, glossy, with gilded horns, gilded hoofs, and gilded collar, which he had
not hitherto perceived, and which had remained lying curled up on one corner of
the carpet watching his mistress dance.
"Djali!" said the dancer, "it is your turn."
And, seating herself, she gracefully presented her tambourine to the goat.
Thesaurus
deep-set: (adj) hollow. uneven. ANTONYM: (adj) temples: (n) brow.
disenchanted: (adj) cynical, unfurrowed. tinged: (adj) plausible, bright, painted,
disappointed, worldly, sophisticated, incessantly: (adv) constantly, fey, touched, specious, colorful,
blas, let down, dissatisfied. endlessly, continually, perpetually, stained, tined, dyed, tinct.
ANTONYMS: (adj) naive, satisfied, continuously, unceasingly, eternally, wide-awake: (adj) vigilant, wakeful,
spellbound, entranced, idealistic. persistently, unremittingly, alert, observant, bright, wary,
flaring: (adj) flared, flaming, burning, unendingly, steadily. ANTONYMS: prompt, nimble; (adv) on the ball.
blazing, tawdry, ablaze, garish, fiery; (adv) sporadically, briefly. youthfulness: (n) juvenility,
(v) glaring; (n) flare; (adv) flaringly. revery: (n) dream, daydream, castle in adolescence, younker, youngness,
furrowed: (adj) wrinkled, lined, Spain, air castle, castle in the air, young person, young, spring chicken,
wrinkly, crumpled, corrugated, imagine, dreaming; (v) low spirits, puberty, jejuneness, immaturity,
corrugate, furrowy, porcate, rugged, melancholy, ill humor, despondency. callowness.
"Djali," she continued, "what month is this?"

The goat lifted its fore foot, and struck one blow upon the tambourine. It was
the first month in the year, in fact.%
"Djali," pursued the young girl, turning her tambourine round, "what day of
the month is this?"
Djali raised his little gilt hoof, and struck six blows on the tambourine.
"Djali," pursued the Egyptian, with still another movement of the
tambourine, "what hour of the day is it?"
Djali struck seven blows. At that moment, the clock of the Pillar House rang
out seven.
The people were amazed.
"There's sorcery at the bottom of it," said a sinister voice in the crowd. It was
that of the bald man, who never removed his eyes from the gypsy.
She shuddered and turned round; but applause broke forth and drowned the
morose exclamation.
It even effaced it so completely from her mind, that she continued to question
her goat.
"Djali, what does Master Guichard Grand-Remy, captain of the pistoliers of
the town do, at the procession of Candlemas?"
Djali reared himself on his hind legs, and began to bleat, marching along
with so much dainty gravity, that the entire circle of spectators burst into a laugh
at this parody of the interested devoutness of the captain of pistoliers.
"Djali," resumed the young girl, emboldened by her growing success, "how
preaches Master Jacques Charmolue, procurator to the king in the ecclesiastical
court?"
The goat seated himself on his hind quarters, and began to bleat, waving his
fore feet in so strange a manner, that, with the exception of the bad French, and
worse Latin, Jacques Charmolue was there complete,-- gesture, accent, and
attitude.
Thesaurus
bleat: (v) blat, kvetch, gripe, moan, religiousness, godliness, piousness, aft, behind, rear; (adj) back.
whimper, cry, blate, quetch, utter, consecration, religion, attachment, hoof: (n) toe, sole, hooves, bottom,
emit; (n) baaing. fervor, earnestness, reverence. keel, root, leg, ungula, unguis, animal
dainty: (adj, v) nice; (adj, n, v) delicacy; emboldened: (adj) bold. foot; (v) step.
(adj) fastidious, savory, tasteful, exclamation: (n) clamor, ejaculation, marching: (n) walking, mar, drill; (adj)
squeamish, particular, mincing, exclaiming, utterance, whoop, ongoing, moving.
refined; (adj, n) tidbit; (n) luxury. interjection, shout, expletive, deuce, seated: (adj) sat, sedentary.
ANTONYMS: (adj) coarse, vulgar, Dickens, ecphonesis. sorcery: (n) charm, incantation,
rough, inelegant, harsh, gross, fore: (adv) ahead, before; (adj, adv) witchcraft, enchantment, black
awkward, accepting, heavy, careless, forward; (n) bow, head, forefront, magic, magic, diabolism,
thick. stem; (adj, n) front; (adj) anterior, necromancy, black art, witchery,
devoutness: (n) holiness, piety, foremost, frontal. ANTONYMS: (adv) diablerie.
Victor Hugo 79
And the crowd applauded louder than ever.%

"Sacrilege! profanation!" resumed the voice of the bald man.
The gypsy turned round once more.
"Ah!" said she, "'tis that villanous man!" Then, thrusting her under lip out
beyond the upper, she made a little pout, which appeared to be familiar to her,
executed a pirouette on her heel, and set about collecting in her tambourine the
gifts of the multitude.
Big blanks, little blanks, targes and eagle liards showered into it.
All at once, she passed in front of Gringoire. Gringoire put his hand so
recklessly into his pocket that she halted. "The devil!" said the poet, finding at
the bottom of his pocket the reality, that is, to say, a void. In the meantime, the
pretty girl stood there, gazing at him with her big eyes, and holding out her
tambourine to him and waiting. Gringoire broke into a violent perspiration.
If he had all Peru in his pocket, he would certainly have given it to the
dancer; but Gringoire had not Peru, and, moreover, America had not yet been
discovered.
Happily, an unexpected incident came to his rescue.
"Will you take yourself off, you Egyptian grasshopper?" cried a sharp voice,
which proceeded from the darkest corner of the Place.
The young girl turned round in affright. It was no longer the voice of the
bald man; it was the voice of a woman, bigoted and malicious.
However, this cry, which alarmed the gypsy, delighted a troop of children
who were prowling about there.
"It is the recluse of the Tour-Roland," they exclaimed, with wild laughter, "it
is the sacked nun who is scolding! Hasn't she supped? Let's carry her the
remains of the city refreshments!"
All rushed towards the Pillar House.
In the meanwhile, Gringoire had taken advantage of the dancer's
embarrassment, to disappear. The children's shouts had reminded him that he,
Thesaurus
affright: (v) frighten, scare, horrify, lather, water. inattentively, wildly, wantonly,
startle, terrorize, terrify, intimidate; pirouette: (n, v) spin, whirl; (v) gyrate, neglectfully. ANTONYMS: (adv)
(n) dread, alarm, fear; (n, v) fright. wheel, rotate, turn round, roll; (n) prudently, responsibly, calmly,
bigoted: (adj) fanatic, opinionated, circination, revolution, volutation, discreetly, sensibly, cautiously.
narrow, fanatical, hidebound, bigot, turbination. recluse: (n) hermit, anchoret, solitary,
insular, zealot, arbitrary, dogmatic, pout: (v) brood, sulk; (adj, v) frown, ascetic, eremite, loner, troglodyte;
biased. ANTONYMS: (adj) protrude; (adj) lower, glower, scowl, (adj) reclusive, secluded, cloistered,
broadminded, tolerant, unprejudiced, gloam, look downcast; (n) eelpout, withdrawn. ANTONYM: (n) native.
humanitarian, liberal, moderate, fair. hornpout. thrusting: (n) thrust, push, jab, poke,
perspiration: (n) diaphoresis, hidrosis, recklessly: (adv) rashly, carelessly, jabbing, stab, driving force, scoke,
sudor, sweating, extravasation, imprudently, hastily, heedlessly, sack, punch, Phytolacca Americana.
secretion, exertion, exudation, effort, negligently, foolhardily, villanous: (adj) vile.
also, had not supped, so he ran to the public buffet. But the little rascals had
better legs than he; when he arrived, they had stripped the table. There
remained not so much as a miserable camichon at five sous the pound. Nothing
remained upon the wall but slender fleurs-de-lis, mingled with rose bushes,
painted in 1434 by Mathieu Biterne. It was a meagre supper.%
It is an unpleasant thing to go to bed without supper, it is a still less pleasant
thing not to sup and not to know where one is to sleep. That was Gringoire's
condition. No supper, no shelter; he saw himself pressed on all sides by
necessity, and he found necessity very crabbed. He had long ago discovered the
truth, that Jupiter created men during a fit of misanthropy, and that during a
wise man's whole life, his destiny holds his philosophy in a state of siege. As for
himself, he had never seen the blockade so complete; he heard his stomach
sounding a parley, and he considered it very much out of place that evil destiny
should capture his philosophy by famine.
This melancholy revery was absorbing him more and more, when a song,
quaint but full of sweetness, suddenly tore him from it. It was the young gypsy
who was singing.
Her voice was like her dancing, like her beauty. It was indefinable and
charming; something pure and sonorous, aerial, winged, so to speak. There
were continual outbursts, melodies, unexpected cadences, then simple phrases
strewn with aerial and hissing notes; then floods of scales which would have put
a nightingale to rout, but in which harmony was always present; then soft
modulations of octaves which rose and fell, like the bosom of the young singer.
Her beautiful face followed, with singular mobility, all the caprices of her song,
from the wildest inspiration to the chastest dignity. One would have pronounced
her now a mad creature, now a queen.
The words which she sang were in a tongue unknown to Gringoire, and
which seemed to him to be unknown to herself, so little relation did the
expression which she imparted to her song bear to the sense of the words. Thus,
these four lines, in her mouth, were madly gay,
Thesaurus
buffet: (n, v) blow, cuff, hit, smack, indefinable: (adj) ineffable, parley: (v) negotiate, converse, confer,
buff; (v) beat, batter, knock, punch; unspeakable, vague, indeterminate, consult; (n, v) talk, treat; (n)
(n) restaurant, canteen. undefinable, inexpressible, elusive, conversation, interview, colloquy,
crabbed: (adj) abstruse, sour, grumpy, indefinite, undefined, nondescript, meeting, consultation.
morose, crusty, surly, churlish, equivocal. ANTONYMS: (adj) rout: (adj, n, v) defeat; (n, v)
moody, irritable, huffy; (adj, n) concrete, precise. discomfiture, overthrow, discomfit;
austere. misanthropy: (n) hatred, hate, (v) conquer, overpower, overcome,
hissing: (adj) sibilant, sibilous, incivism. crush, beat, overwhelm; (n) flight.
sibilatory; (n) whistling, heckling, nightingale: (n) bulbul, nurse, ANTONYMS: (v) lose, surrender.
scoffing, sibilance, taunts, sibilation, philomel, the lady with the lamp, winged: (adj) swift, rapid, speedy,
white noise; (v) fizzle. ANTONYM: singer, nighthawk, night bird, quick, flying, alate, sublime, lofty,
(n) applause. Florence nightingale, etc. alated, aligerous, composed.
Victor Hugo 81
Un cofre de gran riqueza

Hallaron dentro un pilar,
Dentro del, nuevas banderas
Con figuras de espantar.%
And an instant afterwards, at the accents which she imparted to this stanza,
Alarabes de cavallo
Sin poderse menear,
Con espadas, y los cuellos,
Ballestas de buen echar,
Gringoire felt the tears start to his eyes. Nevertheless, her song breathed joy,
most of all, and she seemed to sing like a bird, from serenity and heedlessness.
The gypsy's song had disturbed Gringoire's revery as the swan disturbs the
water. He listened in a sort of rapture, and forgetfulness of everything. It was
the first moment in the course of many hours when he did not feel that he
suffered.
The moment was brief.
The same woman's voice, which had interrupted the gypsy's dance,
interrupted her song.
"Will you hold your tongue, you cricket of hell?" it cried, still from the same
obscure corner of the place.
The poor "cricket" stopped short. Gringoire covered up his ears.
"Oh!" he exclaimed, "accursed saw with missing teeth, which comes to break
the lyre!"
Meanwhile, the other spectators murmured like himself; "To the devil with
the sacked nun!" said some of them. And the old invisible kill-joy might have
had occasion to repent of her aggressions against the gypsy had their attention
not been diverted at this moment by the procession of the Pope of the Fools,
Thesaurus
cavallo: (n) capel. foolhardiness, disregard, temerity. feel remorse, grieve, be sorry.
forgetfulness: (n) neglect, amnesia, ANTONYMS: (n) mindfulness, serenity: (n) quiet, peace, calm,
obliviousness, inattention, memory caution. quietness, equanimity, calmness,
loss, omission, unknowingness, rapture: (n) joy, bliss, delight, quietude, repose; (adj, n) composure,
unawareness, Lethe, carelessness, happiness, exaltation, elation, tranquility, placidity. ANTONYMS:
loss of memory. ANTONYMS: (n) exultation, enchantment; (adj, n) (n) anxiety, uproar, chaos, anger,
awareness, concentration, enthusiasm; (n, v) transport; (adj, n, v) panic, bustle, disturbance,
remembering, attention. passion. ANTONYMS: (n) impatience, turbulence, turmoil.
heedlessness: (n) neglect, rashness, indifference, boredom, misery, stanza: (n) couplet, quatrain, strophe,
carelessness, inattention, gloom, agony, hell, despair. stave, line, octave, antistrophe, sestet,
inadvertence, recklessness, repent: (v) deplore, bewail, rue, poetry, envoy, canto.
indifference, inattentiveness, mourn, lament, atone, sorry, bemoan, suffered: (adj) permitted, permissive.
which, after having traversed many streets and squares, debouched on the Place
de Grève, with all its torches and all its uproar.%
This procession, which our readers have seen set out from the Palais de
Justice, had organized on the way, and had been recruited by all the knaves, idle
thieves, and unemployed vagabonds in Paris; so that it presented a very
respectable aspect when it arrived at the Grève.
First came Egypt. The Duke of Egypt headed it, on horseback, with his
counts on foot holding his bridle and stirrups for him; behind them, the male and
female Egyptians, pell-mell, with their little children crying on their shoulders;
all-- duke, counts, and populace-- in rags and tatters. Then came the Kingdom of
Argot; that is to say, all the thieves of France, arranged according to the order of
their dignity; the minor people walking first. Thus defiled by fours, with the
divers insignia of their grades, in that strange faculty, most of them lame, some
cripples, others one-armed, shop clerks, pilgrim, hubins, bootblacks, thimble-
riggers, street arabs, beggars, the blear-eyed beggars, thieves, the weakly,
vagabonds, merchants, sham soldiers, goldsmiths, passed masters of
pickpockets, isolated thieves. A catalogue that would weary Homer. In the
centre of the conclave of the passed masters of pickpockets, one had some
difficulty in distinguishing the King of Argot, the grand coësre, so called,
crouching in a little cart drawn by two big dogs. After the kingdom of the
Argotiers, came the Empire of Galilee. Guillaume Rousseau, Emperor of the
Empire of Galilee, marched majestically in his robe of purple, spotted with wine,
preceded by buffoons wrestling and executing military dances; surrounded by
his macebearers, his pickpockets and clerks of the chamber of accounts. Last of
all came the corporation of law clerks, with its maypoles crowned with flowers,
its black robes, its music worthy of the orgy, and its large candles of yellow wax.
In the centre of this crowd, the grand officers of the Brotherhood of Fools bore on
their shoulders a litter more loaded down with candles than the reliquary of
Sainte-Geneviève in time of pest; and on this litter shone resplendent, with
crosier, cope, and mitre, the new Pope of the Fools, the bellringer of Notre-
Dame, Quasimodo the hunchback.
Thesaurus
conclave: (n) congress, caucus, decapitation, capital punishment, Saturnalia, bacchanal, drunken
convocation, meeting, vestry, electrocution, death penalty, revelry, riot, Bacchanalia, pampering,
consistory, conventicle, convention, crucifixion, implementation, corporal rite, splurge.
synod, gathering, conference. punishment; (v) perform, execute. reliquary: (n) casket, desk, caisson,
crosier: (n) staff, fiddlehead. horseback: (n) hogback, body part. pix, pyx, chest, box, bureau, coffer,
defiled: (adj) impure, polluted, dirty, majestically: (adv) magnificently, case, container.
maculate, debauched, contaminated, regally, imperially, splendidly, nobly, resplendent: (adj, n) bright, lucid; (adj)
corrupt, violated, tainted, abusive, sublimely, solemnly, grandly, loftily, radiant, luminous, illustrious,
adulterate. ANTONYMS: (adj) impressively, gloriously. splendid, flamboyant, glorious,
hallowed, purified, sanctified, mitre: (n) miter joint, headdress, magnificent, gorgeous, effulgent.
cleansed, untarnished. headgear. ANTONYM: (adj) dull.
executing: (n) performing, execution, orgy: (n) debauchery, binge, debauch, tatters: (n) rags, clothing.
Victor Hugo 83
Each section of this grotesque procession had its own music. The Egyptians
made their drums and African tambourines resound. The slang men, not a very
musical race, still clung to the goat's horn trumpet and the Gothic rubebbe of the
twelfth century. The Empire of Galilee was not much more advanced; among its
music one could hardly distinguish some miserable rebec, from the infancy of
the art, still imprisoned in the re-la-mi. But it was around the Pope of the Fools
that all the musical riches of the epoch were displayed in a magnificent discord.
It was nothing but soprano rebecs, counter-tenor rebecs, and tenor rebecs, not to
reckon the flutes and brass instruments. Alas! our readers will remember that
this was Gringoire's orchestra.%
It is difficult to convey an idea of the degree of proud and blissful expansion
to which the sad and hideous visage of Quasimodo had attained during the
transit from the Palais de Justice, to the Place de Grève. It was the first
enjoyment of self-love that he had ever experienced. Down to that day, he had
known only humiliation, disdain for his condition, disgust for his person.
Hence, deaf though he was, he enjoyed, like a veritable pope, the acclamations of
that throng, which he hated because he felt that he was hated by it. What
mattered it that his people consisted of a pack of fools, cripples, thieves, and
beggars? it was still a people and he was its sovereign. And he accepted
seriously all this ironical applause, all this derisive respect, with which the crowd
mingled, it must be admitted, a good deal of very real fear. For the hunchback
was robust; for the bandy-legged fellow was agile; for the deaf man was
malicious: three qualities which temper ridicule.
We are far from believing, however, that the new Pope of the Fools
understood both the sentiments which he felt and the sentiments which he
inspired. The spirit which was lodged in this failure of a body had, necessarily,
something incomplete and deaf about it. Thus, what he felt at the moment was
to him, absolutely vague, indistinct, and confused. Only joy made itself felt, only
pride dominated. Around that sombre and unhappy face, there hung a radiance.
It was, then, not without surprise and alarm, that at the very moment when
Quasimodo was passing the Pillar House, in that semi-intoxicated state, a man
Thesaurus
agile: (adj) active, nimble, spry, quick, discord: (n, v) conflict, clash; (n) effulgence, sparkle, light; (adj, n)
adroit, deft, lively, dapper, supple, disagreement, variance, division, brilliancy. ANTONYMS: (n)
lithe, astute. ANTONYMS: (adj) stiff, difference, dissension, dissonance, darkness, gloominess.
ponderous, brittle, logical, oafish, strife, split, contention. ANTONYMS: rebec: (n) bawd, prostitute, ribibe.
slow, sluggish, unfit, awkward, (n) agreement, harmony, unity, resound: (v) ring, reverberate, boom,
heavy, inflexible. accord, concordance, consent, silence, peal, roar, blare, resonate, sound,
blissful: (adj) happy, heavenly, merry, concord; (v) match. reecho, clatter, resounding.
joyful, delighted, glad, cheerful, epoch: (n) era, date, period, day, sentiments: (n) breast.
delightful, ecstatic, elated, blest. season, time, term, cycle, crisis, date soprano: (adj) high, tenor, voce di
ANTONYMS: (adj) unhappy, of reference, times. testa, penetrating, piercing, sharp,
grieving, sad, sorrowful, depressed, radiance: (n) gleam, glory, brilliance, shrill; (n) mezzo, lind, high pitch,
unpleasant, down, dreadful. luster, lustre, beam, brightness, high frequency.
was seen to dart from the crowd, and to tear from his hands, with a gesture of
anger, his crosier of gilded wood, the emblem of his mock popeship.%
This man, this rash individual, was the man with the bald brow, who, a
moment earlier, standing with the gypsy's group had chilled the poor girl with
his words of menace and of hatred. He was dressed in an eccleslastical costume.
At the moment when he stood forth from the crowd, Gringoire, who had not
noticed him up to that time, recognized him: "Hold!" he said, with an
exclamation of astonishment. "Eh! 'tis my master in Hermes, Dom Claude Frollo,
the archdeacon! What the devil does he want of that old one- eyed fellow? He'll
get himself devoured!"
A cry of terror arose, in fact. The formidable Quasimodo had hurled himself
from the litter, and the women turned aside their eyes in order not to see him
tear the archdeacon asunder.
He made one bound as far as the priest, looked at him, and fell upon his
knees.
The priest tore off his tiara, broke his crozier, and rent his tinsel cope.
Quasimodo remained on his knees, with head bent and hands clasped. Then
there was established between them a strange dialogue of signs and gestures, for
neither of them spoke. The priest, erect on his feet, irritated, threatening,
imperious; Quasimodo, prostrate, humble, suppliant. And, nevertheless, it is
certain that Quasimodo could have crushed the priest with his thumb.
At length the archdeacon, giving Quasimodo's powerful shoulder a rough
shake, made him a sign to rise and follow him.
Quasimodo rose.
Then the Brotherhood of Fools, their first stupor having passed off, wished to
defend their pope, so abruptly dethroned. The Egyptians, the men of slang, and
all the fraternity of law clerks, gathered howling round the priest.
Quasimodo placed himself in front of the priest, set in play the muscles of his
athletic fists, and glared upon the assailants with the snarl of an angry tiger.
Thesaurus
arose: (v) happen, occur. imperative, masterful, dictatorial, ANTONYMS: (v) facilitate, undo.
asunder: (adj, v) separate; (adv) aside, commanding, lordly, magisterial, stupor: (n) lethargy, stupefaction,
in two; (adj, adv) in Twain; (adj) loose, despotic. ANTONYM: (adj) coma, shock, insensibility,
distant, adrift, aloof; (v) discrete, far subservient. unconsciousness, trance,
between, free. ANTONYM: (adv) prostrate: (adj, v) prone, exhaust, level, sluggishness, torpor, haze,
together. fatigue; (v) fell, overwhelm, grogginess. ANTONYMS: (n)
crozier: (n) crosier, staff. overcome, floor, overthrow; (adj) alertness, awareness, wakefulness.
emblem: (n) flag, type, device, deject, knock down. ANTONYM: suppliant: (n) petitioner, applicant,
allegory, character, crest, sign, badge, (adj) upright. besieger, postulant, prayer, lover,
figure, ensign, symbol. snarl: (n, v) tangle, growl, knot, suer; (adj) beseeching, supplicatory,
imperious: (adj) haughty, muddle, yap, howl, bark; (adj, v) imploring, humbly entreating.
domineering, authoritative, arbitrary, snap; (v) entangle; (n) kink, maze. tore: (v) tare; (n) moulding, molding.
Victor Hugo 85
The priest resumed his sombre gravity, made a sign to Quasimodo, and
retired in silence.%
Quasimodo walked in front of him, scattering the crowd as he passed.
When they had traversed the populace and the Place, the cloud of curious
and idle were minded to follow them. Quasimodo then constituted himself the
rearguard, and followed the archdeacon, walking backwards, squat, surly,
monstrous, bristling, gathering up his limbs, licking his boar's tusks, growling
like a wild beast, and imparting to the crowd immense vibrations, with a look or
a gesture.
Both were allowed to plunge into a dark and narrow street, where no one
dared to venture after them; so thoroughly did the mere chimera of Quasimodo
gnashing his teeth bar the entrance.
"Here's a marvellous thing," said Gringoire; "but where the deuce shall I find
some supper?"
Thesaurus
chimera: (n) fantasy, dream, illusion, licking: (n) thrashing, rout, debacle, slight.
vision, chimaera, maggot, beating, drubbing, discomfiture, surly: (adj) sullen, grumpy, peevish,
imagination, phantom, fancy, whipping, lacing, lick, hiding, crusty, churlish, grouchy, gruff,
daydream; (adj) Minotaur. reverse. ANTONYM: (n) victory. morose; (adj, n) harsh, rude; (adj, adv)
ANTONYM: (n) truth. minded: (prep) inclined; (adj, prep) unfriendly. ANTONYMS: (adj)
growling: (adj) grunting, doggish, disposed; (adj) willing, apt, ready, cheerful, gentle, pleasant, courteous,
churlish, brutal, guttural, hoarse, prone, orientated, favorable, easygoing, friendly.
husky, peevish; (n) scowling, oriented, prepared, partial. vibrations: (n) vibes, atmosphere,
glowering. squat: (adj) short, chunky, stumpy, ambiance, premonition,
imparting: (n) giving, conveyance, squatty, thick, low; (v) crouch, perch, undercurrent, feelings, vibraharp,
conveyance of title, conveyancing, sit, hunker down, bend. vibraphone, ambience.
conveying. ANTONYMS: (adj) slender, tall, walked: (adj) exempt; (v) yode.
Victor Hugo 87
CHAPTER IV
THE INCONVENIENCES OF FOLLOWING A

PRETTY WOMAN THROUGH THE STREETS IN
THE EVENING
Gringoire set out to follow the gypsy at all hazards. He had seen her,
accompanied by her goat, take to the Rue de la Coutellerie; he took the Rue de la
Coutellerie.%
"Why not?" he said to himself.
Gringoire, a practical philosopher of the streets of Paris, had noticed that
nothing is more propitious to revery than following a pretty woman without
knowing whither she is going. There was in this voluntary abdication of his
freewill, in this fancy submitting itself to another fancy, which suspects it not, a
mixture of fantastic independence and blind obedience, something indescribable,
intermediate between slavery and liberty, which pleased Gringoire,-- a spirit
essentially compound, undecided, and complex, holding the extremities of all
extremes, incessantly suspended between all human propensities, and
neutralizing one by the other. He was fond of comparing himself to Mahomet's
coffin, attracted in two different directions by two loadstones, and hesitating
Thesaurus
abdication: (n) resignation, gallant, fornicator, caprine animal, ANTONYMS: (adj) unfortunate,
abandonment, surrender, retirement, Billy, paillard, grasshopper, victim. unlucky, unpropitious, inopportune,
renunciation, waiver, withdrawal, gypsy: (n) Gipsy, vagabond, charlatan, hopeless.
relinquishment, cession, abjuration; empiric, Rosicrucian, palmer, submitting: (n) submission,
(v) usurpation. pilgrim, zingaro; (adj, n) Romany, delegation; (v) submit; (adj) ductile.
comparing: (n) collation, contrast, migrant; (adj) itinerant. undecided: (adj) uncertain, doubtful,
comparison, analogy, collating, neutralizing: (v) neutralise; (n) dubious, unresolved, pending,
comparability. disarmament; (adj) negative, alkaline. indecisive, irresolute, hesitant,
extremes: (n) excess; (adv) overboard. propitious: (adj) fortunate, lucky, debatable, indefinite; (adj, v)
freewill: (n) autonomy, freedom, good, benign, happy, opportune; (adj, undetermined. ANTONYMS: (adj)
independence; (adj) unpaid. v) auspicious; (adj, n, v) friendly; (adj, certain, determined, sure, settled,
goat: (n) satyr, kid, lecher, chamois, n) promising, advantageous, kind. definite, decisive.
eternally between the heights and the depths, between the vault and the
pavement, between fall and ascent, between zenith and nadir.%
If Gringoire had lived in our day, what a fine middle course he would hold
between classicism and romanticism!
But he was not sufficiently primitive to live three hundred years, and 'tis a
pity. His absence is a void which is but too sensibly felt to-day.
Moreover, for the purpose of thus following passers-by (and especially
female passers-by) in the streets, which Gringoire was fond of doing, there is no
better disposition than ignorance of where one is going to sleep.
So he walked along, very thoughtfully, behind the young girl, who hastened
her pace and made her goat trot as she saw the bourgeois returning home and
the taverns-- the only shops which had been open that day-- closing.
"After all," he half thought to himself, "she must lodge somewhere; gypsies
have kindly hearts. Who knows?"
And in the points of suspense which he placed after this reticence in his
mind, there lay I know not what flattering ideas.
Meanwhile, from time to time, as he passed the last groups of bourgeois
closing their doors, he caught some scraps of their conversation, which broke the
thread of his pleasant hypotheses.
Now it was two old men accosting each other.
"Do you know that it is cold, Master Thibaut Fernicle?" (Gringoire had been
aware of this since the beginning of the winter.)
"Yes, indeed, Master Boniface Disome! Are we going to have a winter such as
we had three years ago, in '80, when wood cost eight sous the measure?"
"Bah! that's nothing, Master Thibaut, compared with the winter of 1407, when
it froze from St. Martin's Day until Candlemas! and so cold that the pen of the
registrar of the parliament froze every three words, in the Grand Chamber!
which interrupted the registration of justice."
Thesaurus
classicism: (adj, n) classicalism; (adj) adulatory, fulsome, bland, candied, brashness.
atticism; (n) humanities, smooth, encouraging; (n) flattery. romanticism: (n) utopianism,
neoclassicism, arts. ANTONYM: (n) ANTONYMS: (adj) assertive, critical, idealism, romance language, quality,
romanticism. unflattering, unattractive, wounding, sentiment, love story, love affair,
eternally: (adv) always, permanently, uncomplimentary, negative; (adv) Latinian language, humanities,
incessantly, perpetually, constantly, partially. humanistic discipline, arts.
ceaselessly, endlessly, unendingly, reticence: (n) reserve, reservation, ANTONYM: (n) classicism.
unceasingly, lastingly; (adj, adv) uncommunicativeness, taciturnity, zenith: (n) apex, peak, top, height,
forever. ANTONYMS: (adv) briefly, silence, reticency, restraint, secrecy, acme, pinnacle, summit, climax,
sporadically. reservedness, muteness, humility. vertex, culmination, prime.
flattering: (adj) ingratiating, ANTONYMS: (n) chattiness, honesty, ANTONYMS: (n) base, bottom,
complimentary, courtly, obsequious, nerve, boldness, openness, arrogance, trough.
Victor Hugo 89
Further on there were two female neighbors at their windows, holding

candles, which the fog caused to sputter.%
"Has your husband told you about the mishap, Mademoiselle la Boudraque?"
"No. What is it, Mademoiselle Turquant?"
"The horse of M. Gilles Godin, the notary at the Châtelet, took fright at the
Flemings and their procession, and overturned Master Philippe Avrillot, lay
monk of the Célestins."
"Really?"
"Actually."
"A bourgeois horse! 'tis rather too much! If it had been a cavalry horse, well
and good!"
And the windows were closed. But Gringoire had lost the thread of his ideas,
nevertheless.
Fortunately, he speedily found it again, and he knotted it together without
difficulty, thanks to the gypsy, thanks to Djali, who still walked in front of him;
two fine, delicate, and charming creatures, whose tiny feet, beautiful forms, and
graceful manners he was engaged in admiring, almost confusing them in his
contemplation; believing them to be both young girls, from their intelligence and
good friendship; regarding them both as goats,-- so far as the lightness, agility,
and dexterity of their walk were concerned.
But the streets were becoming blacker and more deserted every moment.
The curfew had sounded long ago, and it was only at rare intervals now that
they encountered a passer-by in the street, or a light in the windows. Gringoire
had become involved, in his pursuit of the gypsy, in that inextricable labyrinth
of alleys, squares, and closed courts which surround the ancient sepulchre of the
Saints-Innocents, and which resembles a ball of thread tangled by a cat. "Here
are streets which possess but little logic!" said Gringoire, lost in the thousands of
circuits which returned upon themselves incessantly, but where the young girl
pursued a road which seemed familiar to her, without hesitation and with a step
which became ever more rapid. As for him, he would have been utterly ignorant
Thesaurus
agility: (n) quickness, lightness, ineptitude, inability, uselessness, casualty, mischance, misery,
alacrity, adroitness, promptitude, inexperience, ineptness, inaccuracy. calamity, misadventure, disaster, ill,
mobility, legerdemain, liveliness, inextricable: (adj) insoluble, intricate, bad luck, catastrophe.
rapidity, speed, activity. involved, perplexed, inaccessible, notary: (n) clerk, official, lawyer,
ANTONYMS: (n) slowness, entangled, impervious, impassable, scrivener, scribe, recorder, legal
oafishness, inflexibility, heaviness, knotty; (v) inseparable, infrangible. representative, draughtsman, copyist,
awkwardness. knotted: (adj) knotty, gnarled, gnarly, brief, attorney.
dexterity: (n) agility, cleverness, involved, entangled, complicated, passer-by: (n) eyewitness.
ability, aptitude, skill, deftness, tangled, matted, knobbed, fastened; sepulchre: (n) mausoleum, burial,
expertise; (adj, n) art, cunning; (n, v) (adj, v) kinky. ANTONYMS: (adj) monument, repository, crypt,
adroitness, address. ANTONYMS: (n) straight, tidy, relaxed. sepulture, burial chamber, tomb, bier;
clumsiness, awkwardness, mishap: (n) adversity, misfortune, (v) inter, bury.
of his situation had he not espied, in passing, at the turn of a street, the octagonal
mass of the pillory of the fish markets, the open-work summit of which threw its
black, fretted outlines clearly upon a window which was still lighted in the Rue
Verdelet.%
The young girl's attention had been attracted to him for the last few
moments; she had repeatedly turned her head towards him with uneasiness; she
had even once come to a standstill, and taking advantage of a ray of light which
escaped from a half-open bakery to survey him intently, from head to foot, then,
having cast this glance, Gringoire had seen her make that little pout which he
had already noticed, after which she passed on.
This little pout had furnished Gringoire with food for thought. There was
certainly both disdain and mockery in that graceful grimace. So he dropped his
head, began to count the paving-stones, and to follow the young girl at a little
greater distance, when, at the turn of a street, which had caused him to lose sight
of her, he heard her utter a piercing cry.
He hastened his steps.
The street was full of shadows. Nevertheless, a twist of tow soaked in oil,
which burned in a cage at the feet of the Holy Virgin at the street corner,
permitted Gringoire to make out the gypsy struggling in the arms of two men,
who were endeavoring to stifle her cries. The poor little goat, in great alarm,
lowered his horns and bleated.
"Help! gentlemen of the watch!" shouted Gringoire, and advanced bravely.
One of the men who held the young girl turned towards him. It was the
formidable visage of Quasimodo.
Gringoire did not take to flight, but neither did he advance another step.
Quasimodo came up to him, tossed him four paces away on the pavement
with a backward turn of the hand, and plunged rapidly into the gloom, bearing
the young girl folded across one arm like a silken scarf. His companion followed
him, and the poor goat ran after them all, bleating plaintively.
"Murder! murder!" shrieked the unhappy gypsy.
Thesaurus
bakery: (n, v) bakehouse; (n) baker, admire, praise, accept, participate. pathetically, woefully, lamentingly,
bakeshop, patisserie, oven, candy endeavoring: (n) effort; (adj) aspiring. wistfully.
store, confectionery, supermarket, gentlemen: (n) sirs, messieurs. standstill: (n) impasse, deadlock,
grocery, sweet shop. hastened: (adj) careless. cessation, pause, halt, stagnation,
bleating: (n) bleat, baaing. mockery: (n) gibe, jeer, irony, farce, inaction, stay, stop, interruption; (adj,
disdain: (n, v) despise, contemn, charade, derision, parody, mock, n) stand. ANTONYM: (n) progress.
slight, ridicule; (n) contempt, scorn, imitation, burlesque. uneasiness: (n) disquiet, discomfort,
derision, arrogance, haughtiness, ANTONYM: (n) approval. inquietude, anxiety, unease, malaise,
pride; (v) scoff, disparage. octagonal: (adj) octangular. disquietude, apprehension, unrest,
ANTONYMS: (n) humility, plaintively: (adv) piteously, impatience; (n, v) agitation.
admiration, reverence, worship, sorrowfully, mournfully, pitifully, ANTONYMS: (n) peace, calm,
approval, regard; (v) approve, ruefully, grievously, lugubriously, confidence.
Victor Hugo 91
"Halt, rascals, and yield me that wench!" suddenly shouted in a voice of

thunder, a cavalier who appeared suddenly from a neighboring square.%
It was a captain of the king's archers, armed from head to foot, with his
sword in his hand.
He tore the gypsy from the arms of the dazed Quasimodo, threw her across
his saddle, and at the moment when the terrible hunchback, recovering from his
surprise, rushed upon him to regain his prey, fifteen or sixteen archers, who
followed their captain closely, made their appearance, with their two-edged
swords in their fists. It was a squad of the king's police, which was making the
rounds, by order of Messire Robert d'Estouteville, guard of the provostship of
Paris.
Quasimodo was surrounded, seized, garroted; he roared, he foamed at the
mouth, he bit; and had it been broad daylight, there is no doubt that his face
alone, rendered more hideous by wrath, would have put the entire squad to
flight. But by night he was deprived of his most formidable weapon, his
ugliness.
His companion had disappeared during the struggle.
The gypsy gracefully raised herself upright upon the officer's saddle, placed
both hands upon the young man's shoulders, and gazed fixedly at him for
several seconds, as though enchanted with his good looks and with the aid
which he had just rendered her. Then breaking silence first, she said to him,
making her sweet voice still sweeter than usual,
"What is your name, monsieur le gendarme?"
"Captain Phoebus de Châteaupers, at your service, my beauty!" replied the
officer, drawing himself up.
"Thanks," said she.
And while Captain Phoebus was turning up his moustache in Burgundian
fashion, she slipped from the horse, like an arrow falling to earth, and fled.
A flash of lightning would have vanished less quickly.
Thesaurus
cavalier: (adj) overbearing, arrogant, conscious. neatly, delicately, smoothly,
haughty, offhand, supercilious, enchanted: (adj) bewitched, delighted, charmingly, refinedly, lithely, easily,
domineering, bumptious, charmed, fascinated, rapt, daintily, nicely. ANTONYMS: (adv)
adventurous, flippant; (n) escort, spellbound, blissful, happy, awkwardly, ungraciously, clumsily,
equestrian. ANTONYMS: (adj) enamored, possessed; (v) entranced. gracelessly, vigorously, unpleasantly,
humble, conscientious, obliging, ANTONYMS: (adj) disenchanted, unkindly, heavily.
careful, polite, considerate. unhappy. neighboring: (adj, adv) adjacent, near;
dazed: (adj) bewildered, stunned, fixedly: (adv) steadily, steadfastly, (adj) adjoining, nearby, contiguous,
dumbfounded, muzzy, stupefied, regularly, intently, stably, setly, neighbor, abutting, next, neighborly,
dizzy, stupid, groggy, amazed, permanently, rigidly, unwaveringly, nigh, next to. ANTONYMS: (adj)
astounded, bleary. ANTONYMS: surely, resolutely. distant, remote, far, national.
(adj) indifferent, unimpressed, gracefully: (adv) prettily, graciously, sixteen: (n) large integer.
"Nombrill of the Pope!" said the captain, causing Quasimodo's straps to be

drawn tighter, "I should have preferred to keep the wench."%
"What would you have, captain?" said one gendarme. "The warbler has fled,
and the bat remains."
Thesaurus
captain: (n) head, master, leader, carefree. preferred: (adj) favorite, chosen, pet,
guide, commodore, commander, gendarme: (n) mace bearer, huissier, select, favourite, selected, choice,
boss, skipper, chieftain; (v) govern, kavass, lictor, policeman, officer, preferable, singled out, favoured,
manage. ANTONYM: (n) minion. bedel, beefeater, National Guard, golden.
causing: (n) causation, coercion, posse comitatus, reserves. warbler: (n) White-throated blue
compulsion; (adj) causative, factitive; keep: (n, v) hold; (v) preserve, retain, warbler, White-throated warbler,
(prep) behind. defend, guard, maintain, continue, canary, kinglet, songster, gnatcatcher,
drawn: (adj) careworn, worn, drew, have, save, confine, observe. greater whitethroat, lesser
pinched, gaunt, taut, tired, ANTONYMS: (v) lose, neglect, whitethroat, oscine, oscine bird,
cadaverous, thin, tense, withdraw. entrust, return, let, discontinue, quaverer.
ANTONYMS: (adj) rested, robust, reimburse, allow, stop, destroy,
refreshed, hale, fresh, vigorous, break.
Victor Hugo 93
CHAPTER V
RESULT OF THE DANGERS
Gringoire, thoroughly stunned by his fall, remained on the pavement in front

of the Holy Virgin at the street corner. Little by little, he regained his senses; at
first, for several minutes, he was floating in a sort of half-somnolent revery,
which was not without its charm, in which aeriel figures of the gypsy and her
goat were coupled with Quasimodo's heavy fist. This state lasted but a short
time. A decidedly vivid sensation of cold in the part of his body which was in
contact with the pavement, suddenly aroused him and caused his spirit to return
to the surface.%
"Whence comes this chill?" he said abruptly, to himself. He then perceived
that he was lying half in the middle of the gutter.
"That devil of a hunchbacked cyclops!" he muttered between his teeth; and
he tried to rise. But he was too much dazed and bruised; he was forced to
remain where he was. Moreover, his hand was tolerably free; he stopped up his
nose and resigned himself.
"The mud of Paris," he said to himself-- for decidedly he thought that he was
sure that the gutter would prove his refuge for the night; and what can one do in
a refuge, except dream?-- "the mud of Paris is particularly stinking; it must
Thesaurus
aroused: (adj) ablaze, aflame, ANTONYMS: (adv) uncertainly, stinking: (adj) malodorous, putrid,
passionate, hot, agitated, inflamed, equivocally, slightly, vaguely. fetid, foul, smelly, loathsome,
susceptible, tense, fascinated, gutter: (n) groove, trough, ditch, drain, noisome, odorous, disgusting, funky,
emotional, elated. chute, trench, canal, furrow, conduit, lousy. ANTONYMS: (adj) fragrant,
coupled: (adj) conjugate, linked, waterway, gully. clean, fresh.
united, double, joined, associated, hunchbacked: (adj) hunchback, stunned: (adj) dumbfounded,
conjugated, attached, fixed, twin, crookback, humpbacked, gibbous, astonished, astounded, amazed,
paired. ANTONYM: (adj) unrelated. crookbacked, gibbose, kyphotic, flabbergasted, dazed, stupefied,
decidedly: (adv) clearly, positively, unfit. staggered, bewildered, confused; (adj,
definitely, absolutely, emphatically, refuge: (n) sanctuary, asylum, safety, v) astonied. ANTONYMS: (adj)
decisively, resolutely, firmly, retreat, cover, harborage, haven, indifferent, unimpressed.
markedly, surely, determinedly. shelter, harbor; (n, v) recourse, resort.
contain a great deal of volatile and nitric salts. That, moreover, is the opinion of
Master Nicholas Flamel, and of the alchemists"
The word "alchemists" suddenly suggested to his mind the idea of
Archdeacon Claude Frollo. He recalled the violent scene which he had just
witnessed in part; that the gypsy was struggling with two men, that Quasimodo
had a companion; and the morose and haughty face of the archdeacon passed
confusedly through his memory. "That would be strange!" he said to himself.
And on that fact and that basis he began to construct a fantastic edifice of
hypothesis, that card-castle of philosophers; then, suddenly returning once more
to reality, "Come! I'm freezing!" he ejaculated.%
The place was, in fact, becoming less and less tenable. Each molecule of the
gutter bore away a molecule of heat radiating from Gringoire's loins, and the
equilibrium between the temperature of his body and the temperature of the
brook, began to be established in rough fashion.
Quite a different annoyance suddenly assailed him. A group of children,
those little bare-footed savages who have always roamed the pavements of Paris
under the eternal name of gamins, and who, when we were also children
ourselves, threw stones at all of us in the afternoon, when we came out of school,
because our trousers were not torn-- a swarm of these young scamps rushed
towards the square where Gringoire lay, with shouts and laughter which seemed
to pay but little heed to the sleep of the neighbors. They were dragging after
them some sort of hideous sack; and the noise of their wooden shoes alone
would have roused the dead. Gringoire who was not quite dead yet, half raised
himself.
"Ohé, Hennequin Dandéche! Ohè, Jehan Pincebourde!" they shouted in
deafening tones, "old Eustache Moubon, the merchant at the corner, has just
died. We've got his straw pallet, we're going to have a bonfire out of it. It's the
turn of the Flemish to-day!"
And behold, they flung the pallet directly upon Gringoire, beside whom they
had arrived, without espying him. At the same time, one of them took a handful
of straw and set off to light it at the wick of the good Virgin.
Thesaurus
confusedly: (adv) obscurely, pallet: (n) bed, stillage, berth, range, drove, throng, cloud, assembly; (n, v)
disorderedly, perplexedly, cloudily, tester, stretcher, shakedown, scope, mob; (v) teem, pour; (adj) shoal.
dazedly, befuddledly, muddily, reach, bunk, paillasse. ANTONYMS: (v) retreat; (n) few.
bemusedly, dizzily, bewilderedly, radiating: (adj) radiate, shining, tenable: (adj) reasonable, justifiable,
puzzledly. glowing, radious, burning; (adv) maintainable, plausible, invulnerable,
edifice: (n) building, structure, house, radiately. excusable, believable, credible,
hall, fabric, aviary, bagnio, roused: (adj) excited, awake, defendable, sensible. ANTONYMS:
bathhouse, abattoir, bawdyhouse, susceptible, emotional, elated, (adj) unbelievable, untenable.
clubhouse. interested. took: (adj) taken; (v) receive.
loins: (n) waist, body part, haunch, shouts: (n) cries. wick: (n) taper, candlewick, wax light,
lends, pubic region, area, pubes. stones: (n) shingle, grit. cord, candle, sleeve bearing wick,
nitric: (adj) nitrous, azotic acid. swarm: (n) host, horde, multitude, burner.
Victor Hugo 95
"S'death!" growled Gringoire, "am I going to be too warm now?"

It was a critical moment. He was caught between fire and water; he made a
superhuman effort, the effort of a counterfeiter of money who is on the point of
being boiled, and who seeks to escape. He rose to his feet, flung aside the straw
pallet upon the street urchins, and fled.%
"Holy Virgin!" shrieked the children; "'tis the merchant's ghost!"
And they fled in their turn.
The straw mattress remained master of the field. Belleforet, Father Le Juge,
and Corrozet affirm that it was picked up on the morrow, with great pomp, by
the clergy of the quarter, and borne to the treasury of the church of Saint
Opportune, where the sacristan, even as late as 1789, earned a tolerably
handsome revenue out of the great miracle of the Statue of the Virgin at the
corner of the Rue Mauconseil, which had, by its mere presence, on the
memorable night between the sixth and seventh of January, 1482, exorcised the
defunct Eustache Moubon, who, in order to play a trick on the devil, had at his
death maliciously concealed his soul in his straw pallet.
Thesaurus
boiled: (adj) intoxicated, poached, earned: (adj) deserved, realized, due. ostentation, show, ceremony, glory,
stewed; (v) sodden. maliciously: (adv) malevolently, luxury, pageantry, magnificence,
counterfeiter: (n) coiner, forger, malignly, viciously, nastily, state, splendor. ANTONYMS: (n)
cheater, cheat, fabricator, deceiver, malignantly, rancorously, understatement, modesty.
faker, falsifier, trickster, paperhanger, venomously, vindictively, bitterly, sacristan: (n) sexton, beadle, verger,
literary pirate. meanly, virulently. ANTONYMS: almoner, sacrist, Anne sexton,
defunct: (adj) deceased, inanimate, (adv) kindly, harmlessly, caretaker, church officer, Suisse.
late, extinct, departed, lifeless; (n) benevolently, friendly, genially, superhuman: (adj) supernatural,
reliquiae, dust, earth, mortal remains, mercifully. heavenly, preterhuman, superman,
relics. ANTONYMS: (adj) existing, morrow: (n) morning, future, mean epic, daring, godlike, gallant, brave,
thriving, surviving, operating, alive, solar day, day. celestial, incredible. ANTONYM:
current. pomp: (n) grandeur, parade, (adj) normal.
Victor Hugo 97
CHAPTER %VI
THE BROKEN JUG
After having run for some time at the top of his speed, without knowing
whither, knocking his head against many a street corner, leaping many a gutter,
traversing many an alley, many a court, many a square, seeking flight and
passage through all the meanderings of the ancient passages of the Halles,
exploring in his panic terror what the fine Latin of the maps calls tota via,
cheminum et viaria, our poet suddenly halted for lack of breath in the first place,
and in the second, because he had been collared, after a fashion, by a dilemma
which had just occurred to his mind. "It strikes me, Master Pierre Gringoire," he
said to himself, placing his finger to his brow, "that you are running like a
madman. The little scamps are no less afraid of you than you are of them. It
strikes me, I say, that you heard the clatter of their wooden shoes fleeing
southward, while you were fleeing northward. Now, one of two things, either
they have taken flight, and the pallet, which they must have forgotten in their
terror, is precisely that hospitable bed in search of which you have been running
ever since morning, and which madame the Virgin miraculously sends you, in
order to recompense you for having made a morality in her honor, accompanied
by triumphs and mummeries; or the children have not taken flight, and in that
case they have put the brand to the pallet, and that is precisely the good fire
Thesaurus
clatter: (n, v) rattle, jingle, bang, clank, sinister, hostile. northwards, in the north, to the
clang, roll, clink; (v) clash, chatter; (n) madman: (n) bedlamite, maniac, crazy, north.
noise, racket. ANTONYM: (n) quiet. loony, nut, madcap, looney, loco, recompense: (n, v) pay, redress; (n)
fleeing: (v) flee; (adj) runaway, sufferer, raver, nutcase. compensation, amends, atonement,
fugitive, evanescent. miraculously: (adv) astoundingly, payment, consideration,
halted: (adj) motionless, nonmoving, marvelously, strangely, remarkably, indemnification, indemnity; (v)
unmoving. stupendously, supernaturally, compensate, reimburse.
hospitable: (adj) affable, receptive, astonishingly, staggeringly, ANTONYMS: (v) penalize, receive;
gracious, cordial, generous, amiable, wondrously, startlingly, (n) penalty.
convivial, genial, pleasant, warm, to phenomenally. southward: (adv) southwards,
enjoy having guests. ANTONYMS: northward: (adj, adv) north; (adj) southernly; (adj) southbound,
(adj) unwelcoming, inhospitable, northbound; (adv) northerly, southern.
which you need to cheer, dry, and warm you. In either case, good fire or good
bed, that straw pallet is a gift from heaven. The blessed Virgin Marie who stands
at the corner of the Rue Mauconseil, could only have made Eustache Moubon die
for that express purpose; and it is folly on your part to flee thus zigzag, like a
Picard before a Frenchman, leaving behind you what you seek before you; and
you are a fool!"
Then he retraced his steps, and feeling his way and searching, with his nose
to the wind and his ears on the alert, he tried to find the blessed pallet again, but
in vain. There was nothing to be found but intersections of houses, closed courts,
and crossings of streets, in the midst of which he hesitated and doubted
incessantly, being more perplexed and entangled in this medley of streets than
he would have been even in the labyrinth of the Hôtel des Tournelles. At length
he lost patience, and exclaimed solemnly: "Cursed be cross roads! 'tis the devil
who has made them in the shape of his pitchfork!"
This exclamation afforded him a little solace, and a sort of reddish reflection
which he caught sight of at that moment, at the extremity of a long and narrow
lane, completed the elevation of his moral tone. "God be praised!" said he,
"There it is yonder! There is my pallet burning." And comparing himself to the
pilot who suffers shipwreck by night, "Salve," he added piously, "salve, maris
stella!"
Did he address this fragment of litany to the Holy Virgin, or to the pallet?
We are utterly unable to say.%
He had taken but a few steps in the long street, which sloped downwards,
was unpaved, and more and more muddy and steep, when he noticed a very
singular thing. It was not deserted; here and there along its extent crawled
certain vague and formless masses, all directing their course towards the light
which flickered at the end of the street, like those heavy insects which drag along
by night, from blade to blade of grass, towards the shepherd's fire.
Nothing renders one so adventurous as not being able to feel the place where
one's pocket is situated. Gringoire continued to advance, and had soon joined
that one of the forms which dragged along most indolently, behind the others.
Thesaurus
entangled: (adj) complicated, intricate, inertly, shiftlessly. ANTONYMS: saintly, purely, devotionally.
embroiled, complex, foul, confused, (adv) nimbly, vigorously, sloped: (adj) slanting, oblique, sloping,
matted, tangled, inextricable, knotty; dynamically. inclined, aslope, diagonal, aslant,
(v) entangle. perplexed: (adj) confused, puzzled, leaned, leant, colored, biased.
formless: (adj) shapeless, unformed, baffled, confounded, doubtful, solace: (n) consolation, relief, balm,
indistinct, unstructured, unbodied, distracted, disconcerted; (adj, v) solacement; (v) console, allay, relieve,
nebulous, vague, indistinguishable, intricate, complicated, lost, involved. recreate; (n, v) ease, cheer, support.
soft, fuzzy, rude. ANTONYMS: (adj) ANTONYMS: (adj) unperplexed, ANTONYMS: (n) distress, grief.
organized, clear, distinct. assured, clear, knowing. zigzag: (v) wind, meander, twist; (n, v)
indolently: (adv) lazily, sluggishly, piously: (adv) religiously, reverently, bend; (adj) furcated, winding,
slackly, slowly, languidly, torpidly, godly, spiritually, devotedly, meandering, bifurcate; (adj, v)
listlessly, lethargically, carelessly, righteously, sacredly, earnestly, indirect; (n) groin, crane.
Victor Hugo 99
On drawing near, he perceived that it was nothing else than a wretched legless
cripple in a bowl, who was hopping along on his two hands like a wounded
field-spider which has but two legs left. At the moment when he passed close to
this species of spider with a human countenance, it raised towards him a
lamentable voice: "La buona mancia, signor! la buona mancia!"
"Deuce take you," said Gringoire, "and me with you, if I know what you
mean!"
And he passed on.%
He overtook another of these itinerant masses, and examined it. It was an
impotent man, both halt and crippled, and halt and crippled to such a degree
that the complicated system of crutches and wooden legs which sustained him,
gave him the air of a mason's scaffolding on the march. Gringoire, who liked
noble and classical comparisons, compared him in thought to the living tripod of
Vulcan.
This living tripod saluted him as he passed, but stopping his hat on a level
with Gringoire's chin, like a shaving dish, while he shouted in the latter's ears:
"Senor cabellero, para comprar un pedaso de pan!"
"It appears," said Gringoire, "that this one can also talk; but 'tis a rude
language, and he is more fortunate than I if he understands it." Then, smiting his
brow, in a sudden transition of ideas: "By the way, what the deuce did they mean
this morning with their Esmeralda?"
He was minded to augment his pace, but for the third time something barred
his way. This something or, rather, some one was a blind man, a little blind
fellow with a bearded, Jewish face, who, rowing away in the space about him
with a stick, and towed by a large dog, droned through his nose with a
Hungarian accent: "Facitote caritatem!"
"Well, now," said Gringoire, "here's one at last who speaks a Christian
tongue. I must have a very charitable aspect, since they ask alms of me in the
present lean condition of my purse. My friend," and he turned towards the blind
Thesaurus
augment: (v) amplify, add, enhance, strengthen, invigorate, help, fortify, ambulatory. ANTONYMS: (adj, n)
enlarge, aggrandize, reinforce, boost, enable, aid. resident; (adj) sedentary, settled,
expand, improve, intensify; (n, v) hopping: (n) jump, jumping, leaping; fixed.
accrue. ANTONYMS: (v) reduce, (adv) leapingly. overtook: (v) overtake.
decrease, attenuate, degrade, drop, impotent: (adj) helpless, feeble, frail, shaving: (adj, n) paring, sliver, shiver;
diminish, undermine, minimize, fragile, inadequate, weak, barren, (n, v) shave; (n) cut, splinter, rasher,
lower. slack, ineffective, incapable, unable. grazing, slice; (adj) clipping, driblet.
cripple: (adj, v) maim, prostrate; (v) ANTONYMS: (adj) able, powerful. signor: (n) signior, man, sir, adult
mutilate, enfeeble, injure, itinerant: (n) traveler, wanderer, male, senor, mynheer.
incapacitate, weaken, becripple; (n, v) nomad, vagrant; (adj, n) migrant, tripod: (n) triplopia, triangle, trionym,
damage; (n) invalid; (adj) paralyze. vagabond; (adj) errant, traveling, easel, trident, triennium, trigon,
ANTONYMS: (v) support, journeying, migratory; (adj, v) trisula, triskelion, triseme, trireme.
man, "I sold my last shirt last week; that is to say, since you understand only the
language of Cicero: Vendidi hebdomade nuper transita meam ultimam chemisan."
That said, he turned his back upon the blind man, and pursued his way. But
the blind man began to increase his stride at the same time; and, behold! the
cripple and the legless man, in his bowl, came up on their side in great haste, and
with great clamor of bowl and crutches, upon the pavement. Then all three,
jostling each other at poor Gringoire's heels, began to sing their song to him,
"Caritatem!" chanted the blind man.%
"La buona mancia!" chanted the cripple in the bowl.
And the lame man took up the musical phrase by repeating: "Un pedaso de
pan!"
Gringoire stopped up his ears. "Oh, tower of Babel!" he exclaimed.
He set out to run. The blind man ran! The lame man ran! The cripple in the
bowl ran!
And then, in proportion as he plunged deeper into the street, cripples in
bowls, blind men and lame men, swarmed about him, and men with one arm,
and with one eye, and the leprous with their sores, some emerging from little
streets adjacent, some from the air-holes of cellars, howling, bellowing, yelping,
all limping and halting, all flinging themselves towards the light, and humped
up in the mire, like snails after a shower.
Gringoire, still followed by his three persecutors, and not knowing very well
what was to become of him, marched along in terror among them, turning out
for the lame, stepping over the cripples in bowls, with his feet imbedded in that
ant-hill of lame men, like the English captain who got caught in the quicksand of
a swarm of crabs.
The idea occurred to him of making an effort to retrace his steps. But it was
too late. This whole legion had closed in behind him, and his three beggars held
him fast. So he proceeded, impelled both by this irresistible flood, by fear, and
by a vertigo which converted all this into a sort of horrible dream.
Thesaurus
bellowing: (n) roaring, roar, bellows, kyphotic, unfit. corrupting.
hollo, holloa, rout, yowl, boation, imbedded: (v) embosomed, rooted, mire: (n, v) bog, muck; (n) filth, marsh,
mugiency, hollering; (adj) mugient. mewed up, in the bosom of, posited, quagmire, dirt, sludge, clay; (adj, n, v)
cellars: (n) cellar. situate; (adj) encysted. mud; (v) involve, bog down.
halting: (adj) halt, hesitant, broken, impelled: (adj) prompted, provoked, quicksand: (n) trap, bog, running
crude, grotesque, barbarous; (adj, v) determined, compulsive, encouraged, sand, SIRT, syrt, Syrtis, pit, pitfall,
lame, crippled; (adv) haltingly; (v) goaded, motivated, bound. cavity, mire.
drooping, flagging. ANTONYMS: jostling: (v) jarring; (adj) bustling; (n) vertigo: (n) giddiness,
(adj) easy, firm. elbowing. lightheadedness, swimming,
humped: (adj) gibbous, hunchbacked, leprous: (n) leper; (v) morbid, mangy, symptom, wooziness, daze, dizzy,
gibbose, crookback, crookbacked, poisoned, tabid, tainted, vitiated; dizzy round, dizzy spell, faint,
humpy, bent, curved, hunchback, (adj) lazarly, itchy, infectious, faintness.
Victor Hugo 101
At last he reached the end of the street. It opened upon an immense place,
where a thousand scattered lights flickered in the confused mists of night.
Gringoire flew thither, hoping to escape, by the swiftness of his legs, from the
three infirm spectres who had clutched him.%
"Onde vas, hombre?" (Where are you going, my man?) cried the cripple,
flinging away his crutches, and running after him with the best legs that ever
traced a geometrical step upon the pavements of Paris.
In the meantime the legless man, erect upon his feet, crowned Gringoire with
his heavy iron bowl, and the blind man glared in his face with flaming eyes!
"Where am I?" said the terrified poet.
"In the Court of Miracles," replied a fourth spectre, who had accosted them.
"Upon my soul," resumed Gringoire, "I certainly do behold the blind who see,
and the lame who walk, but where is the Saviour?"
They replied by a burst of sinister laughter.
The poor poet cast his eyes about him. It was, in truth, that redoubtable Cour
des Miracles, whither an honest man had never penetrated at such an hour; the
magic circle where the officers of the Châtelet and the sergeants of the
provostship, who ventured thither, disappeared in morsels; a city of thieves, a
hideous wart on the face of Paris; a sewer, from which escaped every morning,
and whither returned every night to crouch, that stream of vices, of mendicancy
and vagabondage which always overflows in the streets of capitals; a monstrous
hive, to which returned at nightfall, with their booty, all the drones of the social
order; a lying hospital where the bohemian, the disfrocked monk, the ruined
scholar, the ne'er-do-wells of all nations, Spaniards, Italians, Germans,-- of all
religions, Jews, Christians, Mahometans, idolaters, covered with painted sores,
beggars by day, were transformed by night into brigands; an immense dressing-
room, in a word, where, at that epoch, the actors of that eternal comedy, which
theft, prostitution, and murder play upon the pavements of Paris, dressed and
undressed.
Thesaurus
bohemian: (n) Gypsy, Romany, impotent, fragile, decrepit, ill, thither: (adv) hither, whither, on that
palmer, hadji, pilgrim, delicate, shaky. ANTONYMS: (adj) point, in that respect, at that place, in
unconventional, vagabond, maverick, whole, well, hearty. that location; (adj) further, ulterior,
nomad; (adj, n) nonconformist; (adj) mendicancy: (n) beggary, begging, remoter, succeeding, more distant.
raffish. mendicity, indigence, penury, undressed: (adj) naked, unclad,
booty: (n) plunder, prize, loot, pillage, solicitation, beggarly appearance, unclothed, bare, raw, stripped,
stolen goods, spoil, spoils, swag, mendication, extreme poverty. unattired, unappareled, crude, rough,
haul, prey, trophy. swiftness: (n) speed, haste, rapidity, disrobed. ANTONYMS: (adj)
clutched: (adj) tense, worried, anxious, celerity, acceleration, quickness, covered, decent.
neurotic. promptness, pace, velocity, agility, vagabondage: (n) roving, vagrancy,
infirm: (adj, n, v) feeble; (adj, v) faint, dispatch. ANTONYM: (n) wandering, vagabondry, journey,
weak, sickly, debilitated; (adj) clumsiness. peregrination.
It was a vast place, irregular and badly paved, like all the squares of Paris at
that date. Fires, around which swarmed strange groups, blazed here and there.
Every one was going, coming, and shouting. Shrill laughter was to be heard, the
wailing of children, the voices of women. The hands and heads of this throng,
black against the luminous background, outlined against it a thousand eccentric
gestures. At times, upon the ground, where trembled the light of the fires,
mingled with large, indefinite shadows, one could behold a dog passing, which
resembled a man, a man who resembled a dog. The limits of races and species
seemed effaced in this city, as in a pandemonium. Men, women, beasts, age, sex,
health, maladies, all seemed to be in common among these people; all went
together, they mingled, confounded, superposed; each one there participated in
all.%
The poor and flickering flames of the fire permitted Gringoire to distinguish,
amid his trouble, all around the immense place, a hideous frame of ancient
houses, whose wormeaten, shrivelled, stunted façades, each pierced with one or
two lighted attic windows, seemed to him, in the darkness, like enormous heads
of old women, ranged in a circle, monstrous and crabbed, winking as they
looked on at the Witches' Sabbath.
It was like a new world, unknown, unheard of, misshapen, creeping,
swarming, fantastic.
Gringoire, more and more terrified, clutched by the three beggars as by three
pairs of tongs, dazed by a throng of other faces which frothed and yelped around
him, unhappy Gringoire endeavored to summon his presence of mind, in order
to recall whether it was a Saturday. But his efforts were vain; the thread of his
memory and of his thought was broken; and, doubting everything, wavering
between what he saw and what he felt, he put to himself this unanswerable
question,
"If I exist, does this exist? if this exists, do I exist?"
At that moment, a distinct cry arose in the buzzing throng which surrounded
him, "Let's take him to the king! let's take him to the king!"
"Holy Virgin!" murmured Gringoire, "the king here must be a ram."
Thesaurus
misshapen: (adj) deformed, shrivelled: (adj) shriveled, withered, tongs: (n) forceps, pincers, pliers,
malformed, shapeless, crooked, ugly, wizened, shrunken, sere, sear, thin, nippers, poker, lifter, pair of tongs,
contorted, monstrous, unshapely, lean, dry, shrunk, dryer. trivet, vice, ice tongs; (v) clutches.
grotesque, deformity, perverted. stunted: (adj) scrubby, little, scrawny, unanswerable: (adj) irrefutable, final,
ANTONYMS: (adj) straight, diminutive, puny, short, spare, weak, incontestable, irresponsible,
attractive. underdeveloped, dwarfish; (v) incontrovertible, indisputable,
pandemonium: (n) chaos, confusion, strangulated. ANTONYM: (adj) tall. decisive, ultimate, undeniable, not
hubbub, disorder, commotion, racket, swarming: (adj) full, crowded, alive, refragable; (v) probative.
turmoil, noise, mayhem, clamor, packed, populous, sensitive, thick; (v) winking: (n) twinkling, wink, blink,
hullabaloo. ANTONYMS: (n) order, dense, crowded to suffocation, New York minute, jiffy, instant,
peace, calm. serried, closely packed. nictation, nictitation, trice, blink of an
paved: (adj) cobbled. ANTONYMS: (adj) clear, deserted. eye; (adj) pink ribbons.
Victor Hugo 103
"To the king! to the king!" repeated all voices.%

They dragged him off. Each vied with the other in laying his claws upon
him. But the three beggars did not loose their hold and tore him from the rest,
howling, "He belongs to us!"
The poet's already sickly doublet yielded its last sigh in this struggle.
While traversing the horrible place, his vertigo vanished. After taking a few
steps, the sentiment of reality returned to him. He began to become accustomed
to the atmosphere of the place. At the first moment there had arisen from his
poet's head, or, simply and prosaically, from his empty stomach, a mist, a vapor,
so to speak, which, spreading between objects and himself, permitted him to
catch a glimpse of them only in the incoherent fog of nightmare,-- in those
shadows of dreams which distort every outline, agglomerating objects into
unwieldy groups, dilating things into chimeras, and men into phantoms. Little
by little, this hallucination was succeeded by a less bewildered and exaggerating
view. Reality made its way to the light around him, struck his eyes, struck his
feet, and demolished, bit by bit, all that frightful poetry with which he had, at
first, believed himself to be surrounded. He was forced to perceive that he was
not walking in the Styx, but in mud, that he was elbowed not by demons, but by
thieves; that it was not his soul which was in question, but his life (since he
lacked that precious conciliator, which places itself so effectually between the
bandit and the honest man-- a purse). In short, on examining the orgy more
closely, and with more coolness, he fell from the witches' sabbath to the dram-
shop.
The Cour des Miracles was, in fact, merely a dram-shop; but a brigand's
dram-shop, reddened quite as much with blood as with wine.
The spectacle which presented itself to his eyes, when his ragged escort
finally deposited him at the end of his trip, was not fitted to bear him back to
poetry, even to the poetry of hell. It was more than ever the prosaic and brutal
reality of the tavern. Were we not in the fifteenth century, we would say that
Gringoire had descended from Michael Angelo to Callot.
Thesaurus
bandit: (n) outlaw, robber, gangster, panic, approachability, mustiness, prosaically: (adv) tritely, prosily,
enemy, thief, scoundrel, rascal, turbulence, agitation. humdrumly, commonly, trivially,
mosstrooper, freebooter, bushranger, effectually: (adv) efficaciously, dully, pedestrianly, ordinarily,
burglar. effectively, validly, adequately, boringly, commonplacely,
conciliator: (n) mediator, arbitrator, potently, tellingly, strongly, unimaginatively.
moderator, intermediary, negotiator, decisively; (adj) nicely, fully, head reddened: (adj) red, ablaze, aflame,
pacifier, referee, appeaser, judge, and shoulders. ANTONYM: (adv) flushed, crimson, inflamed, blazing,
intermediator, arbiter. ineffectually. aroused, blemished, red as scarlet,
coolness: (n) chill, cool, composure, hallucination: (n) illusion, dream, spotty.
assurance, cold, calmness, alienation, apparition, vision, fantasy, phantom, vapor: (n) fog, cloud, steam, haze,
frigidity, equanimity, chilliness, delirium, aberration, optical illusion, evaporation, vapour, fume; (adj, n)
poise. ANTONYMS: (n) friendliness, mirage, nightmare. gas, air; (adj, v) bluster; (v) boast.
Around a great fire which burned on a large, circular flagstone, the flames of
which had heated red-hot the legs of a tripod, which was empty for the moment,
some wormeaten tables were placed, here and there, haphazard, no lackey of a
geometrical turn having deigned to adjust their parallelism, or to see to it that
they did not make too unusual angles. Upon these tables gleamed several
dripping pots of wine and beer, and round these pots were grouped many
bacchic visages, purple with the fire and the wine. There was a man with a huge
belly and a jovial face, noisily kissing a woman of the town, thickset and
brawny. There was a sort of sham soldier, a "naquois," as the slang expression
runs, who was whistling as he undid the bandages from his fictitious wound,
and removing the numbness from his sound and vigorous knee, which had been
swathed since morning in a thousand ligatures. On the other hand, there was a
wretched fellow, preparing with celandine and beef's blood, his "leg of God," for
the next day. Two tables further on, a palmer, with his pilgrim's costume
complete, was practising the lament of the Holy Queen, not forgetting the drone
and the nasal drawl. Further on, a young scamp was taking a lesson in epilepsy
from an old pretender, who was instructing him in the art of foaming at the
mouth, by chewing a morsel of soap. Beside him, a man with the dropsy was
getting rid of his swelling, and making four or five female thieves, who were
disputing at the same table, over a child who had been stolen that evening, hold
their noses. All circumstances which, two centuries later, "seemed so ridiculous
to the court," as Sauval says, "that they served as a pastime to the king, and as an
introduction to the royal ballet of Night, divided into four parts and danced on
the theatre of the Petit-Bourbon." "Never," adds an eye witness of 1653, "have the
sudden metamorphoses of the Court of Miracles been more happily presented.
Benserade prepared us for it by some very gallant verses."%
Loud laughter everywhere, and obscene songs. Each one held his own
course, carping and swearing, without listening to his neighbor. Pots clinked,
and quarrels sprang up at the shock of the pots, and the broken pots made rents
in the rags.
Thesaurus
brawny: (adj, n) hefty, burly; (adj) blood flower, greater celandine, effervescing, bubbly, bubbling,
strong, athletic, sturdy, strapping, orange balsam, action plant, swallow sparkling, spumy; (adj, n) frothing;
beefy, powerful, robust, stalwart, wort, jewelweed. (n) surging, effervescence, scum.
mighty. ANTONYMS: (adj) skinny, disputing: (adj) opposed; (v) lackey: (n) flunkey, sycophant, butler,
puny, weak, frail, powerless, delicate, disputant. attendant, bootlicker, toady, truckler,
feeble. dropsy: (n) oedema, hydrops, edema, waiter, servant, footman, flatterer.
carping: (adj, v) captious, critical, chemosis, tumefaction, puffiness, removing: (adj) departing.
censorious; (adj) hypercritical, picky, intumescence, tumor, lump, swelling, thickset: (adj) thick, squat, heavyset,
irritable, querulous; (n) faultfinding, circulatory failure. dumpy, chunky, fat, stumpy, squab,
criticism, cavil, censoriousness. flagstone: (n) slab, paving stone, dense; (adj, n) burly; (adj, v) compact.
celandine: (n) Chelidonium majus, ensign; (adj) asphalt, wood pavement. ANTONYMS: (adj) slight, slender,
Impatiens capensis, herb, poppy, foaming: (adj) foamy, effervescent, slim.
Victor Hugo 105
A big dog, seated on his tail, gazed at the fire. Some children were mingled
in this orgy. The stolen child wept and cried. Another, a big boy four years of
age, seated with legs dangling, upon a bench that was too high for him, before a
table that reached to his chin, and uttering not a word. A third, gravely
spreading out upon the table with his finger, the melted tallow which dripped
from a candle. Last of all, a little fellow crouching in the mud, almost lost in a
cauldron, which he was scraping with a tile, and from which he was evoking a
sound that would have made Stradivarius swoon.%
Near the fire was a hogshead, and on the hogshead a beggar. This was the
king on his throne.
The three who had Gringoire in their clutches led him in front of this
hogshead, and the entire bacchanal rout fell silent for a moment, with the
exception of the cauldron inhabited by the child.
Gringoire dared neither breathe nor raise his eyes.
"Hombre, quita tu sombrero!" said one of the three knaves, in whose grasp he
was, and, before he had comprehended the meaning, the other had snatched his
hat-- a wretched headgear, it is true, but still good on a sunny day or when there
was but little rain. Gringoire sighed.
Meanwhile the king addressed him, from the summit of his cask,
"Who is this rogue?"
Gringoire shuddered. That voice, although accentuated by menace, recalled
to him another voice, which, that very morning, had dealt the deathblow to his
mystery, by drawling, nasally, in the midst of the audience, "Charity, please!" He
raised his head. It was indeed Clopin Trouillefou.
Clopin Trouillefou, arrayed in his royal insignia, wore neither one rag more
nor one rag less. The sore upon his arm had already disappeared. He held in his
hand one of those whips made of thongs of white leather, which police sergeants
then used to repress the crowd, and which were called boullayes. On his head he
wore a sort of headgear, bound round and closed at the top. But it was difficult
Thesaurus
arrayed: (adj) armored, panoplied, apprehended. hombre: (n) guy, bloke, Dick, chap,
clothed, clad, armed; (v) habited, crouching: (adj) sneaking, huddled, bozo, cuss, gink, creature, bugger,
accustomed. obsequious, squat, hunkered, man, sod.
cask: (n) bucket, butt, tun, tub, drum, cowering, hunkered down; (v) repress: (v) inhibit, crush, quash,
vat, hogshead, keg, coffin, submissive, resigned. control, suppress, put down, bridle,
containerful, vessel. deathblow: (v) finishing stroke; (n) keep down, subdue, restrain, reduce.
cauldron: (n) caldron, copper, kettle, quietus, blow of mercy, sudden ANTONYMS: (v) declare, liberate,
pot, container. death. incite.
clutches: (n) clasp, grip, grasp, hold, headgear: (n) halter, bridle, hood, tallow: (n) grease, lard, oil, suet,
clench, seizing, custody, talons; (v) hackamore, hoist, hat, cap, chapeau, cream, butter, cicatrix, beef tallow,
vice, tongs, pliers. helmet, lid, miter. dubbin, animal oil, scar.
comprehended: (adj) understood, hogshead: (n) cask, barrel, vat.
to make out whether it was a child's cap or a king's crown, the two things bore so
strong a resemblance to each other.%
Meanwhile Gringoire, without knowing why, had regained some hope, on
recognizing in the King of the Cour des Miracles his accursed mendicant of the
Grand Hall.
"Master," stammered he; "monseigneur--sire--how ought I to address you?"
he said at length, having reached the culminating point of his crescendo, and
knowing neither how to mount higher, nor to descend again.
"Monseigneur, his majesty, or comrade, call me what you please. But make
haste. What have you to say in your own defence?"
"In your own defence?" thought Gringoire, "that displeases me." He
resumed, stuttering, "I am he, who this morning"
"By the devil's claws!" interrupted Clopin, "your name, knave, and nothing
more. Listen. You are in the presence of three powerful sovereigns: myself,
Clopin Trouillefou, King of Thunes, successor to the Grand Coësre, supreme
suzerain of the Realm of Argot; Mathias Hunyadi Spicali, Duke of Egypt and of
Bohemia, the old yellow fellow whom you see yonder, with a dish clout round
his head; Guillaume Rousseau, Emperor of Galilee, that fat fellow who is not
listening to us but caressing a wench. We are your judges. You have entered the
Kingdom of Argot, without being an argotier; you have violated the privileges of
our city. You must be punished unless you are a capon, a franc-mitou or a rifodé;
that is to say, in the slang of honest folks,-- a thief, a beggar, or a vagabond. Are
you anything of that sort? Justify yourself; announce your titles."
"Alas!" said Gringoire, "I have not that honor. I am the author"
"That is sufficient," resumed Trouillefou, without permitting him to finish.
"You are going to be hanged. 'Tis a very simple matter, gentlemen and honest
bourgeois! as you treat our people in your abode, so we treat you in ours! The
law which you apply to vagabonds, vagabonds apply to you. 'Tis your fault if it
is harsh. One really must behold the grimace of an honest man above the
hempen collar now and then; that renders the thing honorable. Come, friend,
Thesaurus
abode: (n) dwelling, house, residence, (n) authority, control. sovereigns: (n) crowned heads, royals,
place, domicile, lodge, abidance, crescendo: (n) swell, intensity, royalty.
mansion, lodging, address, seat. volume, loudness, culmination, stuttering: (n) hesitation, psellism;
capon: (n) chicken, volaille, stot, apogee; (adv) diminuendo, (adj) incoherent, halting, ashamed.
poulet, steer, gelding, ox, rooster, rallentando, staccato, legato; (adj) vagabond: (n, v) tramp; (adj, n)
fowl, hen, pullet. increasing. vagrant; (v) roam, stray, wander,
caressing: (adj) caressive, soft; (n) hempen: (adj) Hempen collar, tough, range, ramble; (n) outcast, bum,
petting, foreplay, stimulation, cannabine. wanderer, nomad. ANTONYMS: (n)
dalliance, smooching, snuggling, slang: (n) lingo, cant, vernacular, inhabitant, resident; (adj) settled.
arousal, hugging, cuddling. argot, dialect, patois, language; (v) wench: (n) miss, damsel, strumpet,
clout: (n, v) cuff, punch, slap, swipe, put one over, put one across, put on, trollop, Trull, missy, quean, slut,
knock, smack, whack, strike, crack; dupe. nymph, dame; (n, v) drab.
Victor Hugo 107
divide your rags gayly among these damsels. I am going to have you hanged to
amuse the vagabonds, and you are to give them your purse to drink your health.
If you have any mummery to go through with, there's a very good God the
Father in that mortar yonder, in stone, which we stole from Saint-Pierre aux
Boeufs. You have four minutes in which to fling your soul at his head."
The harangue was formidable.%
"Well said, upon my soul! Clopin Trouillefou preaches like the Holy Father
the Pope!" exclaimed the Emperor of Galilee, smashing his pot in order to prop
up his table.
"Messeigneurs, emperors, and kings," said Gringoire coolly (for I know not
how, firmness had returned to him, and he spoke with resolution), "don't think
of such a thing; my name is Pierre Gringoire. I am the poet whose morality was
presented this morning in the grand hall of the Courts."
"Ah! so it was you, master!" said Clopin. "I was there, xête Dieu! Well!
comrade, is that any reason, because you bored us to death this morning, that
you should not be hung this evening?"
"I shall find difficulty in getting out of it," said Gringoire to himself.
Nevertheless, he made one more effort: "I don't see why poets are not classed
with vagabonds," said he. "Vagabond, Aesopus certainly was; Homerus was a
beggar; Mercurius was a thief"
Clopin interrupted him: "I believe that you are trying to blarney us with your
jargon. Zounds! let yourself be hung, and don't kick up such a row over it!"
"Pardon me, monseigneur, the King of Thunes," replied Gringoire, disputing
the ground foot by foot. "It is worth trouble--One moment!-- Listen to me-- You
are not going to condemn me without having heard me"
His unlucky voice was, in fact, drowned in the uproar which rose around
him. The little boy scraped away at his cauldron with more spirit than ever; and,
to crown all, an old woman had just placed on the tripod a frying-pan of grease,
which hissed away on the fire with a noise similar to the cry of a troop of
children in pursuit of a masker.
Thesaurus
amuse: (v) please, beguile, absorb, consistency, obstinacy, steadfastness, bribe, butter, ointment, soil, stain; (v)
entertain, enjoy, disport, distract, resolve, confidence, courage, boodle, anoint, graft, lubricate.
delight, occupy, recreate, rejoice. backbone. ANTONYMS: (n) softness, heard: (n) hearing.
ANTONYMS: (v) bore, dull, tire, instability, vacillation, unsteadiness, masker: (n) disguiser, mummer,
annoy, anger, cloy, depress, weary, yielding, irresoluteness, droopiness, Buffon, masquerader, guiser.
disappoint. indefiniteness, indecisiveness, mummery: (adj) tomfoolery, vagary;
blarney: (v) wheedle, coax, flatter, indecision, leniency. (n) flummery, pleasantry, nonsense,
cajole, palaver, inveigle, persuade; (n) fling: (n, v) toss, throw, pitch, slam, nonsensicality, masque, false colors,
flattery, adulation, coaxing, sweet hurl; (v) chuck, shoot, dash, rush, sport, joke, escapade.
talk. discard; (n) crack. ANTONYM: (v) scraped: (adj) scratched, worn out,
firmness: (adj, n) constancy; (n) collect. worn, threadbare, frayed, hurt,
determination, resolution, assurance, grease: (n, v) oil, lubricating oil; (n) skinned, damaged, raw.
In the meantime, Clopin Trouillefou appeared to hold a momentary

conference with the Duke of Egypt, and the Emperor of Galilee, who was
completely drunk. Then he shouted shrilly: "Silence!" and, as the cauldron and
the frying-pan did not heed him, and continued their duet, he jumped down
from his hogshead, gave a kick to the boiler, which rolled ten paces away bearing
the child with it, a kick to the frying-pan, which upset in the fire with all its
grease, and gravely remounted his throne, without troubling himself about the
stifled tears of the child, or the grumbling of the old woman, whose supper was
wasting away in a fine white flame.%
Trouillefou made a sign, and the duke, the emperor, and the passed masters
of pickpockets, and the isolated robbers, came and ranged themselves around
him in a horseshoe, of which Gringoire, still roughly held by the body, formed
the centre. It was a semicircle of rags, tatters, tinsel, pitchforks, axes, legs
staggering with intoxication, huge, bare arms, faces sordid, dull, and stupid. In
the midst of this Round Table of beggary, Clopin Trouillefou,-- as the doge of
this senate, as the king of this peerage, as the pope of this conclave,-- dominated;
first by virtue of the height of his hogshead, and next by virtue of an
indescribable, haughty, fierce, and formidable air, which caused his eyes to flash,
and corrected in his savage profile the bestial type of the race of vagabonds. One
would have pronounced him a boar amid a herd of swine.
"Listen," said he to Gringoire, fondling his misshapen chin with his horny
hand; "I don't see why you should not be hung. It is true that it appears to be
repugnant to you; and it is very natural, for you bourgeois are not accustomed to
it. You form for yourselves a great idea of the thing. After all, we don't wish you
any harm. Here is a means of extricating yourself from your predicament for the
moment. Will you become one of us?"
The reader can judge of the effect which this proposition produced upon
Gringoire, who beheld life slipping away from him, and who was beginning to
lose his hold upon it. He clutched at it again with energy.
"Certainly I will, and right heartily," said he.
Thesaurus
beggary: (n) poverty, want, begging, cuddling, dalliance, foreplay, repugnant: (adj) abominable,
penury, pauperism, need, indigence, stimulation, indulgence, darling, abhorrent, odious, hateful,
solicitation, misery, squalor, kissing, necking. loathsome, ugly, adverse, obscene,
destitution. horny: (adj) corneous, hornlike, hard, offensive; (adj, v) repulsive; (adj, n)
bestial: (adj) animal, brutish, brute, hot, excited, ruttish, randy, lecherous, contradictory. ANTONYMS: (adj)
atrocious, savage, brutal, inhuman, lascivious, aroused, cornuted. attractive, agreeable, desirable,
cruel, grim, depraved; (adj, adv) intoxication: (n) inebriation, inebriety, lovable, nice, delightful.
beastly. ANTONYM: (adj) refined. poisoning, tipsiness, fascination, shrilly: (adv) sharply, acutely,
doge: (n) archduke, elector, judge, grogginess, ecstasy, daze, excitement, penetratingly, stridently, noisily,
jurist, justice, magistrate, chicanery, euphoria, wine. harshly, raucously, keenly, loudly,
prime minister. peerage: (n) aristocracy, baronage, discordantly, shrewdly. ANTONYM:
fondling: (n) caressing, pet, caress, nobility, peerdom, gentry, noblesse. (adv) softly.
Victor Hugo 109
"Do you consent," resumed Clopin, "to enroll yourself among the people of
the knife?"
"Of the knife, precisely," responded Gringoire.%
"You recognize yourself as a member of the free bourgeoisie?" added the
King of Thunes.
"Of the free bourgeoisie."
"Subject of the Kingdom of Argot?"
"Of the Kingdom of Argot."
"A vagabond?"
"A vagabond."
"In your soul?"
"In my soul."
"I must call your attention to the fact," continued the king, "that you will be
hung all the same."
"The devil!" said the poet.
"Only," continued Clopin imperturbably, "you will be hung later on, with
more ceremony, at the expense of the good city of Paris, on a handsome stone
gibbet, and by honest men. That is a consolation."
"Just so," responded Gringoire.
"There are other advantages. In your quality of a high-toned sharper, you
will not have to pay the taxes on mud, or the poor, or lanterns, to which the
bourgeois of Paris are subject."
"So be it," said the poet. "I agree. I am a vagabond, a thief, a sharper, a man
of the knife, anything you please; and I am all that already, monsieur, King of
Thunes, for I am a philosopher; et omnia in philosophia, omnes in philosopho
continentur,-- all things are contained in philosophy, all men in the philosopher,
as you know."
The King of Thunes scowled.
Thesaurus
bourgeois: (adj) conservative; (n) record, join, matriculate, recruit, list, imperturbably: (adv) dispassionately,
capitalist, burgher, snooks, insert, inscribe. ANTONYMS: (v) unflappably, serenely, indifferently,
accountant, bourgeoisie, epicier, omit, withdraw, pass, neglect, impassively, emotionlessly, coolly,
cockney, burgess, capitals, caps. disregard, discard, reject, leave. casually.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unconventional, handsome: (adj) fair, beautiful, fine, sharper: (n, v) cheat; (n) rogue,
untraditional, bohemian. generous, charming, comely, impostor, swindler, chiseler,
ceremony: (n) courtesy, celebration, attractive, bountiful, considerable, deceiver, cheater, welsher, sharpie;
ceremonial, parade, pomp, rite, bonny, prepossessing. ANTONYMS: (v) shark, fraud.
ceremonies, manners, custom, ritual, (adj) ugly, unattractive, meager, thief: (n) burglar, bandit, pirate,
pageant. ANTONYMS: (n) modesty, ungenerous, measly, plain. plunderer, filcher, stealer,
understatement. hung: (n) hanging; (v) Heng; (adj) pickpocket, pilferer, crook, brigand,
enroll: (v) enlist, enter, draft, enrol, fatigued, puzzled, decorated. despoiler.
"What do you take me for, my friend? What Hungarian Jew patter are you
jabbering at us? I don't know Hebrew. One isn't a Jew because one is a bandit. I
don't even steal any longer. I'm above that; I kill. Cut-throat, yes; cutpurse, no."
Gringoire tried to slip in some excuse between these curt words, which wrath
rendered more and more jerky.%
"I ask your pardon, monseigneur. It is not Hebrew; 'tis Latin."
"I tell you," resumed Clopin angrily, "that I'm not a Jew, and that I'll have you
hung, belly of the synagogue, like that little shopkeeper of Judea, who is by your
side, and whom I entertain strong hopes of seeing nailed to a counter one of
these days, like the counterfeit coin that he is!"
So saying, he pointed his finger at the little, bearded Hungarian Jew who had
accosted Gringoire with his facitote caritatem, and who, understanding no other
language beheld with surprise the King of Thunes's ill-humor overflow upon
him.
At length Monsieur Clopin calmed down.
"So you will be a vagabond, you knave?" he said to our poet.
"Of course," replied the poet.
"Willing is not all," said the surly Clopin; "good will doesn't put one onion the
more into the soup, and 'tis good for nothing except to go to Paradise with; now,
Paradise and the thieves' band are two different things. In order to be received
among the thieves, you must prove that you are good for something, and for that
purpose, you must search the manikin."
"I'll search anything you like," said Gringoire.
Clopin made a sign. Several thieves detached themselves from the circle, and
returned a moment later. They brought two thick posts, terminated at their
lower extremities in spreading timber supports, which made them stand readily
upon the ground; to the upper extremity of the two posts they fitted a cross-
beam, and the whole constituted a very pretty portable gibbet, which Gringoire
had the satisfaction of beholding rise before him, in a twinkling. Nothing was
lacking, not even the rope, which swung gracefully over the cross-beam.
Thesaurus
bearded: (adj) barbate, awny, ANTONYMS: (adj) genuine, real, immobile.
whiskered, hairy, aristate, coniform, authentic, true, actual; (n) original. patter: (v) clatter, rumble, roll, rattle,
calamiform, gladiate, pilous, curt: (adj) concise, brief, abrupt, short, drum, scuttle, skip, tiptoe; (n) line of
shagged, echinate. brusque, crisp, terse, laconic, rude, gab, vernacular, jargon.
beholding: (n) fusion, seeing, visual churlish, crusty. ANTONYMS: (adj) shopkeeper: (n) merchant, tradesman,
perception, look. polite, friendly, courteous, gracious, merchandiser, shopman, seller,
calmed: (adj) composed, thankful. civil, lengthy, rambling, voluble, storekeeper, florist, hosier, market
ANTONYM: (adj) worried. caring, loquacious, convoluted. keeper, cleaner, dealer.
counterfeit: (adj, n, v) sham; (n, v) cutpurse: (n) pickpocket, dip, Moll synagogue: (n) tabernacle, house of
copy, duplicate; (adj, v) mock, falsify; Cutpurse, thief, angle of dip. worship, place of worship, temple,
(adj) false, artificial, assumed; (adj, n) nailed: (adj) fixed, tight, stationary, church, Mormon tabernacle, house of
imitation; (v) forge, ape. stable, secure, decided, firm, prayer, house of God.
Victor Hugo 111
"What are they going to do?" Gringoire asked himself with some uneasiness.
A sound of bells, which he heard at that moment, put an end to his anxiety; it
was a stuffed manikin, which the vagabonds were suspending by the neck from
the rope, a sort of scarecrow dressed in red, and so hung with mule-bells and
larger bells, that one might have tricked out thirty Castilian mules with them.
These thousand tiny bells quivered for some time with the vibration of the rope,
then gradually died away, and finally became silent when the manikin had been
brought into a state of immobility by that law of the pendulum which has
dethroned the water clock and the hour-glass. Then Clopin, pointing out to
Gringoire a rickety old stool placed beneath the manikin,-- "Climb up there."
"Death of the devil!" objected Gringoire; "I shall break my neck. Your stool
limps like one of Martial's distiches; it has one hexameter leg and one
pentameter leg."
"Climb!" repeated Clopin.%
Gringoire mounted the stool, and succeeded, not without some oscillations of
head and arms, in regaining his centre of gravity.
"Now," went on the King of Thunes, "twist your right foot round your left
leg, and rise on the tip of your left foot."
"Monseigneur," said Gringoire, "so you absolutely insist on my breaking
some one of my limbs?"
Clopin tossed his head.
"Hark ye, my friend, you talk too much. Here's the gist of the matter in two
words: you are to rise on tiptoe, as I tell you; in that way you will be able to
reach the pocket of the manikin, you will rummage it, you will pull out the purse
that is there,-- and if you do all this without our hearing the sound of a bell, all is
well: you shall be a vagabond. All we shall then have to do, will be to thrash you
soundly for the space of a week."
"Ventre-Dieu! I will be careful," said Gringoire. "And suppose I do make the
bells sound?"
"Then you will be hanged. Do you understand?"
Thesaurus
hark: (v) harken, hear, hearken, heed, figurine, form, fashion model. scarecrow: (n) hobgoblin, bugaboo,
listen in; (n) look here, look you, look. mules: (n) mule, scuffs, carpet slipper, simulacrum, malkin, frump, ogre,
hexameter: (n) verse, pentameter. scuff. jackstraw, shewel, goblin,
immobility: (adj, n) fixity; (n) pentameter: (n) hexameter, verse. ragamuffin; (adj) octopus.
fixedness, stillness, stationariness, regaining: (n) regain, clawback, suspending: (adj) suspended,
motionlessness, immovability, proceeds, payoff, paying back, suspensory, depending, hanging.
immovableness; (adj) vitality, reappearance, indemnity, issue, thrash: (v) flog, whip, beat, pound,
stiffness, stabiliment, solidity. recapture, recurrence, redress. defeat, whack, lam, drub, baste, lick,
ANTONYMS: (n) bustle, movement. ANTONYM: (n) loss. clobber.
manikin: (n) model, homunculus, rummage: (n, v) search; (v) ransack, tiptoe: (v) tip, tippytoe, creep, patter,
dummy, mannikin, mannequin, jumble, root, look for, rifle, seek, skirt, skip, tilt, sidle, lean; (adj) alert;
Manacus, phantom, manakin, forage; (n) explore, trash, scan. (n) quieter. ANTONYM: (v) clump.
"I don't understand at all," replied Gringoire.%

"Listen, once more. You are to search the manikin, and take away its purse; if
a single bell stirs during the operation, you will be hung. Do you understand
that?"
"Good," said Gringoire; "I understand that. And then?"
"If you succeed in removing the purse without our hearing the bells, you are
a vagabond, and you will be thrashed for eight consecutive days. You
understand now, no doubt?"
"No, monseigneur; I no longer understand. Where is the advantage to me?
hanged in one case, cudgelled in the other?"
"And a vagabond," resumed Clopin, "and a vagabond; is that nothing? It is
for your interest that we should beat you, in order to harden you to blows."
"Many thanks," replied the poet.
"Come, make haste," said the king, stamping upon his cask, which resounded
like a huge drum! Search the manikin, and let there be an end to this! I warn
you for the last time, that if I hear a single bell, you will take the place of the
manikin."
The band of thieves applauded Clopin's words, and arranged themselves in a
circle round the gibbet, with a laugh so pitiless that Gringoire perceived that he
amused them too much not to have everything to fear from them. No hope was
left for him, accordingly, unless it were the slight chance of succeeding in the
formidable operation which was imposed upon him; he decided to risk it, but it
was not without first having addressed a fervent prayer to the manikin he was
about to plunder, and who would have been easier to move to pity than the
vagabonds. These myriad bells, with their little copper tongues, seemed to him
like the mouths of so many asps, open and ready to sting and to hiss.
"Oh!" he said, in a very low voice, "is it possible that my life depends on the
slightest vibration of the least of these bells? Oh!" he added, with clasped hands,
"bells, do not ring, hand-bells do not clang, mule-bells do not quiver!"
He made one more attempt upon Trouillefou.
Thesaurus
clang: (n, v) chime, clangor, ring, clash, freeze, congeal, coagulate, calcify, compassionate, warmhearted,
clank, clatter, sound; (adj, n, v) peal; petrify; (n) brace. ANTONYMS: (v) sympathetic, flexible, caring, tolerant.
(v) boom, clink; (n) crash. soften, liquefy, dissolve, weaken, plunder: (n, v) pillage, spoil; (v)
fervent: (adj) ardent, eager, earnest, melt. despoil, harry, devastate, maraud,
enthusiastic, intense, cordial, hiss: (v) fizz, spit, whiz, whisper, destroy, strip, ransack; (n) booty,
passionate, hot, emotional, torrid, whoosh; (n) buzz, jeer, hissing, depredation.
strong. ANTONYMS: (adj) apathetic, ridicule; (n, v) hoot, taunt. stamping: (n) impression, blocking,
unenthusiastic, cool, weak, pitiless: (adj) merciless, brutal, harsh, coin, postage, stamping of rail.
unexcited, dispirited, dispassionate, cruel, ruthless, implacable, vibration: (n) tremor, shudder, quiver,
flippant, impassive, lukewarm, mild. remorseless, inexorable, inhuman, beat, pulse, oscillation, shiver,
harden: (adj, v) habituate, inure; (n, v) heartless, hard. ANTONYMS: (adj) pulsation, trembling, undulation,
strengthen; (v) season, consolidate, merciful, charitable, soft, movement. ANTONYM: (n) stillness.
Victor Hugo 113
"And if there should come a gust of wind?"

"You will be hanged," replied the other, without hesitation.%
Perceiving that no respite, nor reprieve, nor subterfuge was possible, he
bravely decided upon his course of action; he wound his right foot round his left
leg, raised himself on his left foot, and stretched out his arm: but at the moment
when his hand touched the manikin, his body, which was now supported upon
one leg only, wavered on the stool which had but three; he made an involuntary
effort to support himself by the manikin, lost his balance, and fell heavily to the
ground, deafened by the fatal vibration of the thousand bells of the manikin,
which, yielding to the impulse imparted by his hand, described first a rotary
motion, and then swayed majestically between the two posts.
"Malediction!" he cried as he fell, and remained as though dead, with his face
to the earth.
Meanwhile, he heard the dreadful peal above his head, the diabolical
laughter of the vagabonds, and the voice of Trouillefou saying,
"Pick me up that knave, and hang him without ceremony." He rose. They
had already detached the manikin to make room for him.
The thieves made him mount the stool, Clopin came to him, passed the rope
about his neck, and, tapping him on the shoulder,
"Adieu, my friend. You can't escape now, even if you digested with the
pope's guts."
The word "Mercy!" died away upon Gringoire's lips. He cast his eyes about
him; but there was no hope: all were laughing.
"Bellevigne de l'Etoile," said the King of Thunes to an enormous vagabond,
who stepped out from the ranks, "climb upon the cross beam."
Bellevigne de l'Etoile nimbly mounted the transverse beam, and in another
minute, Gringoire, on raising his eyes, beheld him, with terror, seated upon the
beam above his head.
Thesaurus
deafened: (adj) dead, deaf corn, rapidly, readily; (adj) dexterously; press; (adj) rotatory, rotating,
stunned, deadened. (adj, adv) neatly. ANTONYMS: (adv) rotative, vertiginous, turning,
diabolical: (adj) diabolic, demoniac, lethargically, heavily, awkwardly. circular; (adj, n) whirligig, round.
demonic, infernal, hellish, unholy, peal: (n) ding, noise, clang, dingdong, subterfuge: (adj, n) quibble; (n) excuse,
fiendish, wicked, satanic, atrocious, blast; (v) chime, knell, toll, echo; (adj, pretense, deception, ruse, dodge,
evil. n) swell; (n, v) bang. evasion, pretext, blind, artifice; (n, v)
digested: (adj) mature, digestible. reprieve: (n, v) pause, postponement, shift.
gust: (n) eruption, flurry, blow, blast, pardon, stay; (n) relief, delay, transverse: (adj, v) cross; (adj)
puff, flare, explosion, gale, storm, abatement, remission, grace; (v) crosswise, oblique, crossing,
breeze; (adj, n) whiff. remit, adjournment. ANTONYM: (n) thwartwise, thwart, diagonal,
nimbly: (adv) adroitly, alertly, lightly, charge. grumpy, perversely irritable; (v)
energetically, cleverly, hastily, deftly, rotary: (n) circle, roundabout, rotary traverse; (adv) transversely.
"Now," resumed Clopin Trouillefou, "as soon as I clap my hands, you, Andry
the Red, will fling the stool to the ground with a blow of your knee; you,
François Chante-Prune, will cling to the feet of the rascal; and you, Bellevigne,
will fling yourself on his shoulders; and all three at once, do you hear?"
Gringoire shuddered.%
"Are you ready?" said Clopin Trouillefou to the three thieves, who held
themselves in readiness to fall upon Gringoire. A moment of horrible suspense
ensued for the poor victim, during which Clopin tranquilly thrust into the fire
with the tip of his foot, some bits of vine shoots which the flame had not caught.
"Are you ready?" he repeated, and opened his hands to clap. One second more
and all would have been over.
But he paused, as though struck by a sudden thought.
"One moment!" said he; "I forgot! It is our custom not to hang a man without
inquiring whether there is any woman who wants him. Comrade, this is your
last resource. You must wed either a female vagabond or the noose."
Gringoire breathed again. This was the second time that he had returned to
life within an hour. So he did not dare to trust to it too implicitly.
"Holà!" cried Clopin, mounted once more upon his cask, "holà! women,
females, is there among you, from the sorceress to her cat, a wench who wants
this rascal? Holà, Colette la Charonne! Elisabeth Trouvain! Simone Jodouyne!
Marie Piédebou! Thonne la Longue! Bérarde Fanouel! Michelle Genaille!
Claude Ronge-oreille! Mathurine Girorou!-- Holà! Isabeau-la-Thierrye! Come
and see! A man for nothing! Who wants him?"
Gringoire, no doubt, was not very appetizing in this miserable condition.
The female vagabonds did not seem to be much affected by the proposition. The
unhappy wretch heard them answer: "No! no! hang him; there'll be the more fun
for us all!"
Nevertheless, three emerged from the throng and came to smell of him. The
first was a big wench, with a square face. She examined the philosopher's
deplorable doublet attentively. His garment was worn, and more full of holes
Thesaurus
appetizing: (adj) delectable, delicious, smash; (v) acclaim, applaud, hit. magician, enchanter, warlock,
appetising, luscious, savory, ANTONYMS: (v) hiss, jeer. wizard, lamia, necromancer.
palatable, scrumptious, alluring, inquiring: (adj) inquisitive, quizzical, tranquilly: (adv) serenely, calmly,
exquisite; (adj, v) tantalizing, spicy. interested, analytical, probing, peacefully, quietly, stilly,
ANTONYMS: (adj) tasteless, intrusive; (adj, n) questioning; (v) undisturbedly, untroubledly,
unsavory, sickening, nauseating, inquire; (n) enquiry, question, restfully, placidly, coolly,
inedible, distasteful, repulsive, examination. ANTONYM: (adj) unperturbedly. ANTONYMS: (adv)
revolting, unappealing. uninquiring. anxiously, noisily.
breathed: (adj) unvoiced, inaudible, rascal: (n) villain, rapscallion, monkey, wretch: (n) victim, villain, scoundrel,
breathing, aphonic. miscreant, knave, scoundrel, scamp, reprobate, reptile, miscreant, martyr,
clap: (n, v) blast, boom, slam, rumble; rogue, varlet, vagabond, brat. object of compassion, poor devil,
(n) applause, clapping, gonorrhoea, sorceress: (n) sorcerer, witch, prey, wreak.
Victor Hugo 115
than a stove for roasting chestnuts. The girl made a wry face. "Old rag!" she
muttered, and addressing Gringoire, "Let's see your cloak!" "I have lost it,"
replied Gringoire. "Your hat?" "They took it away from me." "Your shoes?"
"They have hardly any soles left." "Your purse?" "Alas!" stammered Gringoire,
"I have not even a sou." "Let them hang you, then, and say 'Thank you!'" retorted
the vagabond wench, turning her back on him.%
The second,-- old, black, wrinkled, hideous, with an ugliness conspicuous
even in the Cour des Miracles, trotted round Gringoire. He almost trembled lest
she should want him. But she mumbled between her teeth, "He's too thin," and
went off.
The third was a young girl, quite fresh, and not too ugly. "Save me!" said the
poor fellow to her, in a low tone. She gazed at him for a moment with an air of
pity, then dropped her eyes, made a plait in her petticoat, and remained in
indecision. He followed all these movements with his eyes; it was the last gleam
of hope. "No," said the young girl, at length, "no! Guillaume Longuejoue would
beat me." She retreated into the crowd.
"You are unlucky, comrade," said Clopin.
Then rising to his feet, upon his hogshead. "No one wants him," he
exclaimed, imitating the accent of an auctioneer, to the great delight of all; "no
one wants him? once, twice, three times!" and, turning towards the gibbet with a
sign of his hand, "Gone!"
Bellevigne de l'Etoile, Andry the Red, François Chante-Prune, stepped up to
Gringoire.
At that moment a cry arose among the thieves: "La Esmeralda! La
Esmeralda!"
Gringoire shuddered, and turned towards the side whence the clamor
proceeded.
The crowd opened, and gave passage to a pure and dazzling form.
It was the gypsy.
Thesaurus
auctioneer: (n) broker, agent, attorney, unremarkable, unexceptional, pigtail, pleat, tuck; (v) lace, crease,
secretary, solicitor, clerk, seller, gradual, abysmal, humdrum, dark. entwine, interlace, intertwine.
underwriter, proctor, commission imitating: (adj) imitative; (n) roasting: (n) barbecuing, cookery,
agent; (v) auction off. emulation, mimicry, forgery, acting. cooking; (adj) broiling, baking,
chestnuts: (n) Castanopsis, Fagaceae, indecision: (n) hesitation, irresolution, burning, boiling, airless, blazing,
Castanea, genus Castanea, beech uncertainty, indecisiveness, close; (adj, n) scorching.
family. hesitance, qualm, vacillation, ANTONYMS: (adj) airy, fresh.
dazzling: (adj) brilliant, blinding, hesitancy, dubiety, infirmity of soles: (n) family Soleidae.
splendid, glaring, vivid, stunning, purpose; (adj, n) suspense. whence: (adv) wherefrom, hence,
dazzlingly, striking, sparkling, ANTONYMS: (n) determination, because, for, why, wherefore, how,
fulgent, resplendent. ANTONYMS: resolve, resolution, confidence. then, then thence so, how comes it,
(adj) dim, ugly, uninspired, plait: (n, v) braid, plat, double; (n) how happens it.
"La Esmeralda!" said Gringoire, stupefied in the midst of his emotions, by the
abrupt manner in which that magic word knotted together all his reminiscences
of the day.%
This rare creature seemed, even in the Cour des Miracles, to exercise her
sway of charm and beauty. The vagabonds, male and female, ranged themselves
gently along her path, and their brutal faces beamed beneath her glance.
She approached the victim with her light step. Her pretty Djali followed her.
Gringoire was more dead than alive. She examined him for a moment in silence.
"You are going to hang this man?" she said gravely, to Clopin.
"Yes, sister," replied the King of Thunes, "unless you will take him for your
husband."
She made her pretty little pout with her under lip. "I'll take him," said she.
Gringoire firmly believed that he had been in a dream ever since morning,
and that this was the continuation of it.
The change was, in fact, violent, though a gratifying one. They undid the
noose, and made the poet step down from the stool. His emotion was so lively
that he was obliged to sit down.
The Duke of Egypt brought an earthenware crock, without uttering a word.
The gypsy offered it to Gringoire: "Fling it on the ground," said she.
The crock broke into four pieces.
"Brother," then said the Duke of Egypt, laying his hands upon their
foreheads, "she is your wife; sister, he is your husband for four years. Go."
Thesaurus
abrupt: (adj) sudden, brusque, sharp, (n) ceramics, delft, clay, stoneware, momentously, heavily, earnestly,
precipitous, steep, instantaneous, faience, majolica. weightily, grievously. ANTONYMS:
unexpected, swift, instant, hasty; (n) gratifying: (adj) agreeable, pleasant, (adv) lightheartedly, mildly, slightly;
bold. ANTONYMS: (adj) gentle, enjoyable, delightful, pleasurable, (adj) soft.
gradual, rambling, gracious, rewarding, welcome, satisfying, nice; noose: (n) loop, trap, gin, lasso, net,
courteous, polite, anticipated, kind, (adj, v) grateful; (v) gratify. gibbet, gallows, bowstring, snare,
calm, protracted, deliberate. ANTONYMS: (adj) disappointing, girdle; (v) hang.
crock: (n) jar, vat, suede crock, unwelcome, unrewarding, pieces: (n) debris, trash.
container, banger, urn, jalopy, bowl, frustrating, disagreeable, sway: (n, v) command, rule, control,
amphora; (v) begrime, smut. heartbreaking, annoying, unpleasant. rock, stagger, roll; (v) oscillate, reel,
earthenware: (v) China, porcelain, gravely: (adv) seriously, soberly, lurch, shake; (n) reign. ANTONYMS:
pottery, ceramic ware; (adj) ceramic; severely, solemnly, badly, staidly, (v) stay, dissuade, discourage.
Victor Hugo 117
CHAPTER VII
A BRIDAL NIGHT
A few moments later our poet found himself in a tiny arched chamber, very
cosy, very warm, seated at a table which appeared to ask nothing better than to
make some loans from a larder hanging near by, having a good bed in prospect,
and alone with a pretty girl. The adventure smacked of enchantment. He began
seriously to take himself for a personage in a fairy tale; he cast his eyes about him
from time to time to time, as though to see if the chariot of fire, harnessed to two-
winged chimeras, which alone could have so rapidly transported him from
Tartarus to Paradise, were still there. At times, also, he fixed his eyes obstinately
upon the holes in his doublet, in order to cling to reality, and not lose the ground
from under his feet completely. His reason, tossed about in imaginary space,
now hung only by this thread.%
The young girl did not appear to pay any attention to him; she went and
came, displaced a stool, talked to her goat, and indulged in a pout now and
then. At last she came and seated herself near the table, and Gringoire was able
to scrutinize her at his ease.
You have been a child, reader, and you would, perhaps, be very happy to be
one still. It is quite certain that you have not, more than once (and for my part, I
have passed whole days, the best employed of my life, at it) followed from
Thesaurus
appeared: (n) appearing. displaced: (adj) disjointed, homeless, doggedly, refractorily, unyieldingly,
arched: (adj, v) bowed, arcuate; (adj) gone, extendant, disordered, willfully, pigheadedly, waywardly,
bent, vaulted, convex, arciform, deranged. firmly. ANTONYM: (adv) helpfully.
arced, domed, hooked, hunched, holes: (n) cavity, holes tow. scrutinize: (v) inspect, examine,
crooked. indulged: (adj) pet, privileged, review, consider, audit, investigate,
chariot: (n) car, wagon, carriage, cherished, admired. explore, search, analyze, check; (adj,
waggon, vehicle, wain, equipage, larder: (n) storeroom, pantry, food, v) scan. ANTONYM: (v) ignore.
char. victuals, viands, provisions, transported: (adj) ecstatic, rapt, elated,
cling: (v) adhere, cleave, stick, cohere, provender, stowage, stillroom, inspirited, spellbound, exultant,
hang, attach, grasp, adjoin, clutch, commissariat, spence. puffed up, proud, delighted, elate;
grip, hold. ANTONYMS: (v) detach, obstinately: (adv) obdurately, (adv) on cloud nine. ANTONYM:
repel, unfasten. mulishly, persistently, perversely, (adj) dejected.
thicket to thicket, by the side of running water, on a sunny day, a beautiful green
or blue dragon-fly, breaking its flight in abrupt angles, and kissing the tips of all
the branches. You recollect with what amorous curiosity your thought and your
gaze were riveted upon this little whirlwind, hissing and humming with wings
of purple and azure, in the midst of which floated an imperceptible body, veiled
by the very rapidity of its movement. The aerial being which was dimly
outlined amid this quivering of wings, appeared to you chimerical, imaginary,
impossible to touch, impossible to see. But when, at length, the dragon-fly
alighted on the tip of a reed, and, holding your breath the while, you were able
to examine the long, gauze wings, the long enamel robe, the two globes of
crystal, what astonishment you felt, and what fear lest you should again behold
the form disappear into a shade, and the creature into a chimera! Recall these
impressions, and you will readily appreciate what Gringoire felt on
contemplating, beneath her visible and palpable form, that Esmeralda of whom,
up to that time, he had only caught a glimpse, amidst a whirlwind of dance,
song, and tumult.%
Sinking deeper and deeper into his revery: "So this," he said to himself,
following her vaguely with his eyes, "is la Esmeralda! a celestial creature! a street
dancer! so much, and so little! 'Twas she who dealt the death-blow to my
mystery this morning, 'tis she who saves my life this evening! My evil genius!
My good angel! A pretty woman, on my word! and who must needs love me
madly to have taken me in that fashion. By the way," said he, rising suddenly,
with that sentiment of the true which formed the foundation of his character and
his philosophy, "I don't know very well how it happens, but I am her husband!"
With this idea in his head and in his eyes, he stepped up to the young girl in a
manner so military and so gallant that she drew back.
"What do you want of me?" said she.
"Can you ask me, adorable Esmeralda?" replied Gringoire, with so passionate
an accent that he was himself astonished at it on hearing himself speak.
The gypsy opened her great eyes. "I don't know what you mean."
Thesaurus
adorable: (adj) lovely, attractive, impassioned. ANTONYMS: (adj) velocity, pace, fleetness,
delightful, endearing, pleasing, cold, hateful, repulsed, unfriendly, promptitude, speed. ANTONYM: (n)
glamorous, delicious, wonderful, cool. tardiness.
winning, appealing, cute. chimerical: (adj) imaginary, fanciful, recollect: (v) recall, remember,
ANTONYMS: (adj) despicable, fantastic, romantic, delusive, recognize, call to mind, remind,
disgusting, wicked, unappealing, visionary, unreal, fictitious, utopian, mind, think, call up, reminisce,
repulsive, monstrous, gross. chimeral, insubstantial. refresh, retrieve. ANTONYM: (v)
amidst: (adv, prep) among; (adv) gauze: (n) film, curtain, blind, forget.
amongst; (prep) between, midst, into. bandage, mask, mantle, muslin, thicket: (n) brake, coppice, brush,
amorous: (adj) amatory, romantic, screen, gauze bandage, shutter, daze. grove, spinney, bush, brushwood,
amative, affectionate, passionate, rapidity: (n) expedition, quickness, cluster, underbrush, undergrowth,
fond, warm, ardent, erotic, tender, promptness, dispatch, celerity, haste, underwood.
Victor Hugo 119
"What!" resumed Gringoire, growing warmer and warmer, and supposing

that, after all, he had to deal merely with a virtue of the Cour des Miracles; "am I
not thine, sweet friend, art thou not mine?"
And, quite ingenuously, he clasped her waist.%
The gypsy's corsage slipped through his hands like the skin of an eel. She
bounded from one end of the tiny room to the other, stooped down, and raised
herself again, with a little poniard in her hand, before Gringoire had even had
time to see whence the poniard came; proud and angry, with swelling lips and
inflated nostrils, her cheeks as red as an api apple, and her eyes darting
lightnings. At the same time, the white goat placed itself in front of her, and
presented to Gringoire a hostile front, bristling with two pretty horns, gilded and
very sharp. All this took place in the twinkling of an eye.
The dragon-fly had turned into a wasp, and asked nothing better than to
sting.
Our philosopher was speechless, and turned his astonished eyes from the
goat to the young girl. "Holy Virgin!" he said at last, when surprise permitted
him to speak, "here are two hearty dames!"
The gypsy broke the silence on her side.
"You must be a very bold knave!"
"Pardon, mademoiselle," said Gringoire, with a smile. "But why did you take
me for your husband?"
"Should I have allowed you to be hanged?"
"So," said the poet, somewhat disappointed in his amorous hopes. "You had
no other idea in marrying me than to save me from the gibbet?"
"And what other idea did you suppose that I had?"
Gringoire bit his lips. "Come," said he, "I am not yet so triumphant in
Cupido, as I thought. But then, what was the good of breaking that poor jug?"
Meanwhile Esmeralda's dagger and the goat's horns were still upon the
defensive.
Thesaurus
darting: (adj) arrowy, moving; (v) ingenuously: (adv) artlessly, sincerely, dumbfounded, voiceless, quiet,
Sally. innocently, candidly, naively, tongueless, tacit, noiseless, mum,
gilded: (adj, v) gilt; (adj) rich, gold, frankly, outspokenly, plainly, wordless. ANTONYMS: (adj)
golden, deluxe, gilden, fortunate, naturally, unsophisticatedly, loquacious, eloquent, talkative.
garish, advantageous, aurated, straightforwardly. ANTONYMS: stooped: (adj) hunched, stoop,
luxurious. (adv) artfully, dishonestly, stooping, crooked, bended, not
hearty: (adj) heartfelt, healthy, genial, pretentiously. straight, inclined, not erect, arched,
sturdy, cheering, fervent, nostrils: (n) naris, nose. asymmetrical, droopy.
wholehearted, lusty, enthusiastic, poniard: (n) dagger, bodkin, dirk, wasp: (adj) stricture, neck, middle
convivial; (adj, n) well. ANTONYMS: cutlass, stiletto, stylet, bilbo, Toledo, constriction, isthmus; (n) gallfly,
(adj) unhealthy, frail, old, weak, tuck, brand; (v) stab. hornet, vespid, vespid wasp, cynipid
sluggish, unwholesome, meager. speechless: (adj) silent, mute, dumb, gall wasp, cynipid wasp; (v) bee.
"Mademoiselle Esmeralda," said the poet, "let us come to terms. I am not a

clerk of the court, and I shall not go to law with you for thus carrying a dagger in
Paris, in the teeth of the ordinances and prohibitions of M. the Provost.
Nevertheless, you are not ignorant of the fact that Noel Lescrivain was
condemned, a week ago, to pay ten Parisian sous, for having carried a cutlass.
But this is no affair of mine, and I will come to the point. I swear to you, upon
my share of Paradise, not to approach you without your leave and permission,
but do give me some supper."
The truth is, Gringoire was, like M. Despreaux, "not very voluptuous." He
did not belong to that chevalier and musketeer species, who take young girls by
assault. In the matter of love, as in all other affairs, he willingly assented to
temporizing and adjusting terms; and a good supper, and an amiable tête-a-tête
appeared to him, especially when he was hungry, an excellent interlude between
the prologue and the catastrophe of a love adventure.%
The gypsy did not reply. She made her disdainful little grimace, drew up her
head like a bird, then burst out laughing, and the tiny poniard disappeared as it
had come, without Gringoire being able to see where the wasp concealed its
sting.
A moment later, there stood upon the table a loaf of rye bread, a slice of
bacon, some wrinkled apples and a jug of beer. Gringoire began to eat eagerly.
One would have said, to hear the furious clashing of his iron fork and his
earthenware plate, that all his love had turned to appetite.
The young girl seated opposite him, watched him in silence, visibly
preoccupied with another thought, at which she smiled from time to time, while
her soft hand caressed the intelligent head of the goat, gently pressed between
her knees.
A candle of yellow wax illuminated this scene of voracity and revery.
Meanwhile, the first cravings of his stomach having been stilled, Gringoire
felt some false shame at perceiving that nothing remained but one apple.
"You do not eat, Mademoiselle Esmeralda?"
Thesaurus
adjusting: (v) adjust; (n) adjusting discord; (adj) conflicting, interact, adjournment, interim, recess,
operation. incompatible, opposed, contrary; rest.
amiable: (adj) friendly, genial, (adv) clashingly; (v) bickering. musketeer: (n) rifleman, skirmisher,
agreeable, benign, complaisant, ANTONYM: (adj) consistent. sharpshooter, soldier, marcher,
sweet, cordial, pleasant, likable, nice, cutlass: (n) sword, cutlas, steel, knife, infantryman, carabineer, foot soldier,
lovely. ANTONYMS: (adj) saber, machete, dirk, dagger, footslogger, jager.
disagreeable, argumentative, scimitar, poniard, stylet. temporizing: (n) timeserving.
aggressive, antisocial, unkind, dagger: (n) bodkin, sword, blade, voracity: (n) rapacity, greed, gluttony,
hateful, mean, quarrelsome, rude, obelisk, knife, stiletto, dirk, cutlass, ravenousness, rapaciousness,
surly, cold. grapheme, saber, skean. esurience, greediness, eagerness,
clashing: (adj, n) discordant; (n) interlude: (n) intermission, interval, hunger, voraciousness, covetousness.
collision, interference, antagonism, intermezzo, entr'acte, pause, episode, ANTONYM: (n) moderation.
Victor Hugo 121
She replied by a negative sign of the head, and her pensive glance fixed itself
upon the vault of the ceiling.%
"What the deuce is she thinking of?" thought Gringoire, staring at what she
was gazing at; "'tis impossible that it can be that stone dwarf carved in the
keystone of that arch, which thus absorbs her attention. What the deuce! I can
bear the comparison!"
He raised his voice, "Mademoiselle!"
She seemed not to hear him.
He repeated, still more loudly, "Mademoiselle Esmeralda!"
Trouble wasted. The young girl's mind was elsewhere, and Gringoire's voice
had not the power to recall it. Fortunately, the goat interfered. She began to pull
her mistress gently by the sleeve.
"What dost thou want, Djali?" said the gypsy, hastily, as though suddenly
awakened.
"She is hungry," said Gringoire, charmed to enter into conversation.
Esmeralda began to crumble some bread, which Djali ate gracefully from the
hollow of her hand.
Moreover, Gringoire did not give her time to resume her revery. He
hazarded a delicate question.
"So you don't want me for your husband?"
The young girl looked at him intently, and said, "No."
"For your lover?" went on Gringoire.
She pouted, and replied, "No."
"For your friend?" pursued Gringoire.
She gazed fixedly at him again, and said, after a momentary reflection,
"Perhaps."
This "perhaps," so dear to philosophers, emboldened Gringoire.
"Do you know what friendship is?" he asked.
Thesaurus
charmed: (adj) enchanted, delighted, steadfastly. ANTONYM: (adv) pensive: (adj) contemplative,
fascinated, spellbound, entranced, absently. meditative, musing, wistful, dreamy,
captive, beguiled, infatuated, keystone: (n) keynote, headstone, melancholy, abstracted, broody,
absorbed, enamored, captive hours. basis, foundation, key, quoin, reflective, moody; (adj, v) sad.
dwarf: (adj, n) midget, miniature; (n) cornerstone, coigne, coign, base, ANTONYMS: (adj) shallow, satisfied,
gnome, fairy, brownie, manikin, groundwork. carefree.
pygmy; (v) overshadow; (adj) little, momentary: (adj) brief, fugitive, thou: (n) chiliad, grand, m, g, one
runt, baby. ANTONYMS: (adj) large, transient, short, instantaneous, thousand, gramme, gram, gm,
big, huge; (v) maximize. ephemeral, passing, momentaneous, gigabyte, Gb, curtilage.
intently: (adv) fixedly, attentively, temporary, impermanent, temporal. vault: (n, v) leap, bound, spring, jump,
seriously, raptly, intensely, closely, ANTONYMS: (adj) lasting, lengthy, arch, hop, hurdle; (n) grave, tomb,
steadily, eagerly, absorbedly, hard, long. cellar, crypt.
"Yes," replied the gypsy; "it is to be brother and sister; two souls which touch
without mingling, two fingers on one hand."
"And love?" pursued Gringoire.%
"Oh! love!" said she, and her voice trembled, and her eye beamed. "That is to
be two and to be but one. A man and a woman mingled into one angel. It is
heaven."
The street dancer had a beauty as she spoke thus, that struck Gringoire
singularly, and seemed to him in perfect keeping with the almost oriental
exaltation of her words. Her pure, red lips half smiled; her serene and candid
brow became troubled, at intervals, under her thoughts, like a mirror under the
breath; and from beneath her long, drooping, black eyelashes, there escaped a
sort of ineffable light, which gave to her profile that ideal serenity which
Raphael found at the mystic point of intersection of virginity, maternity, and
divinity.
Nevertheless, Gringoire continued,
"What must one be then, in order to please you?"
"A man."
"And I-- " said he, "what, then, am I?"
"A man has a hemlet on his head, a sword in his hand, and golden spurs on
his heels."
"Good," said Gringoire, "without a horse, no man. Do you love any one?"
"As a lover?"
"Yes."
She remained thoughtful for a moment, then said with a peculiar expression:
"That I shall know soon."
"Why not this evening?" resumed the poet tenderly. "Why not me?"
She cast a grave glance upon him and said,
"I can never love a man who cannot protect me."
Thesaurus
candid: (adj) blunt, outspoken, ANTONYMS: (n) abasement, confluent, blended; (n) mixture,
ingenuous, direct, sincere, open, belittlement, debasement, mixing, commixtion, interchange,
forthright, artless, equitable, honest, degradation, humiliation, sorrow, exchange, commixture; (adv)
guileless. ANTONYMS: (adj) derogation, disparagement. minglingly.
scheming, tricky, artful, deceitful, eyelashes: (n) cilia. mystic: (adj, v) secret, recondite; (adj)
dishonest, guarded, indirect, ineffable: (adj) indescribable, mysterious, occult, cryptical, cryptic,
insincere, inhibited, disingenuous, unspeakable, unutterable, esoteric, inscrutable, weird, magical;
evasive. indefinable, inexpressible, beyond (adj, n) psychic.
exaltation: (n) elation, ecstasy, expression, unimaginable, beyond virginity: (n) maidenhood, pucelage,
apotheosis, worship, praise, rapture, words, unpronounceable, dreadful, chastity, purity, maidenhead,
deification, grandeur, adoration; (n, untellable. pudicity, virtue, freshness,
v) sublimation; (v) laud. mingling: (adj) blending, merging, virginhood, innocence, spirit.
Victor Hugo 123
Gringoire colored, and took the hint. It was evident that the young girl was
alluding to the slight assistance which he had rendered her in the critical
situation in which she had found herself two hours previously. This memory,
effaced by his own adventures of the evening, now recurred to him. He smote
his brow.%
"By the way, mademoiselle, I ought to have begun there. Pardon my foolish
absence of mind. How did you contrive to escape from the claws of
Quasimodo?"
This question made the gypsy shudder.
"Oh! the horrible hunchback," said she, hiding her face in her hands. And she
shuddered as though with violent cold.
"Horrible, in truth," said Gringoire, who clung to his idea; "but how did you
manage to escape him?"
La Esmeralda smiled, sighed, and remained silent.
"Do you know why he followed you?" began Gringoire again, seeking to
return to his question by a circuitous route.
"I don't know," said the young girl, and she added hastily, "but you were
following me also, why were you following me?"
"In good faith," responded Gringoire, "I don't know either."
Silence ensued. Gringoire slashed the table with his knife. The young girl
smiled and seemed to be gazing through the wall at something. All at once she
began to sing in a barely articulate voice,
Quando las pintadas aves,
Mudas estan, y la tierra
She broke off abruptly, and began to caress Djali.
"That's a pretty animal of yours," said Gringoire.
"She is my sister," she answered.
"Why are you called 'la Esmeralda?'" asked the poet.
Thesaurus
adventures: (n) experiences, fortunes, claws: (v) tentacle, tenaculum, unguis, destroy, ruin, waste, wreck, fail.
confessions, journal, life, biography, hook, fangs, teeth; (n) clutches, jaws. mademoiselle: (n) girl, signorina,
autobiography, personal narrative. colored: (adj) chromatic, black, tinged, damsel, drum, silver perch,
caress: (v) stroke, fondle, tickle, pat, tinted, colorful, dyed, coloured, drumfish.
pet, kiss, nuzzle, cuddle, coddle; (n, partial, dark, bleached, biased. shudder: (adj, n, v) shake, quake,
v) touch; (n) endearment. ANTONYMS: (adj) truthful, white, tremble; (n, v) quiver, twitch, thrill;
ANTONYM: (n) hit. uncolored, unbiased, pale, objective, (n) quivering, shivering, chill, frisson;
circuitous: (adj) roundabout, winding, honest, genuine, real. (v) flutter.
devious, tortuous, meandering, contrive: (v) plan, invent, design, slashed: (adj) gashed, torn, split,
oblique, complicated, labyrinthine, concoct, devise, cast, concert, mown, cut down, decreased, down,
crooked, collateral, circumlocutional. excogitate, frame, formulate; (n, v) emasculated, fringed, gelded, cheap.
ANTONYMS: (adj) straight, direct. manage. ANTONYMS: (v) demolish, smote: (v) smite.
"I do not know."

"But why?"
She drew from her bosom a sort of little oblong bag, suspended from her
neck by a string of adrézarach beads. This bag exhaled a strong odor of
camphor. It was covered with green silk, and bore in its centre a large piece of
green glass, in imitation of an emerald.%
"Perhaps it is because of this," said she.
Gringoire was on the point of taking the bag in his hand. She drew back.
"Don't touch it! It is an amulet. You would injure the charm or the charm
would injure you."
The poet's curiosity was more and more aroused.
"Who gave it to you?"
She laid one finger on her mouth and concealed the amulet in her bosom. He
tried a few more questions, but she hardly replied.
"What is the meaning of the words, 'la Esmeralda?'"
"I don't know," said she.
"To what language do they belong?"
"They are Egyptian, I think."
"I suspected as much," said Gringoire, "you are not a native of France?"
"I don't know."
"Are your parents alive?"
She began to sing, to an ancient air,
Mon père est oiseau,

Ma mère est oiselle.
Je passe l'eau sans nacelle,
Je passe l'eau sans bateau,
Ma mère est oiselle,
Thesaurus
amulet: (n) talisman, fetish, mascot, ANTONYMS: (n) outside, exteriority. ANTONYMS: (v) heal, enable, repair,
periapt, charm, telesm, philter, spell, camphor: (v) Sandalwood camphor. protect, help.
phylactery, keepsake, good luck drew: (n) move, John Drew. nacelle: (n) enclosure.
charm. imitation: (adj, n) fake, sham, odor: (n) aroma, scent, odour,
bateau: (n) battery, swamp boat, bully, reproduction; (n) dummy, forgery, bouquet, flavour, perfume, flavor,
boat. mockery, copy, emulation; (n, v) savor, stink; (n, v) smell, stench.
beads: (n) pearls, chaplet, censer, pax, parody; (adj) false, bogus. passe: (adj) demode, antique,
patera, host, cross, pyx, reliquary, ANTONYMS: (adj) genuine, real, antiquated, effete, run out, ex,
rood, thurible. natural; (n) original, formalism. outdated; (v) wilted, shaken, shabby,
bosom: (n) heart, interior, boob, injure: (n, v) damage, harm, impair; secondhand.
thorax, chest, bust, tit; (n, v) embrace; (v) contuse, disfigure, maim, bruise, sans: (adj) without, devoid, minus,
(v) cherish, hug; (adj) intimate. blemish, wound, insult; (adj, v) abuse. short, in need.
Victor Hugo 125
Mon père est oiseau.%
"Good," said Gringoire. "At what age did you come to France?"
"When I was very young."
"And when to Paris?"
"Last year. At the moment when we were entering the papal gate I saw a
reed warbler flit through the air, that was at the end of August; I said, it will be a
hard winter."
"So it was," said Gringoire, delighted at this beginning of a conversation. "I
passed it in blowing my fingers. So you have the gift of prophecy?"
She retired into her laconics again.
"Is that man whom you call the Duke of Egypt, the chief of your tribe?"
"Yes."
"But it was he who married us," remarked the poet timidly.
She made her customary pretty grimace.
"I don't even know your name."
"My name? If you want it, here it is,-- Pierre Gringoire."
"I know a prettier one," said she.
"Naughty girl!" retorted the poet. "Never mind, you shall not provoke me.
Wait, perhaps you will love me more when you know me better; and then, you
have told me your story with so much confidence, that I owe you a little of mine.
You must know, then, that my name is Pierre Gringoire, and that I am a son of
the farmer of the notary's office of Gonesse. My father was hung by the
Burgundians, and my mother disembowelled by the Picards, at the siege of Paris,
twenty years ago. At six years of age, therefore, I was an orphan, without a sole
to my foot except the pavements of Paris. I do not know how I passed the
interval from six to sixteen. A fruit dealer gave me a plum here, a baker flung
me a crust there; in the evening I got myself taken up by the watch, who threw
me into prison, and there I found a bundle of straw. All this did not prevent my
Thesaurus
baker: (n) bakery, merchandiser, innovative, different, unfamiliar, staddle, youngster, shaver; (adj)
merchant, cook, bread maker, baxter. extraordinary, rare. orphaned.
crust: (n) skin, peel, bark, cheekiness, flit: (n, v) dart; (v) flicker, fly, fleet, plum: (n) damson, greengage, plum
gall, impertinence, covering, shell, flutter, zip, flash, speed, flitter, run; tree, prune, drupe, marmalade, lac,
cortex, coating, encrustation. (adj) stir. licorice; (adv) plumb, clean; (adj)
customary: (adj, n) accustomed, usual, naughty: (adj) mischievous, impish, mauve.
habitual; (adj) conventional, ordinary, blue, improper, disobedient, provoke: (n, v) excite; (v) defy, offend,
commonplace, traditional, average, insubordinate, wicked, evil, lewd, enrage, anger, irritate, arouse, kindle,
wonted, regular, standard. dark, unruly. ANTONYMS: (adj) inflame, invite, get. ANTONYMS: (v)
ANTONYMS: (adj) unusual, decent, behaved, obedient, clean. please, soothe, mollify, deter, inhibit,
abnormal, exceptional, orphan: (n) waif, caterpillar, nymph, dampen, arbitrate, allay, defuse,
unconventional, offbeat, irregular, nympha, cocoon, Aurelia, tyke, discourage, douse.
growing %up and growing thin, as you see. In the winter I warmed myself in the
sun, under the porch of the Hôtel de Sens, and I thought it very ridiculous that
the fire on Saint John's Day was reserved for the dog days. At sixteen, I wished
to choose a calling. I tried all in succession. I became a soldier; but I was not
brave enough. I became a monk; but I was not sufficiently devout; and then I'm
a bad hand at drinking. In despair, I became an apprentice of the woodcutters,
but I was not strong enough; I had more of an inclination to become a
schoolmaster; 'tis true that I did not know how to read, but that's no reason. I
perceived at the end of a certain time, that I lacked something in every direction;
and seeing that I was good for nothing, of my own free will I became a poet and
rhymester. That is a trade which one can always adopt when one is a vagabond,
and it's better than stealing, as some young brigands of my acquaintance advised
me to do. One day I met by luck, Dom Claude Frollo, the reverend archdeacon
of Notre-Dame. He took an interest in me, and it is to him that I to-day owe it
that I am a veritable man of letters, who knows Latin from the de Officiis of
Cicero to the mortuology of the Celestine Fathers, and a barbarian neither in
scholastics, nor in politics, nor in rhythmics, that sophism of sophisms. I am the
author of the Mystery which was presented to-day with great triumph and a
great concourse of populace, in the grand hall of the Palais de Justice. I have also
made a book which will contain six hundred pages, on the wonderful comet of
1465, which sent one man mad. I have enjoyed still other successes. Being
somewhat of an artillery carpenter, I lent a hand to Jean Mangue's great
bombard, which burst, as you know, on the day when it was tested, on the Pont
de Charenton, and killed four and twenty curious spectators. You see that I am
not a bad match in marriage. I know a great many sorts of very engaging tricks,
which I will teach your goat; for example, to mimic the Bishop of Paris, that
cursed Pharisee whose mill wheels splash passers-by the whole length of the
Pont aux Meuniers. And then my mystery will bring me in a great deal of coined
money, if they will only pay me. And finally, I am at your orders, I and my wits,
and my science and my letters, ready to live with you, damsel, as it shall please
you, chastely or joyously; husband and wife, if you see fit; brother and sister, if
you think that better."
Thesaurus
barbarian: (n) Goth, vandal, brute; comet: (n) Ariel, iris, Dendrocometes, gladly, merrily, festively, brightly,
(adj) heathen, barbaric, barbarous, celestial body. buoyantly, pleasantly. ANTONYM:
uncivilized, uncultured, wild, rude, concourse: (n) assemblage, swarm, (adv) joylessly.
foreign. ANTONYMS: (adj) cultured, multitude, throng, company, killed: (n) casualty; (adj) fallen.
refined; (n) native, citizen. merging, crowd, aggregation, rhymester: (n) versifier, poetaster,
bombard: (v) bomb, attack, pelt, shell, meeting, gathering, legion. bard, poetizer, poetiser, poet, writer,
barrage, pepper, raid, assail, besiege; damsel: (n) demoiselle, damosel, lyricist; (adj, n) rhymist.
(n) shawm, shelling. damozel, damoiselle, wench, maiden, sophism: (n) fallacy, quibble,
chastely: (adv) continently, innocently, maid, girl, nymph, unmarried casuistry, sophistry, deception,
immaculately, purely, morally, woman, virgin. sophistication, elench, evasion, false
decently, modestly, simplely, cleanly, joyously: (adv, v) happily; (adv) gaily, belief, paralogism, refutation.
refinedly, spotlessly. gleefully, mirthfully, cheerfully, warmed: (adj) warmer, warm, baked.
Victor Hugo 127
Gringoire ceased, awaiting the effect of his harangue on the young girl. Her
eyes were fixed on the ground.%
"'Phoebus,'" she said in a low voice. Then, turning towards the poet,
"'Phoebus',-- what does that mean?"
Gringoire, without exactly understanding what the connection could be
between his address and this question, was not sorry to display his erudition.
Assuming an air of importance, he replied,
"It is a Latin word which means 'sun.'"
"Sun!" she repeated.
"It is the name of a handsome archer, who was a god," added Gringoire.
"A god!" repeated the gypsy, and there was something pensive and
passionate in her tone.
At that moment, one of her bracelets became unfastened and fell. Gringoire
stooped quickly to pick it up; when he straightened up, the young girl and the
goat had disappeared. He heard the sound of a bolt. It was a little door,
communicating, no doubt, with a neighboring cell, which was being fastened on
the outside.
"Has she left me a bed, at least?" said our philosopher.
He made the tour of his cell. There was no piece of furniture adapted to
sleeping purposes, except a tolerably long wooden coffer; and its cover was
carved, to boot; which afforded Gringoire, when he stretched himself out upon it,
a sensation somewhat similar to that which Micromégas would feel if he were to
lie down on the Alps.
"Come!" said he, adjusting himself as well as possible, "I must resign myself.
But here's a strange nuptial night. 'Tis a pity. There was something innocent
and antediluvian about that broken crock, which quite pleased me."
Thesaurus
antediluvian: (adj) ancient, outmoded, ornaments. learnedness, culture, lore,
archaic, old, obsolete, dated, antique, coffer: (n) box, chest, case, caisson, eruditeness; (n, v) knowledge; (adj, n)
musty, outdated, prehistoric, casket, trunk, safe, strongbox, wisdom. ANTONYM: (n) simplicity.
primeval. ANTONYMS: (adj) new, treasury, crate, coffers. fastened: (adj) tied, fast, buttoned,
late, young, contemporary. communicating: (n) communication, closed, tight, secure, pinned, binding,
archer: (n) bowman, Sagittarius, intercommunication, suasion, empight, steady, firm. ANTONYMS:
turfman, fan, expert, shot, shooter, expression, transmission, (adj) unfastened, unbuttoned.
toxophilite, tell, bowyer. examination, intercourse, nuptial: (adj, n) bridal, marriage; (adj)
awaiting: (adj) looming, imminent, in dramaturgy; (v) communicate; (adj) marital, matrimonial, spousal,
the near future, pending, expectant. communicant, dramaturgic. connubial, hymeneal, conjugal,
bracelets: (n) trinkets, jewels, erudition: (n) education, scholarship, wedding, married; (n) matrimony.
necklaces, charms, costume jewelry, letters, edification, reading,
Victor Hugo 129
BOOK III
Victor Hugo 131
CHAPTER I
NOTRE-DAME
The church of Notre-Dame de Paris is still no doubt, a majestic and sublime

edifice. But, beautiful as it has been preserved in growing old, it is difficult not
to sigh, not to wax indignant, before the numberless degradations and
mutilations which time and men have both caused the venerable monument to
suffer, without respect for Charlemagne, who laid its first stone, or for Philip
Augustus, who laid the last.%
On the face of this aged queen of our cathedrals, by the side of a wrinkle, one
always finds a scar. Tempus edax, homo edacior; which I should be glad to
translate thus: time is blind, man is stupid.
If we had leisure to examine with the reader, one by one, the diverse traces of
destruction imprinted upon the old church, time's share would be the least, the
share of men the most, especially the men of art, since there have been
individuals who assumed the title of architects during the last two centuries.
And, in the first place, to cite only a few leading examples, there certainly are
few finer architectural pages than this façade, where, successively and at once,
the three portals hollowed out in an arch; the broidered and dentated cordon of
the eight and twenty royal niches; the immense central rose window, flanked by
its two lateral windows, like a priest by his deacon and subdeacon; the frail and
Thesaurus
cite: (v) quote, excerpt, summon, call, homo: (n) gay, fellow, lesbian, scratch, injury; (v) disfigure.
allege, mention, refer, name, repeat; homosexual, human being, human, ANTONYM: (v) enhance.
(adj, v) exemplify; (n) citation. man, ad hominem, guy, one, sublime: (adj, v) majestic; (adj)
cordon: (n) zone, band, ribbon, Littoral somebody. dignified, grand, lofty, magnificent,
cordon, insignia, chain, blockade, majestic: (adj) grand, awesome, elevated, noble, exalted, glorious; (v)
obstacle, bays, hurdle, circle. stately, imperial, royal, exalted, sacred, sublimate. ANTONYMS: (adj)
deacon: (n) clergyman, Protestant glorious, kingly, August; (adj, v) poor, ridiculous.
deacon, Catholic deacon, minister, imposing; (adj, adv) regal. wrinkle: (n, v) crease, crinkle, fold,
deaconess, church officer; (v) offer ANTONYMS: (adj) pathetic, pitiful, rumple, crumple, furrow, pucker; (v)
sacrifice, deny oneself, fast, doctor, modest, lowly, undignified. ruffle; (n) gather, line; (adj, v) curl.
falsify. scar: (n, v) mark, blemish, seam, stain, ANTONYMS: (v) unfold, straighten;
hollowed: (adj) concave. brand; (n) cicatrix, cicatrice, defect, (n) smoothness.
lofty gallery of trefoil arcades, which supports a heavy platform above its fine,
slender columns; and lastly, the two black and massive towers with their slate
penthouses, harmonious parts of a magnificent whole, superposed in five
gigantic stories;-- develop themselves before the eye, in a mass and without
confusion, with their innumerable details of statuary, carving, and sculpture,
joined powerfully to the tranquil grandeur of the whole; a vast symphony in
stone, so to speak; the colossal work of one man and one people, all together one
and complex, like the Iliads and the Romanceros, whose sister it is; prodigious
product of the grouping together of all the forces of an epoch, where, upon each
stone, one sees the fancy of the workman disciplined by the genius of the artist
start forth in a hundred fashions; a sort of human creation, in a word, powerful
and fecund as the divine creation of which it seems to have stolen the double
character,-- variety, eternity.%
And what we here say of the façade must be said of the entire church; and
what we say of the cathedral church of Paris, must be said of all the churches of
Christendom in the Middle Ages. All things are in place in that art, self-created,
logical, and well proportioned. To measure the great toe of the foot is to
measure the giant.
Let us return to the façade of Notre-Dame, as it still appears to us, when we
go piously to admire the grave and puissant cathedral, which inspires terror, so
its chronicles assert: quoe mole sua terrorem incutit spectantibus.
Three important things are to-day lacking in that façade: in the first place, the
staircase of eleven steps which formerly raised it above the soil; next, the lower
series of statues which occupied the niches of the three portals; and lastly the
upper series, of the twenty-eight most ancient kings of France, which garnished
the gallery of the first story, beginning with Childebert, and ending with Phillip
Augustus, holding in his hand "the imperial apple."
Time has caused the staircase to disappear, by raising the soil of the city with
a slow and irresistible progress; but, while thus causing the eleven steps which
added to the majestic height of the edifice, to be devoured, one by one, by the
rising tide of the pavements of Paris,-- time has bestowed upon the church
Thesaurus
appears: (n) appearing. infertile, sterile, impotent, modeler, chaser, statue, sculptress,
bestowed: (adj) presented, conferred, unproductive. assemblage, accumulation,
awarded, accurate. garnished: (adj) fancier, elaborate. aggregation, collection.
carving: (n) sculpture, carve, cut, proportioned: (adj) attemperate, supports: (n) ropes, chains, rigging.
statue, engraving, art, image, figure, shapely, regular, properly adapted, trefoil: (n) shamrock, tierce, medick,
etching, woodcut, bust. even, balanced. ANTONYM: (adj) lucerne, medic, alfalfa, sickle medick,
chronicles: (n) archives, history, asymmetrical. sickle Lucerne, red clover, Dutch
archive, records. puissant: (adj) powerful, mighty, clover, purple clover.
fecund: (adj) productive, prolific, forcible, hard, robust, vigorous, workman: (n) laborer, working man,
fruitful, rich, luxuriant, fat, pregnant, strong, stout, efficacious, worker, employee, hand, operative,
fructuous, reproductive, exuberant, adamantine, cogent. artisan, working person, lather,
plenteous. ANTONYMS: (adj) statuary: (n) sculptor, carver, figuriste, mechanic, artificer.
Victor Hugo 133
perhaps more than it has taken away, for it is time which has spread over the
façade that sombre hue of the centuries which makes the old age of monuments
the period of their beauty.%
But who has thrown down the two rows of statues? who has left the niches
empty? who has cut, in the very middle of the central portal, that new and
bastard arch? who has dared to frame therein that commonplace and heavy door
of carved wood, à la Louis XV., beside the arabesques of Biscornette? The men,
the architects, the artists of our day.
And if we enter the interior of the edifice, who has overthrown that colossus
of Saint Christopher, proverbial for magnitude among statues, as the grand hall
of the Palais de Justice was among halls, as the spire of Strasbourg among spires?
And those myriads of statues, which peopled all the spaces between the columns
of the nave and the choir, kneeling, standing, equestrian, men, women, children,
kings, bishops, gendarmes, in stone, in marble, in gold, in silver, in copper, in
wax even,-- who has brutally swept them away? It is not time.
And who substituted for the ancient gothic altar, splendidly encumbered
with shrines and reliquaries, that heavy marble sarcophagus, with angels' heads
and clouds, which seems a specimen pillaged from the Val-de-Grâce or the
Invalides? Who stupidly sealed that heavy anachronism of stone in the
Carlovingian pavement of Hercandus? Was it not Louis XIV., fulfilling the
request of Louis XIII.?
And who put the cold, white panes in the place of those windows," high in
color, "which caused the astonished eyes of our fathers to hesitate between the
rose of the grand portal and the arches of the apse? And what would a sub-
chanter of the sixteenth century say, on beholding the beautiful yellow wash,
with which our archiepiscopal vandals have desmeared their cathedral? He
would remember that it was the color with which the hangman smeared
"accursed" edifices; he would recall the Hôtel du Petit-Bourbon, all smeared thus,
on account of the constable's treason. "Yellow, after all, of so good a quality,"
said Sauval, "and so well recommended, that more than a century has not yet
Thesaurus
anachronism: (n) anomaly, artefact, depict, represent, blanch, blench. uninhabited.
artifact, parachronism, prochronism, colossus: (n) behemoth, monster, pillaged: (adj) plundered, despoiled,
timekeeping, mistiming, Goliath, titan, personage, hulk, ogre, blasted, desolate, desolated,
antichronism, misdating. anomaly, heavyweight. destroyed, devastated, emptier,
apse: (n) apsis, niche, belfry, tribune, equestrian: (n) rider, trooper, trainer, assaulted, made uninhabitable,
recess. buster, roughrider, horsewoman, sacked.
archiepiscopal: (adj) hierarchical. horseback rider, breaker, postilion; sarcophagus: (n) casket, urn, tomb,
color: (n, v) flush, blush, tint, tinge, (adj) mounted. shell, pall, cinerary urn, bier, hearse,
paint, stain; (adj, n, v) colour; (v) peopled: (adj) multinominal, multiple, catafalque.
redden; (n) guise, complexion; (adj, n) manifold, multiplied, multitudinous, smeared: (adj) smudged, unclean,
tone. ANTONYMS: (v) discolor, pale, populous, inhabited, thick, studded, soiled, grubby, smirched, muddy,
show, whiten, untwist, denote, teeming, crowded. ANTONYM: (adj) messy, smudgy, grimy, greasy.
caused it to lose its color." He would think that the sacred place had become
infamous, and would flee.%
And if we ascend the cathedral, without mentioning a thousand barbarisms
of every sort,-- what has become of that charming little bell tower, which rested
upon the point of intersection of the cross-roofs, and which, no less frail and no
less bold than its neighbor (also destroyed), the spire of the Sainte-Chapelle,
buried itself in the sky, farther forward than the towers, slender, pointed,
sonorous, carved in open work. An architect of good taste amputated it (1787),
and considered it sufficient to mask the wound with that large, leaden plaster,
which resembles a pot cover.
'Tis thus that the marvellous art of the Middle Ages has been treated in nearly
every country, especially in France. One can distinguish on its ruins three sorts of
lesions, all three of which cut into it at different depths; first, time, which has
insensibly notched its surface here and there, and gnawed it everywhere; next,
political and religious revolution, which, blind and wrathful by nature, have
flung themselves tumultuously upon it, torn its rich garment of carving and
sculpture, burst its rose windows, broken its necklace of arabesques and tiny
figures, torn out its statues, sometimes because of their mitres, sometimes
because of their crowns; lastly, fashions, even more grotesque and foolish, which,
since the anarchical and splendid deviations of the Renaissance, have followed
each other in the necessary decadence of architecture. Fashions have wrought
more harm than revolutions. They have cut to the quick; they have attacked the
very bone and framework of art; they have cut, slashed, disorganized, killed the
edifice, in form as in the symbol, in its consistency as well as in its beauty. And
then they have made it over; a presumption of which neither time nor
revolutions at least have been guilty. They have audaciously adjusted, in the
name of "good taste," upon the wounds of gothic architecture, their miserable
gewgaws of a day, their ribbons of marble, their pompons of metal, a veritable
leprosy of egg-shaped ornaments, volutes, whorls, draperies, garlands, fringes,
stone flames, bronze clouds, pudgy cupids, chubby- cheeked cherubim, which
begin to devour the face of art in the oratory of Catherine de Medicis, and cause
Thesaurus
anarchical: (adj) lawless, anarchistic, gobble, use up, absorb. ANTONYMS: leprosy: (adj) gangrene, corruption,
anarchist, uncontrolled, insurgent, (v) avoid, abstain, regurgitate, nibble, sphacelus, mortification; (n) measles,
chaotic, anarchal. fast, sip. meselry, lepry, eruption, infectious
audaciously: (adv) daringly, egg-shaped: (adj) oval, round, disease, lepra, Lepre.
impudently, boldly, brazenly, elliptical. pudgy: (adj) stocky, podgy, dumpy,
bravely, courageously, insolently, fringes: (n) outer edge, border. chubby, plump, obese, thick, squab,
pluckily, fearlessly, valiantly, rashly. gewgaws: (n) gay ornaments, fallals, tubby, thickset, stubby. ANTONYM:
ANTONYMS: (adv) cautiously, frippery. (adj) thin.
discreetly, carefully, fearfully, gnawed: (v) gnow, eroded. wrathful: (adj) furious, irate, wroth,
timidly. insensibly: (adv) imperceptibly, ireful, indignant, incensed, mad,
devour: (v) eat, bolt, gulp, demolish, apathetically, numbly, motionlessly, raging, resentful, infuriated, choleric.
guzzle, swallow, gorge, ingurgitate, inertly. ANTONYM: (adj) pleased.
Victor Hugo 135
it to expire, two centuries later, tortured and grimacing, in the boudoir of the
Dubarry.%
Thus, to sum up the points which we have just indicated, three sorts of
ravages to-day disfigure Gothic architecture. Wrinkles and warts on the
epidermis; this is the work of time. Deeds of violence, brutalities, contusions,
fractures; this is the work of the revolutions from Luther to Mirabeau.
Mutilations, amputations, dislocation of the joints, "restorations"; this is the
Greek, Roman, and barbarian work of professors according to Vitruvius and
Vignole. This magnificent art produced by the Vandals has been slain by the
academies. The centuries, the revolutions, which at least devastate with
impartiality and grandeur, have been joined by a cloud of school architects,
licensed, sworn, and bound by oath; defacing with the discernment and choice of
bad taste, substituting the chicorées of Louis XV. for the Gothic lace, for the
greater glory of the Parthenon. It is the kick of the ass at the dying lion. It is the
old oak crowning itself, and which, to heap the measure full, is stung, bitten, and
gnawed by caterpillars.
How far it is from the epoch when Robert Cenalis, comparing Notre-Dame de
Paris to the famous temple of Diana at Ephesus, so much lauded by the ancient
pagans, which Erostatus has immortalized, found the Gallic temple "more
excellent in length, breadth, height, and structure."
Notre-Dame is not, moreover, what can be called a complete, definite,
classified monument. It is no longer a Romanesque church; nor is it a Gothic
church. This edifice is not a type. Notre-Dame de Paris has not, like the Abbey
of Tournus, the grave and massive frame, the large and round vault, the glacial
bareness, the majestic simplicity of the edifices which have the rounded arch for
their progenitor. It is not, like the Cathedral of Bourges, the magnificent, light,
multiform, tufted, bristling efflorescent product of the pointed arch. Impossible
to class it in that ancient family of sombre, mysterious churches, low and crushed
as it were by the round arch, almost Egyptian, with the exception of the ceiling;
all hieroglyphics, all sacerdotal, all symbolical, more loaded in their ornaments,
with lozenges and zigzags, than with flowers, with flowers than with animals,
Thesaurus
bareness: (n) nakedness, nudity, capitulate. multigenerous, manifold,
austerity, starkness, emptiness, disfigure: (adj, v) mutilate, mangle, miscellaneous, multiple,
nudeness, bleakness, baldness, maim; (v) deform, blemish, mar, polymorphic, multiplex,
blankness, barrenness, plainness. damage, contort, blot, ruin, injure. polyschematist, multifold.
ANTONYMS: (n) lushness, clothed, ANTONYMS: (v) beautify, embellish, sacerdotal: (adj) hieratic, priestly,
cheerfulness, warmth. adorn, heal, decorate, enhance, clerical, ministerial, pastoral,
defacing: (n) defacement, violation. straighten. hieratical, theocratic, ecclesiastical,
devastate: (adj, v) consume, destroy, efflorescent: (adj) abloom, impalpable, religious, priestlike, capitular.
waste; (v) demolish, spoil, havoc, gritty, floral, exanthematous, mature, symbolical: (adj) emblematic,
ruin, annihilate, sack, wreck, ravage. emergent, maturer. emblematical, representative,
ANTONYMS: (v) construct, help, aid, multiform: (adj) different, figurative, sign, symbolics, allusive,
improve, preserve, save, comfort, multifarious, polymorphous, exemplary.
with animals than with men; the work of the architect less than of the bishop;
first transformation of art, all impressed with theocratic and military discipline,
taking root in the Lower Empire, and stopping with the time of William the
Conqueror. Impossible to place our Cathedral in that other family of lofty, aerial
churches, rich in painted windows and sculpture; pointed in form, bold in
attitude; communal and bourgeois as political symbols; free, capricious, lawless,
as a work of art; second transformation of architecture, no longer hieroglyphic,
immovable and sacerdotal, but artistic, progressive, and popular, which begins
at the return from the crusades, and ends with Louis IX. Notre-Dame de Paris is
not of pure Romanesque, like the first; nor of pure Arabian race, like the second.%
It is an edifice of the transition period. The Saxon architect completed the
erection of the first pillars of the nave, when the pointed arch, which dates from
the Crusade, arrived and placed itself as a conqueror upon the large
Romanesque capitals which should support only round arches. The pointed
arch, mistress since that time, constructed the rest of the church. Nevertheless,
timid and inexperienced at the start, it sweeps out, grows larger, restrains itself,
and dares no longer dart upwards in spires and lancet windows, as it did later
on, in so many marvellous cathedrals. One would say that it were conscious of
the vicinity of the heavy Romanesque pillars.
However, these edifices of the transition from the Romanesque to the Gothic,
are no less precious for study than the pure types. They express a shade of the
art which would be lost without them. It is the graft of the pointed upon the
round arch.
Notre-Dame de Paris is, in particular, a curious specimen of this variety.
Each face, each stone of the venerable monument, is a page not only of the
history of the country, but of the history of science and art as well. Thus, in order
to indicate here only the principal details, while the little Red Door almost attains
to the limits of the Gothic delicacy of the fifteenth century, the pillars of the nave,
by their size and weight, go back to the Carlovingian Abbey of Saint-Germain
des Prés. One would suppose that six centuries separated these pillars from that
door. There is no one, not even the hermetics, who does not find in the symbols
Thesaurus
capricious: (adj) fanciful, whimsical, loser. acquiescent, temporary, irresolute.
irregular, freakish, arbitrary, fickle, hieroglyphic: (adj) hieroglyphical, lancet: (adj) bistoury; (n) knife, gimlet,
changeable, impulsive, volatile, illegible; (v) arrowhead, ogham, probe, lancer, needle, gig, piercer,
variable, unpredictable. runes, cuneiform character, uncial Rimer, scoop, fizgig.
ANTONYMS: (adj) dependable, writing; (n) writing, orthography, lawless: (adj) disorderly, illicit,
predictable, stable, steady, steadfast, ideograph, hieratic script. anarchical, illegitimate, anarchic,
placid, logical, fixed, consistent, immovable: (adj, v) firm, fixed; (adj) unlawful, unruly, illegal, mutinous,
serious. adamant, steadfast, motionless, wrongful, seditious. ANTONYM:
conqueror: (n) champion, winner, unyielding, unmovable, set, (adj) orderly.
subjugator, vanquisher, hero, imperturbable, inflexible; (v) fast. theocratic: (adj) pastoral, ministerial,
superior, defeater, subduer, invader, ANTONYMS: (adj) loose, moving, clerical, priestly, capitular, theistic,
colonist, Alexander. ANTONYM: (n) mobile, flexible, movable, theocratical, prelatical.
Victor Hugo 137
of the grand portal a satisfactory compendium of their science, of which the

Church of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie was so complete a hieroglyph. Thus,
the Roman abbey, the philosophers' church, the Gothic art, Saxon art, the heavy,
round pillar, which recalls Gregory VII., the hermetic symbolism, with which
Nicolas Flamel played the prelude to Luther, papal unity, schism, Saint-Germain
des Prés, Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie,-- all are mingled, combined,
amalgamated in Notre-Dame. This central mother church is, among the ancient
churches of Paris, a sort of chimera; it has the head of one, the limbs of another,
the haunches of another, something of all.%
We repeat it, these hybrid constructions are not the least interesting for the
artist, for the antiquarian, for the historian. They make one feel to what a degree
architecture is a primitive thing, by demonstrating (what is also demonstrated by
the cyclopean vestiges, the pyramids of Egypt, the gigantic Hindoo pagodas)
that the greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than
of society; rather the offspring of a nation's effort, than the inspired flash of a
man of genius; the deposit left by a whole people; the heaps accumulated by
centuries; the residue of successive evaporations of human society,-- in a word,
species of formations. Each wave of time contributes its alluvium, each race
deposits its layer on the monument, each individual brings his stone. Thus do
the beavers, thus do the bees, thus do men. The great symbol of architecture,
Babel, is a hive.
Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of centuries. Art often
undergoes a transformation while they are pending, pendent opera interrupta; they
proceed quietly in accordance with the transformed art. The new art takes the
monument where it finds it, incrusts itself there, assimilates it to itself, develops
it according to its fancy, and finishes it if it can. The thing is accomplished
without trouble, without effort, without reaction,-- following a natural and
tranquil law. It is a graft which shoots up, a sap which circulates, a vegetation
which starts forth anew. Certainly there is matter here for many large volumes,
and often the universal history of humanity in the successive engrafting of many
arts at many levels, upon the same monument. The man, the artist, the
Thesaurus
accordance: (n) harmony, agreement, Sciuromorpha, Rodentia, Castoridae, hermetic: (adj) tight, airtight,
conformity, unison, concordance, agoutis, order Rodentia, family hermetical, impenetrable,
coincidence, accordancy, admission, Castoridae. impervious, sealed, airproof, air-
fitness, consensus, concent. compendium: (n) abridgement, tight, watertight, recondite, reclusive.
alluvium: (n) alluvion, alluvial compend, digest, synopsis, manual, hieroglyph: (n) hieratic, orthography,
deposit, alluvial sediment, deposit, epitome, anthology, outline, writing, character, hieratic script.
flood, inundation; (adj) slime, sposh, abbreviation, brief, resume. individuals: (n) people, persons.
slosh, sludge, slush. cyclopean: (adj) huge, gigantic, giant, schism: (n) division, split, rift,
antiquarian: (adj) antique, ancient. colossal, gargantuan, prodigious, cleavage, heresy, faction, discord,
ANTONYMS: (adj) young, modern, Brobdingnagian, Cyclopic, jumbo, rupture, estrangement,
new. Atlantean. Protestantism, breach. ANTONYMS:
beavers: (n) Sciuromorpha, suborder haunches: (n) buttocks. (n) convergence, heresy.
individual, is effaced in these great masses, which lack the name of their author;
human intelligence is there summed up and totalized. Time is the architect, the
nation is the builder.%
Not to consider here anything except the Christian architecture of Europe,
that younger sister of the great masonries of the Orient, it appears to the eyes as
an immense formation divided into three well-defined zones, which are
superposed, the one upon the other: the Romanesque zone, the Gothic zone, the
zone of the Renaissance, which we would gladly call the Greco-Roman zone.
The Roman layer, which is the most ancient and deepest, is occupied by the
round arch, which reappears, supported by the Greek column, in the modern
and upper layer of the Renaissance. The pointed arch is found between the two.
The edifices which belong exclusively to any one of these three layers are
perfectly distinct, uniform, and complete. There is the Abbey of Jumiéges, there
is the Cathedral of Reims, there is the Sainte-Croix of Orleans. But the three
zones mingle and amalgamate along the edges, like the colors in the solar
spectrum. Hence, complex monuments, edifices of gradation and transition.
One is Roman at the base, Gothic in the middle, Greco-Roman at the top. It is
because it was six hundred years in building. This variety is rare. The donjon
keep of d'Etampes is a specimen of it. But monuments of two formations are
more frequent. There is Notre-Dame de Paris, a pointed-arch edifice, which is
imbedded by its pillars in that Roman zone, in which are plunged the portal of
Saint-Denis, and the nave of Saint-Germain des Prés. There is the charming, half-
Gothic chapter-house of Bocherville, where the Roman layer extends half way
up. There is the cathedral of Rouen, which would be entirely Gothic if it did not
bathe the tip of its central spire in the zone of the Renaissance.
Facies non omnibus una,

No diversa tamen, qualem, etc.
However, all these shades, all these differences, do not affect the surfaces of
edifices only. It is art which has changed its skin. The very constitution of the
Thesaurus
amalgamate: (v) combine, blend, unite, dye, paint. progression, graduation, tier, step,
mix, alloy, affiliate, fuse, merge, donjon: (n) castle, dungeon, fastness, level, shade, form, extent.
compound, intermix, mingle. hold, oubliette, citadel, capitol, bread omnibus: (n, v) bus, autobus; (n)
ANTONYMS: (v) diffuse, divide, and butter, stronghold, fortress. motorbus, coach, charabanc,
disperse, split. edges: (n) boundaries. collection, anthology, compilation,
bathe: (adj, v) steep, lave, immerse, gladly: (adv, v) happily; (adv) gleefully, jitney, car, motorcoach.
soak; (v) take a bath, tub, clean, rinse, contentedly, cheerfully, fain, joyfully, portal: (n) gate, door, mouth, gateway,
bath; (n, v) swim; (n) bathing. jovially, cheerily, delightedly, porch, entry, entrance, inlet, portals,
ANTONYMS: (v) smudge, stain, soil, gladsomely, readily. ANTONYMS: entree, lips.
dip. (adv) reluctantly, unwillingly, sadly, spire: (n) pinnacle, minaret, top; (adj,
colors: (n) flag, colours, paints, banner, resentfully, miserably. n) steeple; (v) coil, hover; (adj) tower,
color, colour, ensign, pigment, tint, gradation: (n) degree, scale, ablaut, column, obelisk, pillar, monument.
Victor Hugo 139
Christian church is not attacked by it. There is always the same internal
woodwork, the same logical arrangement of parts. Whatever may be the carved
and embroidered envelope of a cathedral, one always finds beneath it--in the
state of a germ, and of a rudiment at the least-- the Roman basilica. It is eternally
developed upon the soil according to the same law. There are, invariably, two
naves, which intersect in a cross, and whose upper portion, rounded into an
apse, forms the choir; there are always the side aisles, for interior processions, for
chapels,-- a sort of lateral walks or promenades where the principal nave
discharges itself through the spaces between the pillars. That settled, the number
of chapels, doors, bell towers, and pinnacles are modified to infinity, according
to the fancy of the century, the people, and art. The service of religion once
assured and provided for, architecture does what she pleases. Statues, stained
glass, rose windows, arabesques, denticulations, capitals, bas-reliefs,-- she
combines all these imaginings according to the arrangement which best suits
her. Hence, the prodigious exterior variety of these edifices, at whose foundation
dwells so much order and unity. The trunk of a tree is immovable; the foliage is
capricious.%
Thesaurus
basilica: (n) Basilics, basilisk, church, boundlessness, immutability, glory, ANTONYM: (adj) logical.
temple, tabernacle, minster, greatness, holiness, forever, nave: (n) aisle, choir, chancel, halfway
meetinghouse, kirk, chapel, perpetuity. ANTONYM: (n) house, hub, vestry, transept,
cathedral, Bethel. limitedness. omphalos, boss, navel, calvary.
combines: (adj) combined. intersect: (v) cut, divide, meet, bisect, rudiment: (n) basis, fundamental,
embroidered: (adj) ornate, inflated, intersection, traverse, interlace, germ, element, egg, principle,
exaggerated, bewrought, decorated. intertwist, intertwine, interweave, essential, embryo, bedrock,
germ: (n) beginning, bacterium, bud, see. fundamentals, vestige.
sprout, kernel, microbe, embryo, egg, lateral: (adj) sidelong, collateral, woodwork: (n) woodworking, joinery,
bacillus, root, seed. peripheral, accidental, indirect, cabinetwork, millwork,
infinity: (n) infinite, immensity, incidental, parallel, being without; cabinetmaking, work, trade, craft,
infiniteness, infinitude, (adv) sideward, laterally, sideway. wainscot, skirting board, lining.
Victor Hugo 141
CHAPTER II
A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF PARIS
We have just attempted to restore, for the reader's benefit, that admirable
church of Notre-Dame de Paris. We have briefly pointed out the greater part of
the beauties which it possessed in the fifteenth century, and which it lacks to-
day; but we have omitted the principal thing,-- the view of Paris which was then
to be obtained from the summits of its towers.%
That was, in fact,-- when, after having long groped one's way up the dark
spiral which perpendicularly pierces the thick wall of the belfries, one emerged,
at last abruptly, upon one of the lofty platforms inundated with light and air,--
that was, in fact, a fine picture which spread out, on all sides at once, before the
eye; a spectacle sui generis, of which those of our readers who have had the good
fortune to see a Gothic city entire, complete, homogeneous,-- a few of which still
remain, Nuremberg in Bavaria and Vittoria in Spain,-- can readily form an idea;
or even smaller specimens, provided that they are well preserved,-- Vitré in
Brittany, Nordhausen in Prussia.
The Paris of three hundred and fifty years ago-- the Paris of the fifteenth
century-- was already a gigantic city. We Parisians generally make a mistake as
to the ground which we think that we have gained, since Paris has not increased
Thesaurus
admirable: (adj) fine, outstanding, monstrous, vast, big, immense, majestic. ANTONYMS: (adj) short,
beautiful, great, commendable, massive. ANTONYMS: (adj) small, lowly, base, modest, deferential,
lovely, good, creditable, tiny, little, insignificant, short, humble.
praiseworthy, worthy, grand. miniature. perpendicularly: (adv) uprightly,
ANTONYMS: (adj) appalling, poor, inundated: (adj) swamped, awash, erectly, straightly, upright,
unworthy, despicable, contemptible, overwhelmed, afloat, engulfed, orthogonally, sheerly, precipitously,
detestable, dishonorable, rotten, submerged, fuller, weak, suffused, normally, plumb; (adv, v) sheer; (adj,
unimpressive, loathsome, low. submersed, soaked. ANTONYM: adv) directly.
attempted: (adj) unsuccessful. (adj) dry. spiral: (n, v) coil, loop, roll; (n) helix,
gained: (adj) extrinsic. lofty: (adj, v) high, elevated; (adj) spire; (adj, v) helical; (v) screw,
gigantic: (adj) colossal, enormous, exalted, eminent, arrogant, grand, gyrate, corkscrew, circle; (adj, n)
large, huge, giant, stupendous, tall, haughty, great, distinguished, volute. ANTONYM: (v) plummet.
much over one-third since the time of Louis XI. It has certainly lost more in
beauty than it has gained in size.%
Paris had its birth, as the reader knows, in that old island of the City which
has the form of a cradle. The strand of that island was its first boundary wall, the
Seine its first moat. Paris remained for many centuries in its island state, with
two bridges, one on the north, the other on the south; and two bridge heads,
which were at the same time its gates and its fortresses,-- the Grand-Châtelet on
the right bank, the Petit-Châtelet on the left. Then, from the date of the kings of
the first race, Paris, being too cribbed and confined in its island, and unable to
return thither, crossed the water. Then, beyond the Grand, beyond the Petit-
Châtelet, a first circle of walls and towers began to infringe upon the country on
the two sides of the Seine. Some vestiges of this ancient enclosure still remained
in the last century; to-day, only the memory of it is left, and here and there a
tradition, the Baudets or Baudoyer gate, "Porte Bagauda".
Little by little, the tide of houses, always thrust from the heart of the city
outwards, overflows, devours, wears away, and effaces this wall. Philip
Augustus makes a new dike for it. He imprisons Paris in a circular chain of great
towers, both lofty and solid. For the period of more than a century, the houses
press upon each other, accumulate, and raise their level in this basin, like water
in a reservoir. They begin to deepen; they pile story upon story; they mount
upon each other; they gush forth at the top, like all laterally compressed growth,
and there is a rivalry as to which shall thrust its head above its neighbors, for the
sake of getting a little air. The street glows narrower and deeper, every space is
overwhelmed and disappears. The houses finally leap the wall of Philip
Augustus, and scatter joyfully over the plain, without order, and all askew, like
runaways. There they plant themselves squarely, cut themselves gardens from
the fields, and take their ease. Beginning with 1367, the city spreads to such an
extent into the suburbs, that a new wall becomes necessary, particularly on the
right bank; Charles V. builds it. But a city like Paris is perpetually growing. It is
only such cities that become capitals. They are funnels, into which all the
geographical, political, moral, and intellectual water-sheds of a country, all the
Thesaurus
askew: (adj) lopsided, cockeyed, infringe: (v) violate, break, impinge, sidewise, sidely, collaterally,
crooked, oblique, askant, contravene, disobey, intrude, sidewardly, sideway, lengthways,
catawampus; (adj, adv) wrong, entrench, trespass, invade, infract, sideling; (adj) crabwise, parallel.
crookedly; (adj, v) wry; (adv) skew, pirate. ANTONYMS: (v) uphold, ANTONYM: (adv) logically.
agley. ANTONYMS: (adj) level, comply, honor. perpetually: (adv) eternally,
plumb, true, centered, aligned, even. joyfully: (adv) joyously, merrily, gaily, everlastingly, always, incessantly,
dike: (n) channel, ditch, trench, gleefully, buoyantly, cheerily, continually, endlessly, permanently,
embankment, jetty, bank, trough, jubilantly, pleasantly, mirthfully; unceasingly, ceaselessly, ever; (adj,
weir, levee; (n, v) dyke; (v) bar. (adv, v) happily; (adj, adv) cheerfully. adv) forever. ANTONYMS: (adv)
gush: (n, v) flood, flow, spurt, jet, ANTONYMS: (adv) joylessly, erratically, sporadically.
discharge, stream, rush, surge; (n) miserably, despondently. vestiges: (n) leftovers, relics, ruins,
burst, effusion; (v) course. laterally: (adv) sidelongly, obliquely, remnants, remainder.
Victor Hugo 143
natural slopes of a people, pour; wells of civilization, so to speak, and also

sewers, where commerce, industry, intelligence, population,-- all that is sap, all
that is life, all that is the soul of a nation, filters and amasses unceasingly, drop
by drop, century by century.%
So Charles V.'s wall suffered the fate of that of Philip Augustus. At the end of
the fifteenth century, the Faubourg strides across it, passes beyond it, and runs
farther. In the sixteenth, it seems to retreat visibly, and to bury itself deeper and
deeper in the old city, so thick had the new city already become outside of it.
Thus, beginning with the fifteenth century, where our story finds us, Paris had
already outgrown the three concentric circles of walls which, from the time of
Julian the Apostate, existed, so to speak, in germ in the Grand-Châtelet and the
Petit-Châtelet. The mighty city had cracked, in succession, its four enclosures of
walls, like a child grown too large for his garments of last year. Under Louis XI.,
this sea of houses was seen to be pierced at intervals by several groups of ruined
towers, from the ancient wall, like the summits of hills in an inundation,-- like
archipelagos of the old Paris submerged beneath the new. Since that time Paris
has undergone yet another transformation, unfortunately for our eyes; but it has
passed only one more wall, that of Louis XV., that miserable wall of mud and
spittle, worthy of the king who built it, worthy of the poet who sung it,
Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant.
In the fifteenth century, Paris was still divided into three wholly distinct and
separate towns, each having its own physiognomy, its own specialty, its
manners, customs, privileges, and history: the City, the University, the Town.
The City, which occupied the island, was the most ancient, the smallest, and the
mother of the other two, crowded in between them like (may we be pardoned
the comparison) a little old woman between two large and handsome maidens.
The University covered the left bank of the Seine, from the Tournelle to the Tour
de Nesle, points which correspond in the Paris of to-day, the one to the wine
market, the other to the mint. Its wall included a large part of that plain where
Thesaurus
concentric: (adj) homocentric, metier, specialism, field, long suit, endlessly, ceaselessly, continually,
unrelieved, coaxial, axial, focal, covenant, feature, particularity, unremittingly, unendingly,
azygous, umbilical. foible, mannerism. constantly, always, perpetually,
physiognomy: (n) face, kisser, phiz, spittle: (n) slaver, slobber, spit, uninterruptedly, eternally.
visage, mug, look, brow, contour, phlegm, sputum, drivel, dribble, ANTONYM: (adv) acutely.
aspect, physnomy , metoposcopy. drool, spital, mucus, expectoration. visibly: (adv) apparently, noticeably,
pierced: (adj) punctured, perforate, submerged: (adj) sunken, immersed, manifestly, obviously, plainly,
penetrated, cut, cleft. submersed, underwater, subaquatic, perceptibly, appreciably, clearly,
rend: (v) pull, lacerate, break, divide, submarine, covered, inundated, discernibly, overtly, conspicuously.
rive, tear, disrupt, mangle; (n, v) rip, flooded, semiaquatic; (pron) ANTONYMS: (adv) imperceptibly,
split, slash. drowned. invisibly, secretly, ambiguously.
specialty: (n) speciality, specialization, unceasingly: (adv) incessantly, wells: (n) spring.
Julian had built his hot baths. The hill of Sainte-Geneviève was enclosed in it.
The culminating point of this sweep of walls was the Papal gate, that is to say,
near the present site of the Pantheon. The Town, which was the largest of the
three fragments of Paris, held the right bank. Its quay, broken or interrupted in
many places, ran along the Seine, from the Tour de Billy to the Tour du Bois; that
is to say, from the place where the granary stands to-day, to the present site of
the Tuileries. These four points, where the Seine intersected the wall of the
capital, the Tournelle and the Tour de Nesle on the right, the Tour de Billy and
the Tour du Bois on the left, were called pre-eminently, "the four towers of
Paris." The Town encroached still more extensively upon the fields than the
University. The culminating point of the Town wall (that of Charles V.) was at
the gates of Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, whose situation has not been
changed.%
As we have just said, each of these three great divisions of Paris was a town,
but too special a town to be complete, a city which could not get along without
the other two. Hence three entirely distinct aspects: churches abounded in the
City; palaces, in the Town; and colleges, in the University. Neglecting here the
originalities, of secondary importance in old Paris, and the capricious regulations
regarding the public highways, we will say, from a general point of view, taking
only masses and the whole group, in this chaos of communal jurisdictions, that
the island belonged to the bishop, the right bank to the provost of the merchants,
the left bank to the Rector; over all ruled the provost of Paris, a royal not a
municipal official. The City had Notre-Dame; the Town, the Louvre and the
Hôtel de Ville; the University, the Sorbonne. The Town had the markets (Halles);
the city, the Hospital; the University, the Pré-aux-Clercs. Offences committed by
the scholars on the left bank were tried in the law courts on the island, and were
punished on the right bank at Montfauçon; unless the rector, feeling the
university to be strong and the king weak, intervened; for it was the students'
privilege to be hanged on their own grounds.
The greater part of these privileges, it may be noted in passing, and there
were some even better than the above, had been extorted from the kings by
Thesaurus
baths: (n) pool, bath, spring. ANTONYMS: (adv) insignificantly, eminently.
communal: (adj) common, public, barely. quay: (n) dock, jetty, pier,
mutual, joint, civic, social, national, granary: (n) garner, warehouse, embankment, platform, port, berth,
collective, community, shared, storage, grange, store, storehouse, harbour, harbor, basin, waterfront.
cooperative. ANTONYMS: (adj) cornloft, depot, farm, lathe, entrepot. rector: (n) minister, pastor, president,
private, individual, personal. intersected: (adj) decussated. manager, principal, governor,
culminating: (adj) uppermost, best, municipal: (adj) city, civic, urban, clergyman, curate, parson, director,
crowning, perfect, supreme, top. public, civil, national, town, priest.
extensively: (adv) largely, generally, metropolitan, domestic, executive, sweep: (adj, v) brush, rake; (n, v)
greatly, lengthily, sweepingly, community. ANTONYM: (adj) range, reach, sway; (n) compass,
broadly, comprehensively, private. expanse, scope, field; (v) sail; (adj, n)
spaciously, vastly, roomily, fully. pre-eminently: (adv) principally, curve.
Victor Hugo 145
revolts and mutinies. It is the course of things from time immemorial; the king
only lets go when the people tear away. There is an old charter which puts the
matter naively: apropos of fidelity: Civibus fidelitas in reges, quoe tamen aliquoties
seditionibus interrypta, multa peperit privileyia.%
In the fifteenth century, the Seine bathed five islands within the walls of
Paris: Louviers island, where there were then trees, and where there is no longer
anything but wood; l'ile aux Vaches, and l'ile Notre-Dame, both deserted, with
the exception of one house, both fiefs of the bishop-- in the seventeenth century,
a single island was formed out of these two, which was built upon and named
l'ile Saint-Louis-- , lastly the City, and at its point, the little islet of the cow tender,
which was afterwards engulfed beneath the platform of the Pont-Neuf. The City
then had five bridges: three on the right, the Pont Notre-Dame, and the Pont au
Change, of stone, the Pont aux Meuniers, of wood; two on the left, the Petit Pont,
of stone, the Pont Saint-Michel, of wood; all loaded with houses.
The University had six gates, built by Philip Augustus; there were, beginning
with la Tournelle, the Porte Saint- Victor, the Porte Bordelle, the Porte Papale, the
Porte Saint- Jacques, the Porte Saint-Michel, the Porte Saint-Germain. The Town
had six gates, built by Charles V.; beginning with the Tour de Billy they were: the
Porte Saint-Antoine, the Porte du Temple, the Porte Saint-Martin, the Porte Saint-
Denis, the Porte Montmartre, the Porte Saint-Honoré. All these gates were
strong, and also handsome, which does not detract from strength. A large, deep
moat, with a brisk current during the high water of winter, bathed the base of the
wall round Paris; the Seine furnished the water. At night, the gates were shut,
the river was barred at both ends of the city with huge iron chains, and Paris
slept tranquilly.
From a bird's-eye view, these three burgs, the City, the Town, and the
University, each presented to the eye an inextricable skein of eccentrically
tangled streets. Nevertheless, at first sight, one recognized the fact that these
three fragments formed but one body. One immediately perceived three long
parallel streets, unbroken, undisturbed, traversing, almost in a straight line, all
three cities, from one end to the other; from North to South, perpendicularly, to
Thesaurus
apropos: (adj) appropriate, applicable, damage. ANTONYMS: (v) increase, faithfulness, adherence, allegiance,
apposite, eligible, apt, pertinent, heighten, enhance. loyalty, faith, dedication, exactness;
germane, pat; (adv) timely, eccentrically: (adv) queerly, unusually, (adj, n) honesty, truth. ANTONYMS:
seasonably, incidentally. oddly, outlandishly, irregularly, (n) infidelity, unfaithfulness,
ANTONYMS: (adj) inappropriate, bizarrely, whimsically, wackily, disloyalty, inaccuracy, faithlessness,
irrelevant, malapropos, unsuitable; quirkily, strangely, originally. dishonesty, unreliability.
(adv) irrelevantly, untimely, ANTONYM: (adv) sensibly. moat: (n) ditch, dike, dyke, trench,
inopportunely. engulfed: (adj) overcome, weak, main, gully, sewer, siphon, sough,
bathed: (adj) sweaty. overwhelmed, conquered, barrier; (v) bulwark.
detract: (v) depreciate, defame, overpowered, swamped, powerless, skein: (n, v) mesh; (n) tangle, flock,
derogate, deprecate, traduce, flooded, enclosed, beaten, enveloped. maze, covey, snarl, bevy, tuft; (v) net,
disparage, lose, cut, slander, subtract, fidelity: (n) constancy, devotion, plexus, sleeve.
the Seine, which bound them together, mingled them, infused them in each
other, poured and transfused the people incessantly, from one to the other, and
made one out of the three. The first of these streets ran from the Porte Saint-
Martin: it was called the Rue Saint-Jacques in the University, Rue de la Juiverie in
the City, Rue Saint-Martin in the Town; it crossed the water twice, under the
name of the Petit Pont and the Pont Notre- Dame. The second, which was called
the Rue de la Harpe on the left bank, Rue de la Barillerié in the island, Rue Saint-
Denis on the right bank, Pont Saint-Michel on one arm of the Seine, Pont au
Change on the other, ran from the Porte Saint-Michel in the University, to the
Porte Saint-Denis in the Town. However, under all these names, there were but
two streets, parent streets, generating streets,-- the two arteries of Paris. All the
other veins of the triple city either derived their supply from them or emptied
into them.%
Independently of these two principal streets, piercing Paris diametrically in
its whole breadth, from side to side, common to the entire capital, the City and
the University had also each its own great special street, which ran lengthwise
by them, parallel to the Seine, cutting, as it passed, at right angles, the two
arterial thoroughfares. Thus, in the Town, one descended in a straight line from
the Porte Saint-Antoine to the Porte Saint-Honoré; in the University from the
Porte Saint-Victor to the Porte Saint-Germain. These two great thoroughfares
intersected by the two first, formed the canvas upon which reposed, knotted and
crowded together on every hand, the labyrinthine network of the streets of
Paris. In the incomprehensible plan of these streets, one distinguished likewise,
on looking attentively, two clusters of great streets, like magnified sheaves of
grain, one in the University, the other in the Town, which spread out gradually
from the bridges to the gates.
Some traces of this geometrical plan still exist to-day.
Now, what aspect did this whole present, when, as viewed from the summit
of the towers of Notre-Dame, in 1482? That we shall try to describe.
For the spectator who arrived, panting, upon that pinnacle, it was first a
dazzling confusing view of roofs, chimneys, streets, bridges, places, spires, bell
Thesaurus
arterial: (n) arterials, cardinal, oppositely, polarly, diametrally, endways, endwise, in company,
foremost, central, principal, prime, exactly, altogether, entirely, wholly, across time; (adj) linear, longitudinal.
arteries, master, capital, major, basic. fairly, quite. ANTONYM: (adj) crosswise.
arteries: (adj) arterial. infused: (adj) mixed. magnified: (adj) enlarged, inflated,
attentively: (adv) carefully, mindfully, labyrinthine: (adj) involved, enlarge, hyperbolic, hypertrophied,
watchfully, observantly, heedfully, convoluted, intricate, knotty, increased, overblown, overstated,
vigilantly, cautiously, considerately, complex, Byzantine, complicated, puffed up, made larger.
diligently, alertly, obligingly. mazy, circuitous; (adj, v) labyrinthian; pinnacle: (n) apex, top, height, crest,
ANTONYMS: (adv) unhelpfully, (v) labyrinthic. ANTONYM: (adj) zenith, crown, summit, acme,
neglectfully, abruptly, carelessly, direct. heyday, climax, culmination.
hastily, casually. lengthwise: (adv) along, longwise, ANTONYMS: (n) nadir, base, bottom,
diametrically: (adv) utterly, totally, endlong, longways, longitudinally, trough.
Victor Hugo 147
towers. Everything struck your eye at once: the carved gable, the pointed roof,
the turrets suspended at the angles of the walls; the stone pyramids of the
eleventh century, the slate obelisks of the fifteenth; the round, bare tower of the
donjon keep; the square and fretted tower of the church; the great and the little,
the massive and the aerial. The eye was, for a long time, wholly lost in this
labyrinth, where there was nothing which did not possess its originality, its
reason, its genius, its beauty, nothing which did not proceed from art; beginning
with the smallest house, with its painted and carved front, with external beams,
elliptical door, with projecting stories, to the royal Louvre, which then had a
colonnade of towers. But these are the principal masses which were then to be
distinguished when the eye began to accustom itself to this tumult of edifices.%
In the first place, the City.-- "The island of the City," as Sauval says, who, in
spite of his confused medley, sometimes has such happy turns of expression,--
"the island of the city is made like a great ship, stuck in the mud and run
aground in the current, near the centre of the Seine."
We have just explained that, in the fifteenth century, this ship was anchored
to the two banks of the river by five bridges. This form of a ship had also struck
the heraldic scribes; for it is from that, and not from the siege by the Normans,
that the ship which blazons the old shield of Paris, comes, according to Favyn
and Pasquier. For him who understands how to decipher them, armorial
bearings are algebra, armorial bearings have a tongue. The whole history of the
second half of the Middle Ages is written in armorial bearings,-- the first half is
in the symbolism of the Roman churches. They are the hieroglyphics of
feudalism, succeeding those of theocracy.
Thus the City first presented itself to the eye, with its stern to the east, and its
prow to the west. Turning towards the prow, one had before one an
innumerable flock of ancient roofs, over which arched broadly the lead-covered
apse of the Sainte-Chapelle, like an elephant's haunches loaded with its tower.
Only here, this tower was the most audacious, the most open, the most
ornamented spire of cabinet-maker's work that ever let the sky peep through its
cone of lace. In front of Notre-Dame, and very near at hand, three streets opened
Thesaurus
accustom: (v) acquaint, habituate, enterprising, insolent. ANTONYMS: peep: (n, v) glance, peek, look, gaze,
season, adjust, teach, acclimate, (adj) modest, timid, cautious, polite, glint, squeal; (n) glimpse, cheep; (v)
harden, adapt, inure, train, custom. reserved, meek, humble, fearful, chirp, peer, pry. ANTONYMS: (v)
aground: (adj, adv, v) shipwrecked; discreet, respectful. stare, gaze; (n) examination.
(adv, v) grounded, foundered, colonnade: (n) arcade, circus, prow: (n) bow, stem, fore, beak, nose,
swamped, wrecked; (adj, v) high and construction, structure, stoa, portico, obeisance, forepart, curtain call,
dry; (adv) ashore; (v) capsized, cast column, crescent, mall, peristyle, bowknot, bowing, arc.
away; (adj, adv) marooned, stuck. piazza. theocracy: (n) democracy, form of
ANTONYM: (adj) sunken. ornamented: (adj) embellished, government, ideology, divine
audacious: (adj) brash, arrogant, beautified, fancy, flowery, ornate, sovereignty, political system,
barefaced, bold, daring, impudent, adorned, bedecked, decked, oligarchy, political orientation,
intrepid, brave, shameless, festooned, feathered, florid. political theory.
into the cathedral square,-- a fine square, lined with ancient houses. Over the
south side of this place bent the wrinkled and sullen façade of the Hôtel Dieu,
and its roof, which seemed covered with warts and pustules. Then, on the right
and the left, to east and west, within that wall of the City, which was yet so
contracted, rose the bell towers of its one and twenty churches, of every date, of
every form, of every size, from the low and wormeaten belfry of Saint-Denis du
Pas (Carcer Glaueini) to the slender needles of Saint-Pierre aux Boeufs and Saint-
Landry.%
Behind Notre-Dame, the cloister and its Gothic galleries spread out towards
the north; on the south, the half-Roman palace of the bishop; on the east, the
desert point of the Terrain. In this throng of houses the eye also distinguished,
by the lofty open-work mitres of stone which then crowned the roof itself, even
the most elevated windows of the palace, the Hôtel given by the city, under
Charles VI., to Juvénal des Ursins; a little farther on, the pitch-covered sheds of
the Palus Market; in still another quarter the new apse of Saint- Germain le
Vieux, lengthened in 1458, with a bit of the Rue aux Febves; and then, in places,
a square crowded with people; a pillory, erected at the corner of a street; a fine
fragment of the pavement of Philip Augustus, a magnificent flagging, grooved
for the horses' feet, in the middle of the road, and so badly replaced in the
sixteenth century by the miserable cobblestones, called the "pavement of the
League;" a deserted back courtyard, with one of those diaphanous staircase
turrets, such as were erected in the fifteenth century, one of which is still to be
seen in the Rue des Bourdonnais. Lastly, at the right of the Sainte-Chapelle,
towards the west, the Palais de Justice rested its group of towers at the edge of
the water. The thickets of the king's gardens, which covered the western point of
the City, masked the Island du Passeur. As for the water, from the summit of the
towers of Notre-Dame one hardly saw it, on either side of the City; the Seine was
hidden by bridges, the bridges by houses.
And when the glance passed these bridges, whose roofs were visibly green,
rendered mouldy before their time by the vapors from the water, if it was
directed to the left, towards the University, the first edifice which struck it was a
Thesaurus
belfry: (n) apse, room, bell tower, flagging: (adj) tired, fading, lazy, mouldy: (adj) moldy, mildewy, fusty,
head, pinnacle, belltower. slack, failing, remiss, pendulous; (v) musty, stale, trite, hackneyed, well-
cloister: (n) abbey, priory, monastery, lame, halting, enervate; (n) pavement. worn, putrid, mould, frowsty.
arcade, friary, piazza, nunnery, ANTONYM: (adj) prompt. sullen: (adj, n) morose, sulky, sour;
circus, veranda; (v) encircle, insulate. grooved: (adj) fluted, ribbed, (adj) gloomy, gruff, glum, moody,
crowned: (adj) laureled, fulfilled, channeled, established, flutelike, dark, cross, surly; (adj, v) grim.
browbound, incoronate, successful. accustomed, methodical, ridged, fine. ANTONYMS: (adj) bright, cheery; (n)
diaphanous: (adj) sheer, filmy, gauzy, lengthened: (adj) elongated, cheeriness.
thin, translucent, lucid, clear, hyaline, prolonged, long, protracted, vapors: (n) megrims, mist, blues, blue
gossamer, dainty, hyaloid. expanded, elongate, longer, devils, fog, depression,
ANTONYMS: (adj) thick, opaque, lingering, extensive, stretched out, hypochondriasis, pessimism, spleen,
heavy, robust. lengthy. brume, horrors.
Victor Hugo 149
large, low sheaf of towers, the Petit-Chàtelet, whose yawning gate devoured the
end of the Petit-Pont. Then, if your view ran along the bank, from east to west,
from the Tournelle to the Tour de Nesle, there was a long cordon of houses, with
carved beams, stained-glass windows, each story projecting over that beneath it,
an interminable zigzag of bourgeois gables, frequently interrupted by the mouth
of a street, and from time to time also by the front or angle of a huge stone
mansion, planted at its ease, with courts and gardens, wings and detached
buildings, amid this populace of crowded and narrow houses, like a grand
gentleman among a throng of rustics. There were five or six of these mansions on
the quay, from the house of Lorraine, which shared with the Bernardins the
grand enclosure adjoining the Tournelle, to the Hôtel de Nesle, whose principal
tower ended Paris, and whose pointed roofs were in a position, during three
months of the year, to encroach, with their black triangles, upon the scarlet disk
of the setting sun.%
This side of the Seine was, however, the least mercantile of the two. Students
furnished more of a crowd and more noise there than artisans, and there was not,
properly speaking, any quay, except from the Pont Saint-Michel to the Tour de
Nesle. The rest of the bank of the Seine was now a naked strand, the same as
beyond the Bernardins; again, a throng of houses, standing with their feet in the
water, as between the two bridges.
There was a great uproar of laundresses; they screamed, and talked, and sang
from morning till night along the beach, and beat a great deal of linen there, just
as in our day. This is not the least of the gayeties of Paris.
The University presented a dense mass to the eye. From one end to the other,
it was homogeneous and compact. The thousand roofs, dense, angular, clinging
to each other, composed, nearly all, of the same geometrical element, offered,
when viewed from above, the aspect of a crystallization of the same substance.
The capricious ravine of streets did not cut this block of houses into too
disproportionate slices. The forty-two colleges were scattered about in a fairly
equal manner, and there were some everywhere. The amusingly varied crests of
these beautiful edifices were the product of the same art as the simple roofs
Thesaurus
amusingly: (adv) drolly, comically, overstep, penetrate. ravine: (n, v) gap, cleft; (n) chasm,
humorously, divertingly, wittily, interminable: (adj) endless, eternal, canyon, dell, defile, gully, glen, pass,
pleasingly, jocularly, funnily, incessant, infinite, illimitable, abyss, valley.
interestingly, pleasantly, charmingly. immeasurable, unending, ceaseless, sheaf: (n) fagot, faggot, bunch, bale,
crystallization: (n) crystallisation, timeless, continual, unlimited. package, bundle, truss, stack, parcel,
crystal, crystallizing, condensation, ANTONYMS: (adj) temporary, finite, fardel, packet.
chemical phenomenon, crystallurgy, intermittent, sporadic, concise. wings: (n) insignia, agency.
efflorescence, formation; (adj) mercantile: (adj) commercial, business, yawning: (adj, v) gaping, oscitant; (n)
precipitation; (v) crystallize. trade, mercenary, economic, yawn, hiation, pandiculation,
encroach: (adj, v) infringe; (v) intrude, merchant, trading, moneymaking, oscitancy; (adj) cavernous, open,
violate, entrench, impinge, trench, commercial relations, for profit, drowsy, profound, sleepy.
contravene, infiltrate, invade, industrial. ANTONYMS: (adj) cramped, narrow.
which %they overshot, and were, actually, only a multiplication of the square or
the cube of the same geometrical figure. Hence they complicated the whole
effect, without disturbing it; completed, without overloading it. Geometry is
harmony. Some fine mansions here and there made magnificent outlines against
the picturesque attics of the left bank. The house of Nevers, the house of Rome,
the house of Reims, which have disappeared; the Hôtel de Cluny, which still
exists, for the consolation of the artist, and whose tower was so stupidly
deprived of its crown a few years ago. Close to Cluny, that Roman palace, with
fine round arches, were once the hot baths of Julian. There were a great many
abbeys, of a beauty more devout, of a grandeur more solemn than the mansions,
but not less beautiful, not less grand. Those which first caught the eye were the
Bernardins, with their three bell towers; Sainte-Geneviève, whose square tower,
which still exists, makes us regret the rest; the Sorbonne, half college, half
monastery, of which so admirable a nave survives; the fine quadrilateral cloister
of the Mathurins; its neighbor, the cloister of Saint-Benoit, within whose walls
they have had time to cobble up a theatre, between the seventh and eighth
editions of this book; the Cordeliers, with their three enormous adjacent gables;
the Augustins, whose graceful spire formed, after the Tour de Nesle, the second
denticulation on this side of Paris, starting from the west. The colleges, which
are, in fact, the intermediate ring between the cloister and the world, hold the
middle position in the monumental series between the Hôtels and the abbeys,
with a severity full of elegance, sculpture less giddy than the palaces, an
architecture less severe than the convents. Unfortunately, hardly anything
remains of these monuments, where Gothic art combined with so just a balance,
richness and economy. The churches (and they were numerous and splendid in
the University, and they were graded there also in all the ages of architecture,
from the round arches of Saint-Julian to the pointed arches of Saint-Séverin), the
churches dominated the whole; and, like one harmony more in this mass of
harmonies, they pierced in quick succession the multiple open work of the gables
with slashed spires, with open-work bell towers, with slender pinnacles, whose
line was also only a magnificent exaggeration of the acute angle of the roofs.
Thesaurus
cobble: (n) cobblestone, sett, boulder, godly. ANTONYMS: (adj) irreligious, quadrilateral: (adj) quadrangular,
brick; (v) tinker, patch, vamp, botch, agnostic, impious, irreverent, multilateral, bilateral, tetragonal; (n)
restore, patch up, refashion. unbelieving, undevout, unholy, quad, tetragon, parallelogram,
cube: (v) dice, chop, multiply; (n) third atheistic, secular, uncommitted. rectangle, polygonal shape,
power, suffrutex, subshrub, giddy: (adj, v) flighty; (adj) dizzy, faint, trapezium, trapezoid.
rhomboid, hexahedron, tetragon, city silly, changeable, vertiginous, stupidly: (adv) dully, thickly, obtusely,
block; (adj) unworldly. featherbrained, light, fickle, senselessly, fatuously, slowly,
denticulation: (n) denticle, jag, barb, capricious; (adv) careless. insanely, unwisely, doltishly, crassly,
cleft. ANTONYMS: (adj) serious, dull. densely. ANTONYMS: (adv)
devout: (adj) pious, devoted, saintly, overloading: (n) level of congestion, shrewdly, brightly, sensibly, wisely,
heartfelt, holy, dear, devotional, congestion, overcrowding, sensitively, prudently, carefully.
hearty, earnest; (adj, v) pure; (adj, n) overfilling.
Victor Hugo 151
The ground of the University was hilly; Mount Sainte- Geneviève formed an
enormous mound to the south; and it was a sight to see from the summit of
Notre-Dame how that throng of narrow and tortuous streets (to-day the Latin
Quarter), those bunches of houses which, spread out in every direction from the
top of this eminence, precipitated themselves in disorder, and almost
perpendicularly down its flanks, nearly to the water's edge, having the air, some
of falling, others of clambering up again, and all of holding to one another. A
continual flux of a thousand black points which passed each other on the
pavements made everything move before the eyes; it was the populace seen thus
from aloft and afar.%
Lastly, in the intervals of these roofs, of these spires, of these accidents of
numberless edifices, which bent and writhed, and jagged in so eccentric a
manner the extreme line of the University, one caught a glimpse, here and there,
of a great expanse of moss-grown wall, a thick, round tower, a crenellated city
gate, shadowing forth the fortress; it was the wall of Philip Augustus. Beyond,
the fields gleamed green; beyond, fled the roads, along which were scattered a
few more suburban houses, which became more infrequent as they became more
distant. Some of these faubourgs were important: there were, first, starting from
la Tournelle, the Bourg Saint-Victor, with its one arch bridge over the Bièvre, its
abbey where one could read the epitaph of Louis le Gros, epitaphium Ludovici
Grossi, and its church with an octagonal spire, flanked with four little bell towers
of the eleventh century (a similar one can be seen at Etampes; it is not yet
destroyed); next, the Bourg Saint- Marceau, which already had three churches
and one convent; then, leaving the mill of the Gobelins and its four white walls
on the left, there was the Faubourg Saint-Jacques with the beautiful carved cross
in its square; the church of Saint- Jacques du Haut-Pas, which was then Gothic,
pointed, charming; Saint-Magloire, a fine nave of the fourteenth century, which
Napoleon turned into a hayloft; Notre-Dame des Champs, where there were
Byzantine mosaics; lastly, after having left behind, full in the country, the
Monastery des Chartreux, a rich edifice contemporary with the Palais de Justice,
with its little garden divided into compartments, and the haunted ruins of
Vauvert, the eye fell, to the west, upon the three Roman spires of Saint-Germain
Thesaurus
aloft: (adj, adv) overhead; (adv) up, on epitaphic, legend. deficient. ANTONYMS: (adj)
high, over, aloof, upwards, uphill, faubourgs: (n) banlieue, entourage, common, regular, usual.
above ground; (prep) upon; (adj) environs, outskirts, precincts, jagged: (adj) rough, angular, irregular,
eminent, lofty. purlieus. crooked, craggy, toothed, scraggy,
convent: (n, v) abbey, cloister; (n) hayloft: (n) loft, garret, attic. rugged, bumpy, jaggy; (adj, n)
monastery, friary, priory, nunnery, hilly: (adj) steep, rugged, ragged. ANTONYMS: (adj) smooth,
community, retreat. mountainous, cragged, rough, rocky, even, straight, blunt, level.
crenellated: (adj) crenelated, castled, lofty, irregular, tumulous, knobby, shadowing: (n) screening, shielding,
castellated, battlemented, crenelate, unsmooth. ANTONYM: (adj) flat. shading, pursuit, cast shadowing;
embattled, fancier, fancy, indented. infrequent: (adj) few, rare, scarce, (adj) following surreptitiously.
epitaph: (n) memorial, lettering, seldom, exceptional, occasional, writhed: (adj) crooked, writhen,
inscription, commemoration, unwonted, sparse, sporadic, unusual, distorted, twisted.
des Prés. The Bourg Saint-Germain, already a large community, formed fifteen
or twenty streets in the rear; the pointed bell tower of Saint- Sulpice marked one
corner of the town. Close beside it one descried the quadrilateral enclosure of
the fair of Saint- Germain, where the market is situated to-day; then the abbot's
pillory, a pretty little round tower, well capped with a leaden cone; the
brickyard was further on, and the Rue du Four, which led to the common
bakehouse, and the mill on its hillock, and the lazar house, a tiny house, isolated
and half seen.%
But that which attracted the eye most of all, and fixed it for a long time on
that point, was the abbey itself. It is certain that this monastery, which had a
grand air, both as a church and as a seignory; that abbatial palace, where the
bishops of Paris counted themselves happy if they could pass the night; that
refectory, upon which the architect had bestowed the air, the beauty, and the
rose window of a cathedral; that elegant chapel of the Virgin; that monumental
dormitory; those vast gardens; that portcullis; that drawbridge; that envelope of
battlements which notched to the eye the verdure of the surrounding meadows;
those courtyards, where gleamed men at arms, intermingled with golden copes;-
- the whole grouped and clustered about three lofty spires, with round arches,
well planted upon a Gothic apse, made a magnificent figure against the horizon.
When, at length, after having contemplated the University for a long time,
you turned towards the right bank, towards the Town, the character of the
spectacle was abruptly altered. The Town, in fact much larger than the
University, was also less of a unit. At the first glance, one saw that it was
divided into many masses, singularly distinct. First, to the eastward, in that part
of the town which still takes its name from the marsh where Camulogènes
entangled Caesar, was a pile of palaces. The block extended to the very water's
edge. Four almost contiguous Hôtels, Jouy, Sens, Barbeau, the house of the
Queen, mirrored their slate peaks, broken with slender turrets, in the Seine.
These four edifices filled the space from the Rue des Nonaindières, to the
abbey of the Celestins, whose spire gracefully relieved their line of gables and
battlements. A few miserable, greenish hovels, hanging over the water in front
Thesaurus
abbatial: (adj) abbatical. viridescent, fleeceable, envious, grey, inert, torpid, grave, languid,
bakehouse: (n) bakeshop, backhouse, covetous, chromatic, porraceous. drab, burdensome, livid.
washhouse, patisserie, hothouse. hillock: (n) hill, mound, rise, barrow, ANTONYM: (adj) bright.
brickyard: (n) brickfield, shop, kopje, hammock, elevation, heap; refectory: (n) restaurant, dining room,
workshop, brickworks. (adj, n) knoll, hummock; (adj) mole. canteen, hall, mess hall, mess, eatery,
capped: (adj) crowned. intermingled: (adj) amalgamated, cafeteria.
drawbridge: (n) fire escape, draw- integrated, coalesced, blended, seignory: (n) seigneury, landed estate,
bridge, bridge, drawbridge sign, lift incorporated, assorted, consolidated, demesne, estate.
bridge. incorporate, amalgamate, fused. verdure: (adj, n) greenness; (n)
eastward: (adj) eastbound, eastern; lazar: (n) sufferer, beggar, diseased greenery, foliage, verdancy, viridity,
(adv) eastwards. person. green, leafage, flora, freshness,
greenish: (adj) green, virescent, leaden: (adj) heavy, gray, sluggish, strength, vegetable kingdom.
Victor Hugo 153
of these sumptuous Hôtels, did not prevent one from seeing the fine angles of
their façades, their large, square windows with stone mullions, their pointed
porches overloaded with statues, the vivid outlines of their walls, always clear
cut, and all those charming accidents of architecture, which cause Gothic art to
have the air of beginning its combinations afresh with every monument.%
Behind these palaces, extended in all directions, now broken, fenced in,
battlemented like a citadel, now veiled by great trees like a Carthusian convent,
the immense and multiform enclosure of that miraculous Hôtel de Saint-Pol,
where the King of France possessed the means of lodging superbly two and
twenty princes of the rank of the dauphin and the Duke of Burgundy, with their
domestics and their suites, without counting the great lords, and the emperor
when he came to view Paris, and the lions, who had their separate Hôtel at the
royal Hôtel. Let us say here that a prince's apartment was then composed of
never less than eleven large rooms, from the chamber of state to the oratory, not
to mention the galleries, baths, vapor-baths, and other "superfluous places," with
which each apartment was provided; not to mention the private gardens for each
of the king's guests; not to mention the kitchens, the cellars, the domestic offices,
the general refectories of the house, the poultry-yards, where there were twenty-
two general laboratories, from the bakehouses to the wine-cellars; games of a
thousand sorts, malls, tennis, and riding at the ring; aviaries, fishponds,
menageries, stables, barns, libraries, arsenals and foundries. This was what a
king's palace, a Louvre, a Hôtel de Saint-Pol was then. A city within a city.
From the tower where we are placed, the Hôtel Saint-Pol, almost half hidden
by the four great houses of which we have just spoken, was still very
considerable and very marvellous to see. One could there distinguish, very well,
though cleverly united with the principal building by long galleries, decked with
painted glass and slender columns, the three Hôtels which Charles V. had
amalgamated with his palace: the Hôtel du Petit-Muce, with the airy balustrade,
which formed a graceful border to its roof; the Hôtel of the Abbe de Saint-Maur,
having the vanity of a stronghold, a great tower, machicolations, loopholes, iron
gratings, and over the large Saxon door, the armorial bearings of the abbé,
Thesaurus
afresh: (adv) again, newly, over again, citadel: (n) castle, bastion, fortification, busy, filled to capacity, laden,
new, once again, freshly, once more, bulwark, Acropolis, fort, stronghold, packed, overfull; (n) weight in excess,
often; (adj) the other day, just now, tower, chateau; (n, v) fortress; (v) fuller.
only yesterday. keep. stronghold: (n) bastion, fortress, keep,
amalgamated: (adj) amalgamate, fenced: (adj) hedged in, provisional, fortification, fort, bulwark, redoubt,
mixed, fused, merged, combined, guarded, bounded. strength; (adj, n) castle, fastness; (v)
consolidated, integrated, joined, oratory: (n) elocution, rhetoric, hold.
coalesced, incorporated, unified. declamation, speech, oration, church, veiled: (adj) hidden, unseen, covert,
ANTONYM: (adj) disjointed. chapel, tabernacle, valediction, secret, masked, disguised, obscure,
battlemented: (adj) castellated, cathedral, public speaking. cryptic, covered, indistinct, oblique.
securer, secure, castled, crenellated, overloaded: (adj) overcrowded, ANTONYMS: (adj) overt, open,
fancier, crenelated. burdened, congested, encumbered, unveiled, blatant.
between the two mortises of the drawbridge; the Hôtel of the Comte d' Etampes,
whose donjon keep, ruined at its summit, was rounded and notched like a cock's
comb; here and there, three or four ancient oaks, forming a tuft together like
enormous cauliflowers; gambols of swans, in the clear water of the fishponds,
all in folds of light and shade; many courtyards of which one beheld picturesque
bits; the Hôtel of the Lions, with its low, pointed arches on short, Saxon pillars,
its iron gratings and its perpetual roar; shooting up above the whole, the scale-
ornamented spire of the Ave-Maria; on the left, the house of the Provost of Paris,
flanked by four small towers, delicately grooved, in the middle; at the extremity,
the Hôtel Saint-Pol, properly speaking, with its multiplied façades, its successive
enrichments from the time of Charles V., the hybrid excrescences, with which the
fancy of the architects had loaded it during the last two centuries, with all the
apses of its chapels, all the gables of its galleries, a thousand weathercocks for the
four winds, and its two lofty contiguous towers, whose conical roof, surrounded
by battlements at its base, looked like those pointed caps which have their edges
turned up.%
Continuing to mount the stories of this amphitheatre of palaces spread out
afar upon the ground, after crossing a deep ravine hollowed out of the roofs in
the Town, which marked the passage of the Rue Saint-Antoine, the eye reached
the house of Angoulême, a vast construction of many epochs, where there were
perfectly new and very white parts, which melted no better into the whole than a
red patch on a blue doublet. Nevertheless, the remarkably pointed and lofty roof
of the modern palace, bristling with carved eaves, covered with sheets of lead,
where coiled a thousand fantastic arabesques of sparkling incrustations of gilded
bronze, that roof, so curiously damascened, darted upwards gracefully from the
midst of the brown ruins of the ancient edifice; whose huge and ancient towers,
rounded by age like casks, sinking together with old age, and rending
themselves from top to bottom, resembled great bellies unbuttoned. Behind
rose the forest of spires of the Palais des Tournelles. Not a view in the world,
either at Chambord or at the Alhambra, is more magic, more aerial, more
enchanting, than that thicket of spires, tiny bell towers, chimneys, weather-
vanes, winding staircases, lanterns through which the daylight makes its way,
Thesaurus
afar: (adv) off, away, far away, coiling, twisted, convoluted, rolled, smooth.
distantly, beyond, Afar off, in the wavy, bent, round; (adj, v) spiral. rending: (adj) ripping, excruciating,
distance, by far, apart; (adj) outlying, ANTONYM: (adj) uncoiled. cacophonous, cacophonic; (v)
far. ANTONYMS: (adv) close, nearby, damascened: (n) fancier. harrowing; (n) division, outbreak.
near; (prep) within. folds: (n) laps. tuft: (n) wisp, crest, cluster, truss,
amphitheatre: (n) amphitheater, arena, gambols: (n) behave, play, frolic, knot, fagot, tassel, strand, thicket,
stadium, gallery, bowl, coliseum, employment, disport, act, action, curl; (adj, n) feather.
colosseum. amusement. unbuttoned: (adj) unobstructed,
bellies: (n) stomach. notched: (adj) serrated, jaggy, serrate, untrammeled, unchecked,
cauliflowers: (n) genus brassica. toothed, erose, rough, uneven, unconfined, unprevented,
chimneys: (n) chimney. indented, ragged, apprenticed, unhindered, uncaught, unrestrained,
coiled: (adj) curled, curved, twined, indentured. ANTONYM: (adj) unlaced, unfastened, unconstrained.
Victor Hugo 155
which seem cut out at a blow, pavilions, spindle-shaped turrets, or, as they were
then called, "tournelles," all differing in form, in height, and attitude. One
would have pronounced it a gigantic stone chess-board.%
To the right of the Tournelles, that truss of enormous towers, black as ink,
running into each other and tied, as it were, by a circular moat; that donjon keep,
much more pierced with loopholes than with windows; that drawbridge, always
raised; that portcullis, always lowered,-- is the Bastille. Those sorts of black beaks
which project from between the battlements, and which you take from a distance
to be cave spouts, are cannons.
Beneath them, at the foot of the formidable edifice, behold the Porte Sainte-
Antoine, buried between its two towers.
Beyond the Tournelles, as far as the wall of Charles V., spread out, with rich
compartments of verdure and of flowers, a velvet carpet of cultivated land and
royal parks, in the midst of which one recognized, by its labyrinth of trees and
alleys, the famous Daedalus garden which Louis XI. had given to Coictier. The
doctor's observatory rose above the labyrinth like a great isolated column, with a
tiny house for a capital. Terrible astrologies took place in that laboratory.
There to-day is the Place Royale.
As we have just said, the quarter of the palace, of which we have just
endeavored to give the reader some idea by indicating only the chief points,
filled the angle which Charles V.'s wall made with the Seine on the east. The
centre of the Town was occupied by a pile of houses for the populace. It was
there, in fact, that the three bridges disgorged upon the right bank, and bridges
lead to the building of houses rather than palaces. That congregation of
bourgeois habitations, pressed together like the cells in a hive, had a beauty of its
own. It is with the roofs of a capital as with the waves of the sea,-- they are
grand. First the streets, crossed and entangled, forming a hundred amusing
figures in the block; around the market-place, it was like a star with a thousand
rays.
The Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, with their innumerable
ramifications, rose one after the other, like trees intertwining their branches; and
Thesaurus
branches: (n) branch, brushwood. similar, parallel. web, unit, system; (adj, n) network;
cultivated: (adj) cultured, refined, hive: (adj) swarm, herd; (v) store, SE (v) eel, labyrinthian.
tame, educated, sophisticated, nicher; (n) concourse, hiding place, observatory: (n) observation tower,
elegant, urbane, polished, cave, cell, den, aerie, eyry. lookout station, structure, tower,
accomplished, civil, polite. innumerable: (adj) countless, outlook, observation post, lookout
ANTONYMS: (adj) wild, untamed, numberless, incalculable, cupola, edifice, lookout man,
uncouth, coarse, graceless. multitudinous, infinite, innumerous, construction, building.
differing: (adj) divergent, opposite, unnumbered, uncounted, myriad, rays: (n) light, sunlight, Selachii,
disagreeing, different, diverse, immeasurable, untold. ANTONYM: dogfishes, elasmobranch,
heretical, dissonant, dissentaneous, (adj) finite. Elasmobranchii, emission, daylight,
discrepant; (adv) differingly; (n) labyrinth: (n) inner ear, tangle, sunshine, selachian, subclass
divergence. ANTONYMS: (adj) confusion, complication, internal ear, Elasmobranchii.
then the tortuous lines, the Rues de la Plâtrerie, de la Verrerie, de la Tixeranderie,

etc., meandered %over all. There were also fine edifices which pierced the
petrified undulations of that sea of gables. At the head of the Pont aux
Changeurs, behind which one beheld the Seine foaming beneath the wheels of
the Pont aux Meuniers, there was the Chalelet, no longer a Roman tower, as
under Julian the Apostate, but a feudal tower of the thirteenth century, and of a
stone so hard that the pickaxe could not break away so much as the thickness of
the fist in a space of three hours; there was the rich square bell tower of Saint-
Jacques de la Boucherie, with its angles all frothing with carvings, already
admirable, although it was not finished in the fifteenth century. (It lacked, in
particular, the four monsters, which, still perched to-day on the corners of its
roof, have the air of so many sphinxes who are propounding to new Paris the
riddle of the ancient Paris. Rault, the sculptor, only placed them in position in
1526, and received twenty francs for his pains.) There was the Maison-aux-
Piliers, the Pillar House, opening upon that Place de Grève of which we have
given the reader some idea; there was Saint-Gervais, which a front "in good
taste" has since spoiled; Saint-Méry, whose ancient pointed arches were still
almost round arches; Saint-Jean, whose magnificent spire was proverbial; there
were twenty other monuments, which did not disdain to bury their wonders in
that chaos of black, deep, narrow streets. Add the crosses of carved stone, more
lavishly scattered through the squares than even the gibbets; the cemetery of the
Innocents, whose architectural wall could be seen in the distance above the roofs;
the pillory of the Markets, whose top was visible between two chimneys of the
Rue de la Cossonnerie; the ladder of the Croix-du-Trahoir, in its square always
black with people; the circular buildings of the wheat mart; the fragments of
Philip Augustus's ancient wall, which could be made out here and there,
drowned among the houses, its towers gnawed by ivy, its gates in ruins, with
crumbling and deformed stretches of wall; the quay with its thousand shops,
and its bloody knacker's yards; the Seine encumbered with boats, from the Port
au Foin to Port-l'Evêque, and you will have a confused picture of what the
central trapezium of the Town was like in 1482.
Thesaurus
crumbling: (adj, v) moldering, richly, wastefully, abundantly, pickaxe: (n) pickax, mattock, option,
ramshackle; (adj) rotten, dilapidated, luxuriously, plentifully, amply. edge tool, cream, choice, filling.
worn out; (n) ruin, decay, ANTONYMS: (adv) meagerly, proverbial: (adj) axiomatic, hackneyed
disintegration, fragmentation; (v) frugally, cheaply, scantily. saying, common saying, notorious,
waterlogged, tainted. ANTONYM: mart: (n) emporium, market, famed, legendary, famous, common,
(adj) pristine. marketplace, bazar, agora, forum, true saying, trite saying,
frothing: (adj) foamy, bubbling, grocery, sale, center, outlet, store. recognizable.
effervescent, bubbly, spumous, petrified: (adj) mineralized, riddle: (n) mystery, conundrum,
spumy, effervescing, sudsy, agitated; motionless, frightened, scared, numb, puzzle, problem, poser; (n, v) screen,
(n) effervescence, scum. stiff, harder, firm, mineral, like a sieve; (v) puncture, strain, filter, sift.
lavishly: (adv) profusely, profligately, statue, lacking sensation. ANTONYM: (n) explanation.
prodigally, copiously, generously, ANTONYMS: (adj) mobile, fearless. stretches: (adj) stretched.
Victor Hugo 157
With these two quarters, one of Hôtels, the other of houses, the third feature
of aspect presented by the city was a long zone of abbeys, which bordered it in
nearly the whole of its circumference, from the rising to the setting sun, and,
behind the circle of fortifications which hemmed in Paris, formed a second
interior enclosure of convents and chapels. Thus, immediately adjoining the
park des Tournelles, between the Rue Saint-Antoine and the Vielle Rue du
Temple, there stood Sainte-Catherine, with its immense cultivated lands, which
were terminated only by the wall of Paris. Between the old and the new Rue du
Temple, there was the Temple, a sinister group of towers, lofty, erect, and
isolated in the middle of a vast, battlemented enclosure. Between the Rue
Neuve-du- Temple and the Rue Saint-Martin, there was the Abbey of Saint-
Martin, in the midst of its gardens, a superb fortified church, whose girdle of
towers, whose diadem of bell towers, yielded in force and splendor only to
Saint-Germain des Prés. Between the Rue Saint-Martin and the Rue Saint- Denis,
spread the enclosure of the Trinité.%
Lastly, between the Rue Saint-Denis, and the Rue Montorgueil, stood the
Filles-Dieu. On one side, the rotting roofs and unpaved enclosure of the Cour
des Miracles could be descried. It was the sole profane ring which was linked to
that devout chain of convents.
Finally, the fourth compartment, which stretched itself out in the
agglomeration of the roofs on the right bank, and which occupied the western
angle of the enclosure, and the banks of the river down stream, was a fresh
cluster of palaces and Hôtels pressed close about the base of the Louvre. The old
Louvre of Philip Augustus, that immense edifice whose great tower rallied about
it three and twenty chief towers, not to reckon the lesser towers, seemed from a
distance to be enshrined in the Gothic roofs of the Hôtel d'Alençon, and the
Petit-Bourbon. This hydra of towers, giant guardian of Paris, with its four and
twenty heads, always erect, with its monstrous haunches, loaded or scaled with
slates, and all streaming with metallic reflections, terminated with wonderful
effect the configuration of the Town towards the west.
Thesaurus
agglomeration: (n) bunch, lump, battlements, ramparts. decomposing, putrid; (n) rot,
cumulation, clump, chunk, cluster, hydra: (adj) chimera, Minotaur, seed putrefaction, decomposition, deep
collection, clod, conglomeration, plot, sphinx, warren, rabbit, phoenix, etching.
aggregation, agglutination. milch cow; (n) snake, plague, cancer. slates: (n) tiling.
bordered: (adj) fringed, edged, profane: (v) desecrate, abuse, violate, splendor: (adj, n, v) brilliancy; (n)
delimited, surrounded. defile, outrage, debauch; (adj) magnificence, pomp, sheen, lustre,
diadem: (n) crown, coronet, tiara, irreverent, impious, sacrilegious, luster, glory, ostentation, glitter; (n, v)
circlet, sovereignty, headdress, crest, unholy; (adj, v) foul. ANTONYMS: brightness; (adj, n) radiance.
power, capitulum, cap of (adj) devout, sacred, moral, religious, ANTONYMS: (n) dullness,
maintenance, crown jewels. reverent. ordinariness, paucity, austerity,
enshrined: (adj) hallowed. rotting: (adj) rotten, decaying, understatement, shabbiness,
fortifications: (n) rampart, decayed, moldering, mouldering, simplicity, unattractiveness.
Thus an immense block, which the Romans called iusula, or island, of

bourgeois houses, flanked on the right and the left by two blocks of palaces,
crowned, the one by the Louvre, the other by the Tournelles, bordered on the
north by a long girdle of abbeys and cultivated enclosures, all amalgamated and
melted together in one view; upon these thousands of edifices, whose tiled and
slated roofs outlined upon each other so many fantastic chains, the bell towers,
tattooed, fluted, and ornamented with twisted bands, of the four and forty
churches on the right bank; myriads of cross streets; for boundary on one side, an
enclosure of lofty walls with square towers (that of the University had round
towers); on the other, the Seine, cut by bridges, and bearing on its bosom a
multitude of boats; behold the Town of Paris in the fifteenth century.%
Beyond the walls, several suburban villages pressed close about the gates, but
less numerous and more scattered than those of the University. Behind the
Bastille there were twenty hovels clustered round the curious sculptures of the
Croix-Faubin and the flying buttresses of the Abbey of Saint- Antoine des
Champs; then Popincourt, lost amid wheat fields; then la Courtille, a merry
village of wine-shops; the hamlet of Saint-Laurent with its church whose bell
tower, from afar, seemed to add itself to the pointed towers of the Porte Saint-
Martin; the Faubourg Saint-Denis, with the vast enclosure of Saint-Ladre; beyond
the Montmartre Gate, the Grange- Batelière, encircled with white walls; behind
it, with its chalky slopes, Montmartre, which had then almost as many churches
as windmills, and which has kept only the windmills, for society no longer
demands anything but bread for the body. Lastly, beyond the Louvre, the
Faubourg Saint- Honoré, already considerable at that time, could be seen
stretching away into the fields, and Petit-Bretagne gleaming green, and the
Marché aux Pourceaux spreading abroad, in whose centre swelled the horrible
apparatus used for boiling counterfeiters. Between la Courtille and Saint-
Laurent, your eye had already noticed, on the summit of an eminence crouching
amid desert plains, a sort of edifice which resembled from a distance a ruined
colonnade, mounted upon a basement with its foundation laid bare. This was
neither a Parthenon, nor a temple of the Olympian Jupiter. It was Montfauçon.
Thesaurus
buttresses: (n) ramparts, defenses. bordered, annulated, annular. melted: (adj) molten, fluid, liquified,
chalky: (adj) cretaceous, calcareous, enclosure: (n) appendage, annex, cage, dissolved, liquefied, baked, fluent,
candid, pale, powdery, white, appendix, addendum, barrier, touched, limpid, sorry, flowing.
achromatic, bloodless, cloudy, enclosing, pen, yard, hedge, addition. multitude: (n) flock, horde, crowd,
opaque, crumbly. fluted: (adj) corrugated, grooved, host, throng, concourse, mob, masses,
clustered: (adj) agglomerated, gadrooned, canaliculated; (v) ribbed, mass, herd, swarm. ANTONYM: (n)
agglomerative, bunched, bunchy, sulcated. trickle.
gregarious, concentrated, gleaming: (adj) brilliant, shiny, swelled: (adj) big, inflated, bloated,
conglomerate, collective. radiant, glossy, lustrous, glowing, swollen, adult, boastful, bighearted,
encircled: (adj) enclosed, bounded, beaming, resplendent; (n) gleam, bad, fully grown, crowing, elder.
circinate, circular, decorated, glimmer; (adj, adv) agleam. tiled: (adj) paved, lined, smooth,
delimited, ringed, wreathed, ANTONYMS: (adj) dull, dirty, rough. cemented.
Victor Hugo 159
Now, if the enumeration of so many edifices, summary as we have

endeavored to make it, has not shattered in the reader's mind the general image
of old Paris, as we have constructed it, we will recapitulate it in a few words. In
the centre, the island of the City, resembling as to form an enormous tortoise,
and throwing out its bridges with tiles for scales; like legs from beneath its gray
shell of roofs. On the left, the monolithic trapezium, firm, dense, bristling, of the
University; on the right, the vast semicircle of the Town, much more intermixed
with gardens and monuments. The three blocks, city, university, and town,
marbled with innumerable streets. Across all, the Seine, "foster-mother Seine,"
as says Father Du Breul, blocked with islands, bridges, and boats. All about an
immense plain, patched with a thousand sorts of cultivated plots, sown with fine
villages. On the left, Issy, Vanvres, Vaugirarde, Montrouge, Gentilly, with its
round tower and its square tower, etc.; on the right, twenty others, from Conflans
to Ville-l'Evêque. On the horizon, a border of hills arranged in a circle like the
rim of the basin. Finally, far away to the east, Vincennes, and its seven
quadrangular towers to the south, Bicêtre and its pointed turrets; to the north,
Saint-Denis and its spire; to the west, Saint Cloud and its donjon keep. Such was
the Paris which the ravens, who lived in 1482, beheld from the summits of the
towers of Notre-Dame.%
Nevertheless, Voltaire said of this city, that "before Louis XIV., it possessed
but four fine monuments": the dome of the Sorbonne, the Val-de-Grâce, the
modern Louvre, and I know not what the fourth was-- the Luxembourg, perhaps.
Fortunately, Voltaire was the author of "Candide" in spite of this, and in spite of
this, he is, among all the men who have followed each other in the long series of
humanity, the one who has best possessed the diabolical laugh. Moreover, this
proves that one can be a fine genius, and yet understand nothing of an art to
which one does not belong. Did not Moliere imagine that he was doing Raphael
and Michael-Angelo a very great honor, by calling them "those Mignards of their
age?"
Let us return to Paris and to the fifteenth century.
Thesaurus
dome: (n) arch, roof, cover, noggin, unvaried, large. similar to, reminiscent of.
bean, covered stadium, arena, hood, patched: (adj) mean, besmirched, old, ANTONYM: (prep) unlike.
eaves; (adj) column, campanile. damaged, ragged, flyblown. spite: (n) malice, grudge, hatred,
enumeration: (n) count, counting, quadrangular: (adj) square, tetragonal. malevolence, rancour, venom, rancor,
computation, list, calculation, recapitulate: (v) repeat, sum up, maliciousness, ill will, animosity; (n,
catalogue, recital, account, tally, enumerate, reiterate, resume, v) pique. ANTONYMS: (v) please; (n)
reckoning, listing. summarize, narrate, recite, brief, benevolence, goodwill, love,
marbled: (adj) patterned, multicolored, restate, reword. affection, harmony.
marbleized, marbleised. resembling: (adj, prep) like; (adj) tortoise: (v) sluggard, loiterer, lingerer;
monolithic: (adj) monumental, analogous, parallel, similar, (n) gopher, desert tortoise, gopher
uniform, largest, monolithal, biggest, conformable, approximate, tortoise, giant tortoise, gopher turtle,
bigger, concrete, big, totalitarian, semblative, other, probable; (prep) testudo.
It was not then merely a handsome city; it was a homogeneous city, an

architectural and historical product of the Middle Ages, a chronicle in stone. It
was a city formed of two layers only; the Romanesque layer and the Gothic layer;
for the Roman layer had disappeared long before, with the exception of the Hot
Baths of Julian, where it still pierced through the thick crust of the Middle Ages.
As for the Celtic layer, no specimens were any longer to be found, even when
sinking wells.%
Fifty years later, when the Renaissance began to mingle with this unity which
was so severe and yet so varied, the dazzling luxury of its fantasies and systems,
its debasements of Roman round arches, Greek columns, and Gothic bases, its
sculpture which was so tender and so ideal, its peculiar taste for arabesques and
acanthus leaves, its architectural paganism, contemporary with Luther, Paris,
was perhaps, still more beautiful, although less harmonious to the eye, and to
the thought.
But this splendid moment lasted only for a short time; the Renaissance was
not impartial; it did not content itself with building, it wished to destroy; it is
true that it required the room. Thus Gothic Paris was complete only for a
moment. Saint- Jacques de la Boucherie had barely been completed when the
demolition of the old Louvre was begun.
After that, the great city became more disfigured every day. Gothic Paris,
beneath which Roman Paris was effaced, was effaced in its turn; but can any one
say what Paris has replaced it?
There is the Paris of Catherine de Medicis at the Tuileries; the Paris of Henri
II., at the Hôtel de Ville, two edifices still in fine taste;-- the Paris of Henri IV., at
the Place Royale: façades of brick with stone corners, and slated roofs, tri-colored
houses;-- the Paris of Louis XIII., at the Val-de- Grace: a crushed and squat
architecture, with vaults like basket-handles, and something indescribably pot-
bellied in the column, and thickset in the dome;-- the Paris of Louis XIV., in the
Invalides: grand, rich, gilded, cold;-- the Paris of Louis XV., in Saint-Sulpice:
volutes, knots of ribbon, clouds, vermicelli and chiccory leaves, all in stone;-- the
Paris of Louis XVI., in the Pantheon: Saint Peter of Rome, badly copied (the
Thesaurus
chronicle: (n, v) register, list, log, bitter, incompatible, inharmonious, words, unbelievably, unutterably,
report; (n) account, story, annals, miserable, disagreeable, disruptive, unthinkably.
history, narrative, roll; (v) date. unbalanced. paganism: (n) heathenism, heresy,
disfigured: (adj) crooked, ugly, spoil, impartial: (adj) just, equitable, pagan religion, idolatry, atheism,
damage, deform, shabby, hurt, disinterested, unprejudiced, religion, faith, barbarism, ethnicism,
shapeless, dishonest, stained, unbiased, dispassionate, even- gentilism, gentility.
blemished. handed, candid, even, evenhanded, sinking: (n) sinkage, settling, fall,
harmonious: (adj) congenial, musical, detached. ANTONYMS: (adj) partial, descent, foundering, depression,
consonant, amicable, peaceful, gentle, partisan, prejudiced, subjective, immersion, submersion,
consistent, compatible, friendly, unfair, unjust. submergence; (v) decrease, decline.
harmonical, calm. ANTONYMS: (adj) indescribably: (adv) unspeakably, ANTONYM: (adj) rising.
discordant, dissonant, harsh, hostile, incredibly, inconceivably, beyond vermicelli: (n) alimentary paste.
Victor Hugo 161
edifice is awkwardly heaped together, which has not amended its lines);-- the
Paris of the Republic, in the School of Medicine: a poor Greek and Roman taste,
which resembles the Coliseum or the Parthenon as the constitution of the year
III., resembles the laws of Minos,-- it is called in architecture, "the Messidor"
taste;-- the Paris of Napoleon in the Place Vendome: this one is sublime, a
column of bronze made of cannons;-- the Paris of the Restoration, at the Bourse: a
very white colonnade supporting a very smooth frieze; the whole is square and
cost twenty millions.%
To each of these characteristic monuments there is attached by a similarity of
taste, fashion, and attitude, a certain number of houses scattered about in
different quarters and which the eyes of the connoisseur easily distinguishes and
furnishes with a date. When one knows how to look, one finds the spirit of a
century, and the physiognomy of a king, even in the knocker on a door.
The Paris of the present day has then, no general physiognomy. It is a
collection of specimens of many centuries, and the finest have disappeared. The
capital grows only in houses, and what houses! At the rate at which Paris is now
proceeding, it will renew itself every fifty years.
Thus the historical significance of its architecture is being effaced every day.
Monuments are becoming rarer and rarer, and one seems to see them gradually
engulfed, by the flood of houses. Our fathers had a Paris of stone; our sons will
have one of plaster.
So far as the modern monuments of new Paris are concerned, we would
gladly be excused from mentioning them. It is not that we do not admire them
as they deserve. The Sainte-Geneviève of M. Soufflot is certainly the finest Savoy
cake that has ever been made in stone. The Palace of the Legion of Honor is also
a very distinguished bit of pastry. The dome of the wheat market is an English
jockey cap, on a grand scale. The towers of Saint-Sulpice are two huge clarinets,
and the form is as good as any other; the telegraph, contorted and grimacing,
forms an admirable accident upon their roofs. Saint-Roch has a door which, for
magnificence, is comparable only to that of Saint-Thomas d'Aquin. It has, also, a
crucifixion in high relief, in a cellar, with a sun of gilded wood. These things are
Thesaurus
connoisseur: (n) critic, authority, excruciation, execution. detractor, hatemonger.
specialist, expert, cognoscenti, excused: (adj) privileged, immune. magnificence: (adj, n) splendor,
savant, scholar, gourmet, arbiter, frieze: (n) architrave, textile, sconce, brilliancy, gorgeousness; (n) glory,
epicurean; (v) judge. ANTONYMS: pediment, material, zoophorus, pomp, brilliance, grandness,
(n) dabbler, tyro. freeze, architectural ornament, greatness, dignity, majesty, loftiness.
contorted: (adj) crooked, bent, capital, coping stone, entablature. ANTONYMS: (n) paucity, modesty,
writhed, writhen, deformed, heaped: (adj) dense, cumulative, shabbiness, poverty, austerity,
distorted, wry, twist, misshapen, concentrated, collective, coacervate, unattractiveness.
perverted, malformed. thick. renew: (v) renovate, rejuvenate,
crucifixion: (v) cruciation, knocker: (n) boob, tit, breast, restore, refresh, refurbish, modernize,
impalement; (n) executing, death, doorknocker, nipple, knock, door- revive, overhaul, reinstate, reiterate,
martyrdom, capital punishment, knocker, depreciator, disparager, mend. ANTONYMS: (v) reduce, kill.
fairly marvellous. The lantern of the labyrinth of the Jardin des Plantes is also
very ingenious.
As for the Palace of the Bourse, which is Greek as to its colonnade, Roman in
the round arches of its doors and windows, of the Renaissance by virtue of its
flattened vault, it is indubitably a very correct and very pure monument; the
proof is that it is crowned with an attic, such as was never seen in Athens, a
beautiful, straight line, gracefully broken here and there by stovepipes. Let us
add that if it is according to rule that the architecture of a building should be
adapted to its purpose in such a manner that this purpose shall be immediately
apparent from the mere aspect of the building, one cannot be too much amazed
at a structure which might be indifferently-- the palace of a king, a chamber of
communes, a town-hall, a college, a riding-school, an academy, a warehouse, a
court-house, a museum, a barracks, a sepulchre, a temple, or a theatre. However,
it is an Exchange. An edifice ought to be, moreover, suitable to the climate. This
one is evidently constructed expressly for our cold and rainy skies. It has a roof
almost as flat as roofs in the East, which involves sweeping the roof in winter,
when it snows; and of course roofs are made to be swept. As for its purpose, of
which we just spoke, it fulfils it to a marvel; it is a bourse in France as it would
have been a temple in Greece. It is true that the architect was at a good deal of
trouble to conceal the clock face, which would have destroyed the purity of the
fine lines of the façade; but, on the other hand, we have that colonnade which
circles round the edifice and under which, on days of high religious ceremony,
the theories of the stock-brokers and the courtiers of commerce can be developed
so majestically.%
These are very superb structures. Let us add a quantity of fine, amusing, and
varied streets, like the Rue de Rivoli, and I do not despair of Paris presenting to
the eye, when viewed from a balloon, that richness of line, that opulence of
detail, that diversity of aspect, that grandiose something in the simple, and
unexpected in the beautiful, which characterizes a checker-board.
However, admirable as the Paris of to-day may seem to you, reconstruct the
Paris of the fifteenth century, call it up before you in thought; look at the sky
Thesaurus
bourse: (n) exchange, bazaar, stock indisputably, decidedly. opulence: (n) fortune, wealth, luxury,
exchange, hall, guildhall, fair, staple. ANTONYMS: (adv) possibly, exuberance, comfort, luxuriousness,
grandiose: (adj) majestic, pretentious, arguably, doubtfully. prosperity, wealthiness, plenty; (adj,
bombastic, imposing, ostentatious, lantern: (n) beacon, light, dormer, n) riches, affluence. ANTONYMS: (n)
pompous, stately, royal, ambitious, tube, lighting fitting, bedside light, poverty, paucity, shabbiness,
flamboyant, highfalutin. street light, street lamp, oil lamp, austerity.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unimpressive, lime light, lanthorn. rainy: (adj) moist, pluvial, damp,
modest. marvel: (n, v) wonder; (n) prodigy, pluvious, stormy, juicy, dirty, soppy,
indubitably: (adv) certainly, surely, curiosity, phenomenon, amazement, raining, drizzly; (adj, v) showery.
positively, incontrovertibly, miracle, portent, marl, surprise, ANTONYM: (adj) pleasant.
unquestionably, clearly, admiration; (v) admire. ANTONYMS: skies: (n) heavens, firmament,
undoubtedly, of course, absolutely, (v) disregard; (n) nightmare. expanse.
Victor Hugo 163
athwart that surprising forest of spires, towers, and belfries; spread out in the
centre of the city, tear away at the point of the islands, fold at the arches of the
bridges, the Seine, with its broad green and yellow expanses, more variable than
the skin of a serpent; project clearly against an azure horizon the Gothic profile
of this ancient Paris. Make its contour float in a winter's mist which clings to its
numerous chimneys; drown it in profound night and watch the odd play of
lights and shadows in that sombre labyrinth of edifices; cast upon it a ray of light
which shall vaguely outline it and cause to emerge from the fog the great heads
of the towers; or take that black silhouette again, enliven with shadow the
thousand acute angles of the spires and gables, and make it start out more
toothed than a shark's jaw against a copper-colored western sky,-- and then
compare.%
And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression with which the
modern one can no longer furnish you, climb-- on the morning of some grand
festival, beneath the rising sun of Easter or of Pentecost-- climb upon some
elevated point, whence you command the entire capital; and be present at the
wakening of the chimes. Behold, at a signal given from heaven, for it is the sun
which gives it, all those churches quiver simultaneously. First come scattered
strokes, running from one church to another, as when musicians give warning
that they are about to begin. Then, all at once, behold!-- for it seems at times, as
though the ear also possessed a sight of its own,-- behold, rising from each bell
tower, something like a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. First, the
vibration of each bell mounts straight upwards, pure and, so to speak, isolated
from the others, into the splendid morning sky; then, little by little, as they swell
they melt together, mingle, are lost in each other, and amalgamate in a
magnificent concert. It is no longer anything but a mass of sonorous vibrations
incessantly sent forth from the numerous belfries; floats, undulates, bounds,
whirls over the city, and prolongs far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of
its oscillations.
Nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and profound as it is, it
has not lost its transparency; you behold the windings of each group of notes
Thesaurus
athwart: (adj, adv, n, prep) across; (adv, quiver: (adj, n, v) shudder, shiver, toothed: (adj) jagged, jaggy, serrate,
prep) aslant, cross; (adj, adv, prep) tremble, shake; (v) flicker, flutter, notched, erose, rough, dentate,
thwart; (adj, adv) crosswise; (adv) vibrate; (n, v) palpitate, quaver; (n) cogged, uneven, dentated, palmated.
sideways, obliquely, transversely, vibration, tremor. ANTONYM: (adj) smooth.
traverse, overthwart, crossways. serpent: (n) snake, ophidian, viper, transparency: (n) clearness, clarity,
chimes: (n) bells, echo, refrain, snake in the grass, reptile, slide, limpidity, pellucidness,
repetend, ritornello, glockenspiel. rattlesnake, colubrid, contrafagotto, lucidity, diaphaneity, translucency,
contour: (n) contour line, outline, cor anglais, hautboy; (v) goose. overhead, foil, pellucidity.
form, profile, shape, line, silhouette: (n) contour, outline, shape, ANTONYMS: (n) ambiguity, opacity,
configuration, silhouette, curve, form, figure, circuit, lines tournure, dirtiness, impurity.
circuit, edge. ANTONYM: (n) core. ambit, perimeter, periphery; (n, v) wakening: (n) rousing, reveille,
mounts: (adj) mounted. shade. waking up, arousal.
which escapes from the belfries. You can follow the dialogue, by turns grave and
shrill, of the treble and the bass; you can see the octaves leap from one tower to
another; you watch them spring forth, winged, light, and whistling, from the
silver bell, to fall, broken and limping from the bell of wood; you admire in their
midst the rich gamut which incessantly ascends and re-ascends the seven bells of
Saint-Eustache; you see light and rapid notes running across it, executing three
or four luminous zigzags, and vanishing like flashes of lightning. Yonder is the
Abbey of Saint-Martin, a shrill, cracked singer; here the gruff and gloomy voice
of the Bastille; at the other end, the great tower of the Louvre, with its bass. The
royal chime of the palace scatters on all sides, and without relaxation,
resplendent trills, upon which fall, at regular intervals, the heavy strokes from
the belfry of Notre-Dame, which makes them sparkle like the anvil under the
hammer. At intervals you behold the passage of sounds of all forms which come
from the triple peal of Saint-Germaine des Prés. Then, again, from time to time,
this mass of sublime noises opens and gives passage to the beats of the Ave
Maria, which bursts forth and sparkles like an aigrette of stars. Below, in the
very depths of the concert, you confusedly distinguish the interior chanting of
the churches, which exhales through the vibrating pores of their vaulted roofs.%
Assuredly, this is an opera which it is worth the trouble of listening to.
Ordinarily, the noise which escapes from Paris by day is the city speaking; by
night, it is the city breathing; in this case, it is the city singing. Lend an ear, then,
to this concert of bell towers; spread over all the murmur of half a million men,
the eternal plaint of the river, the infinite breathings of the wind, the grave and
distant quartette of the four forests arranged upon the hills, on the horizon, like
immense stacks of organ pipes; extinguish, as in a half shade, all that is too
hoarse and too shrill about the central chime, and say whether you know
anything in the world more rich and joyful, more golden, more dazzling, than
this tumult of bells and chimes;-- than this furnace of music,-- than these ten
thousand brazen voices chanting simultaneously in the flutes of stone, three
hundred feet high,-- than this city which is no longer anything but an orchestra,--
than this symphony which produces the noise of a tempest.
Thesaurus
aigrette: (n) egret, panache, plume, quiet, discreet, respectful, ashamed, plaint: (n) complaint, mourning,
crest, brush discharge, feather, veiled, modest. lamentation, wail, moan, jeremiad;
pompom. chime: (n) carillon, melody; (adj) (v) hue and cry, hullabaloo, outcry,
anvil: (n) stithy, anvil blade, fulciment, harmonize; (v) go, jingle, clang, peal, clamor, chorus.
block, stiddy, prop, anvil roll, Stith, tinkle, buzz, ring, chimb. quartette: (n) quartet, quadruplet,
stand. gamut: (n) scale, reach, compass, foursome, quart , set, tetrad,
ascends: (v) ascend, uprise. ambit, ut, orbit, series, variety, quaternity, quaternion, assemblage,
brazen: (adj) audacious, impudent, sweep, spectrum, stretch. composition, four.
brassy, insolent, bold, brash, limping: (n) lameness, gimp, vibrating: (adj) tremulous, vibratory,
impertinent, blatant, flagrant, claudication, gimpiness, gameness; vibrant, swinging, hollow, moving,
forward, saucy. ANTONYMS: (adj) (adj) hobbling, crippled, halting, oscillating, that oscillates, resonant;
shy, abashed, prudish, reserved, inefficient, imperfect, claudicant. (n) shaking system.
Victor Hugo 165
BOOK IV
Victor Hugo 167
CHAPTER I
GOOD SOULS
Sixteen years previous to the epoch when this story takes place, one fine
morning, on Quasimodo Sunday, a living creature had been deposited, after
mass, in the church of Notre- Dame, on the wooden bed securely fixed in the
vestibule on the left, opposite that great image of Saint Christopher, which the
figure of Messire Antoine des Essarts, chevalier, carved in stone, had been gazing
at on his knees since 1413, when they took it into their heads to overthrow the
saint and the faithful follower. Upon this bed of wood it was customary to
expose foundlings for public charity. Whoever cared to take them did so. In
front of the wooden bed was a copper basin for alms.%
The sort of living being which lay upon that plank on the morning of
Quasimodo, in the year of the Lord, 1467, appeared to excite to a high degree, the
curiosity of the numerous group which had congregated about the wooden bed.
The group was formed for the most part of the fair sex. Hardly any one was
there except old women.
In the first row, and among those who were most bent over the bed, four
were noticeable, who, from their gray cagoule, a sort of cassock, were
recognizable as attached to some devout sisterhood. I do not see why history
has not transmitted to posterity the names of these four discreet and venerable
Thesaurus
carved: (adj) cut, incised, sculptured; footbridge, hardboard; (v) flump; (n, securely: (adv) surely, safely, closely,
(v) graven, engraved, stamped, fixed, v) planch. solidly, steadily, assuredly, strongly,
imprinted. ANTONYM: (adj) posterity: (n) race, descendants, issue, tightly, fixly, setly, stably.
uncarved. offspring, descendant, future, ANTONYM: (adv) insecurely.
follower: (n) backer, devotee, fan, generation, progeny, breed, sisterhood: (n) sorority, family
admirer, adherent, cohort, apostle, descendent, spat. relationship, relationship, Women's
partisan, believer, attendant; (adj) recognizable: (adj) perceptible, Liberation, cousinhood, society,
lover. ANTONYMS: (n) detractor, identifiable, clear, familiar, distinct, fellowship, order, kinship, sistership.
rebel, superior, disbeliever, cynic, placeable, obvious, cognizable, vestibule: (n) lobby, hall, foyer,
leader. discernible, distinguishable, antechamber, entrance hall, hallway,
plank: (n) timber, beam, slat, girder, acknowledged. ANTONYMS: (adj) entry, porch, passage, anteroom,
panel, parachute, matchboard, unknown, imperceptible. threshold.
damsels. They were Agnes la Herme, Jehanne de la Tarme, Henriette la

Gaultière, Gauchère la Violette, all four widows, all four dames of the Chapel
Etienne Haudry, who had quitted their house with the permission of their
mistress, and in conformity with the statutes of Pierre d'Ailly, in order to come
and hear the sermon.%
However, if these good Haudriettes were, for the moment, complying with
the statutes of Pierre d'Ailly, they certainly violated with joy those of Michel de
Brache, and the Cardinal of Pisa, which so inhumanly enjoined silence upon
them.
"What is this, sister?" said Agnes to Gauchère, gazing at the little creature
exposed, which was screaming and writhing on the wooden bed, terrified by so
many glances.
"What is to become of us," said Jehanne, "if that is the way children are made
now?"
"I'm not learned in the matter of children," resumed Agnes, "but it must be a
sin to look at this one."
"'Tis not a child, Agnes."
"'Tis an abortion of a monkey," remarked Gauchère.
"'Tis a miracle," interposed Henriette la Gaultière.
"Then," remarked Agnes, "it is the third since the Sunday of the Loetare: for, in
less than a week, we had the miracle of the mocker of pilgrims divinely
punished by Notre-Dame d'Aubervilliers, and that was the second miracle
within a month."
"This pretended foundling is a real monster of abomination," resumed
Jehanne.
"He yells loud enough to deafen a chanter," continued Gauchère. "Hold your
tongue, you little howler!"
"To think that Monsieur of Reims sent this enormity to Monsieur of Paris,"
added la Gaultière, clasping her hands.
Thesaurus
clasping: (adj) tendril. minuteness, veniality, unimportance, callously, savagely, mercilessly,
deafen: (adj) stun, render deaf; (v) tininess, virtue, goodness, coldly. ANTONYMS: (adv) kindly,
desensitize, soften, weaken, muffle, diminutiveness, remissibility, sympathetically.
deave, dampen, blindfold. smallness, mildness, insignificance. mocker: (n) derider, mockingbird,
divinely: (adv) holy, wonderfully, foundling: (adj, n) wastrel; (n) scoffer, flouter, oscine, banterer,
exquisitely, priestly, beautifully, abandoned infant, infant, waifs and tease, mock, teaser, jester, joker.
religiously, spiritually, almightily, estrays, vagrant, refugee, babe, writhing: (adj, n) twisting; (adj)
magnificently, sacredly, godly. scatterling; (v) find, trouvaille; (adj) wriggly, squirming, wiggling,
enormity: (n) magnitude, size, wilding. wiggly, twisty, tortuous, snaky,
greatness, vileness, immensity, inhumanly: (adv) brutally, winding, sinuous; (n) twist.
outrage, vastness, seriousness, crime, inhumanely, ruthlessly, pitilessly,
evil, indecency. ANTONYMS: (n) ferociously, atrociously, barbarously,
Victor Hugo 169
"I imagine," said Agnes la Herme, "that it is a beast, an animal,-- the fruit of--
a Jew and a sow; something not Christian, in short, which ought to be thrown
into the fire or into the water."
"I really hope," resumed la Gaultière, "that nobody will apply for it."
"Ah, good heavens!" exclaimed Agnes; "those poor nurses yonder in the
foundling asylum, which forms the lower end of the lane as you go to the river,
just beside Monseigneur the bishop! what if this little monster were to be carried
to them to suckle? I'd rather give suck to a vampire."
"How innocent that poor la Herme is!" resumed Jehanne; "don't you see,
sister, that this little monster is at least four years old, and that he would have
less appetite for your breast than for a turnspit."
The "little monster" we should find it difficult ourselves to describe him
otherwise, was, in fact, not a new-born child. It was a very angular and very
lively little mass, imprisoned in its linen sack, stamped with the cipher of
Messire Guillaume Chartier, then bishop of Paris, with a head projecting. That
head was deformed enough; one beheld only a forest of red hair, one eye, a
mouth, and teeth. The eye wept, the mouth cried, and the teeth seemed to ask
only to be allowed to bite. The whole struggled in the sack, to the great
consternation of the crowd, which increased and was renewed incessantly
around it.%
Dame Aloise de Gondelaurier, a rich and noble woman, who held by the
hand a pretty girl about five or six years of age, and dragged a long veil about,
suspended to the golden horn of her headdress, halted as she passed the wooden
bed, and gazed for a moment at the wretched creature, while her charming little
daughter, Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier, spelled out with her tiny, pretty finger,
the permanent inscription attached to the wooden bed: "Foundlings."
"Really," said the dame, turning away in disgust, "I thought that they only
exposed children here."
Thesaurus
carried: (adj) conveyed, imported. equanimity. suck: (v) nurse, drink, imbibe, suckle,
cipher: (n) zero, nothing, number, nil, headdress: (n) headgear, hood, turban, absorb, lactate, puff, drain, pull, suck
nobody, null; (n, v) figure, cypher, apparel, crown, clothes, chapeau, up; (n) sucking. ANTONYM: (v) rock.
code; (v) calculate; (adj, n) nonentity. cap, hairstyle, coiffure, vesture. suckle: (v) lactate, suck, breastfeed,
ANTONYMS: (n) infinity; (v) encode, inscription: (n) epigraph, entry, foster, give suck, raise, nourish,
decode, code, scramble. dedication, autograph, epitaph, draw, harbour; (n) nurture, dry
consternation: (n) alarm, shock, fear, registration, lettering, writing, nurse.
apprehension, astonishment, fright, record, superscription, title. veil: (n, v) cover, hide, disguise, mask,
confusion; (adj, n) terror, awe, dread, projecting: (adj) projected, protruding, cloud, shroud, camouflage; (v) cloak,
horror. ANTONYMS: (n) jutting, protrusive, pendent; (adj, v) conceal; (n) curtain, blind.
peacefulness, composure, happiness, overhanging, jutting over, salient; (v) ANTONYMS: (v) disclose, unveil,
tranquility, hopefulness, comfort, beetling, protuberant, convex. expose.
She turned her back, throwing into the basin a silver florin, which rang
among the liards, and made the poor goodwives of the chapel of Etienne Haudry
open their eyes.
A moment later, the grave and learned Robert Mistricolle, the king's
protonotary, passed, with an enormous missal under one arm and his wife on the
other (Damoiselle Guillemette la Mairesse), having thus by his side his two
regulators,-- spiritual and temporal.%
"Foundling!" he said, after examining the object; "found, apparently, on the
banks of the river Phlegethon."
"One can only see one eye," observed Damoiselle Guillemette; "there is a wart
on the other."
"It's not a wart," returned Master Robert Mistricolle, "it is an egg which
contains another demon exactly similar, who bears another little egg which
contains another devil, and so on."
"How do you know that?" asked Guillemette la Mairesse.
"I know it pertinently," replied the protonotary.
"Monsieur le protonotare," asked Gauchère, "what do you prognosticate of
this pretended foundling?"
"The greatest misfortunes," replied Mistricolle.
"Ah! good heavens!" said an old woman among the spectators, "and that
besides our having had a considerable pestilence last year, and that they say that
the English are going to disembark in a company at Harfleur."
"Perhaps that will prevent the queen from coming to Paris in the month of
September," interposed another; "trade is so bad already."
"My opinion is," exclaimed Jehanne de la Tarme, "that it would be better for
the louts of Paris, if this little magician were put to bed on a fagot than on a
plank."
"A fine, flaming fagot," added the old woman.
"It would be more prudent," said Mistricolle.
Thesaurus
basin: (n) bowl, pot, hollow, arrive, set down, descend, discharge, pestilence: (n) pest, epidemic, blight,
washbowl, washbasin, depression, light. ANTONYMS: (v) board, depart. disease, curse, infectious disease,
dock, tank, washstand, sink, basinful. flaming: (adj, n) burning, ardent, contagion, infection, virus; (adj)
ANTONYMS: (n) hill, hump. glowing, passionate; (adj) blazing, murrain, pox.
bears: (n) fissiped, badgers, Carnivora, ablaze, aflame, hot; (n) enthusiastic, pretended: (adj, v) sham, mock,
order Carnivora. flame, fire. ANTONYMS: (adj) counterfeit, pseudo, spurious; (adj)
demon: (n) ghost, fiend, incubus, extinguished, placid, gentle, quiet. assumed, fake, feigned, fictitious,
monster, daemon, ogre, daimon, florin: (n) guilder, Dutch florin. bogus, affected.
goblin, deuce, genie, elf. ANTONYM: magician: (n) enchanter, conjurer, prognosticate: (v) augur, predict,
(n) saint. illusionist, wizard, conjuror, forecast, presage, foretell, portend,
disembark: (v) debark, land, thaumaturge, magicians, performer, anticipate, bode, divine, forebode,
dismount, go ashore, alight, come in, magus, necromancer, prestidigitator. prophesy.
Victor Hugo 171
For several minutes, a young priest had been listening to the reasoning of the
Haudriettes and the sentences of the notary. He had a severe face, with a large
brow, a profound glance. He thrust the crowd silently aside, scrutinized the
"little magician," and stretched out his hand upon him. It was high time, for all
the devotees were already licking their chops over the "fine, flaming fagot."
"I adopt this child," said the priest.%
He took it in his cassock and carried it off. The spectators followed him with
frightened glances. A moment later, he had disappeared through the "Red
Door," which then led from the church to the cloister.
When the first surprise was over, Jehanne de la Tarme bent down to the ear
of la Gaultière,
"I told you so, sister,-- that young clerk, Monsieur Claude Frollo, is a
sorcerer."
Thesaurus
bent: (adj) curved, arched, deformed, jaw, fauces, propylon, portico, porch, mild, facile, slight, insignificant,
crooked; (n) propensity, inclination, door, portal; (v) gob. prosaic.
fancy, leaning, flair, gift, curvature. clerk: (n, v) writer, secretary, reasoning: (n) argumentation,
ANTONYMS: (n) weakness, inability, transcriber; (n) servant, shop deduction, ratiocination, illation,
aversion; (adj) undetermined, assistant, salesclerk, employee, logic, argument, abstract thought,
undecided, uncurved, uncaring, accountant, recorder; (v) scrivener, sense, judgment, thought; (adj)
rigid, unbent. scribe. rational.
brow: (n) peak, brink, brows, height, profound: (adj) abstruse, intense, silently: (adv) mutely, stilly, quietly,
summit, forehead, eyebrow, edge, heavy, important, sound, bottomless, noiselessly, soundlessly, taciturnly,
crown, brim, border. ANTONYM: (n) grave, obscure, utter, abysmal; (adj, v) wordlessly, secretly, speechlessly,
trough. solid. ANTONYMS: (adj) shallow, placidly, tacitly. ANTONYMS: (adv)
chops: (n, v) jaws; (n) orifice, chaps, trivial, lightweight, stupid, simple, loudly, audibly, openly, brazenly.
Victor Hugo 173
CHAPTER II
CLAUDE FROLLO
In fact, Claude Frollo was no common person.%

He belonged to one of those middle-class families which were called
indifferently, in the impertinent language of the last century, the high bourgeoise
or the petty nobility. This family had inherited from the brothers Paclet the fief
of Tirechappe, which was dependent upon the Bishop of Paris, and whose
twenty-one houses had been in the thirteenth century the object of so many suits
before the official. As possessor of this fief, Claude Frollo was one of the twenty-
seven seigneurs keeping claim to a manor in fee in Paris and its suburbs; and for
a long time, his name was to be seen inscribed in this quality, between the Hôtel
de Tancarville, belonging to Master François Le Rez, and the college of Tours, in
the records deposited at Saint Martin des Champs.
Claude Frollo had been destined from infancy, by his parents, to the
ecclesiastical profession. He had been taught to read in Latin; he had been
trained to keep his eyes on the ground and to speak low. While still a child, his
father had cloistered him in the college of Torchi in the University. There it was
that he had grown up, on the missal and the lexicon.
Thesaurus
destined: (adj, v) bound, fated; (adj) indifferently: (adv) carelessly, coldly, adolescence, early days. ANTONYM:
predetermined, sure, inescapable, nonchalantly, listlessly, (n) maturity.
intended, predestined, inevitable, unconcernedly, uninterestedly, inscribed: (adj) etched, incised,
prepared, foreordained, appointed. neutrally, middlingly, casually, graven, written, carved, carven.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unscheduled, unbiasedly, disinterestedly. lexicon: (n) vocabulary, glossary,
unlikely. ANTONYMS: (adv) passionately, wordbook, gazetteer, dyslexia,
families: (n) family. obsessively, carefully, eagerly, thesaurus, jargon, index, gradus,
impertinent: (adj) fresh, pert, saucy, energetically, warmly, anxiously, knowledge, etymological dictionary.
forward, audacious, brash, brazen, enthusiastically, sympathetically. possessor: (n) owner, holder,
extraneous, discourteous, infancy: (n) babyhood, cradle, proprietor, householder, occupant,
disrespectful, flippant. ANTONYMS: beginning, birth, genesis, minority, landowner, landholder, proprietary,
(adj) respectful, polite, courteous. early childhood, youth, nonage, somebody, someone, soul.
Moreover, he was a sad, grave, serious child, who studied ardently, and
learned quickly; he never uttered a loud cry in recreation hour, mixed but little in
the bacchanals of the Rue du Fouarre, did not know what it was to dare alapas et
capillos laniare, and had cut no figure in that revolt of 1463, which the annalists
register gravely, under the title of "The sixth trouble of the University." He
seldom rallied the poor students of Montaigu on the cappettes from which they
derived their name, or the bursars of the college of Dormans on their shaved
tonsure, and their surtout parti-colored of bluish-green, blue, and violet cloth,
azurini coloris et bruni, as says the charter of the Cardinal des Quatre-Couronnes.%
On the other hand, he was assiduous at the great and the small schools of the
Rue Saint Jean de Beauvais. The first pupil whom the Abbé de Saint Pierre de
Val, at the moment of beginning his reading on canon law, always perceived,
glued to a pillar of the school Saint-Vendregesile, opposite his rostrum, was
Claude Frollo, armed with his horn ink-bottle, biting his pen, scribbling on his
threadbare knee, and, in winter, blowing on his fingers. The first auditor whom
Messire Miles d'Isliers, doctor in decretals, saw arrive every Monday morning,
all breathless, at the opening of the gates of the school of the Chef-Saint-Denis,
was Claude Frollo. Thus, at sixteen years of age, the young clerk might have
held his own, in mystical theology, against a father of the church; in canonical
theology, against a father of the councils; in scholastic theology, against a doctor
of Sorbonne.
Theology conquered, he had plunged into decretals. From the "Master of
Sentences," he had passed to the "Capitularies of Charlemagne;" and he had
devoured in succession, in his appetite for science, decretals upon decretals,
those of Theodore, Bishop of Hispalus; those of Bouchard, Bishop of Worms;
those of Yves, Bishop of Chartres; next the decretal of Gratian, which succeeded
the capitularies of Charlemagne; then the collection of Gregory IX.; then the
Epistle of Superspecula, of Honorius III. He rendered clear and familiar to himself
that vast and tumultuous period of civil law and canon law in conflict and at
strife with each other, in the chaos of the Middle Ages,-- a period which Bishop
Theodore opens in 618, and which Pope Gregory closes in 1227.
Thesaurus
ardently: (adv) fervently, warmly, negligent, casual, lax, weary, hustings, stump, reading desk.
eagerly, intensely, fierily, avidly, slapdash, indolent, inconsistent, scholastic: (adj, n) academic; (adj)
enthusiastically, burningly, sloppy. scholarly, pedantic, school, learned,
zealously, fervidly; (adj, adv) hotly. bacchanals: (v) deep potations; (n) erudite; (n) pedant, purist; (v) savant,
ANTONYMS: (adv) indifferently, bacchanalianism, Bacchanalia. blue, enlightened.
apathetically, unenthusiastically, decretal: (v) decretory; (n) edict, ex threadbare: (adj, v) stale, shabby,
halfheartedly, calmly. cathedra pronouncement, ordination, dilapidated, bald, frayed, faded; (adj)
assiduous: (adj) industrious, active, writ, bull. hackneyed, worn, banal, trite,
busy, sedulous, thorough, glued: (adj) watchful, affixed, tattered. ANTONYMS: (adj) new,
hardworking, painstaking, careful, attentive. unused, reliable, fresh, unworn,
devoted, untiring, studious. rostrum: (n) podium, pulpit, snout, pristine, original.
ANTONYMS: (adj) lazy, neglectful, platform, dais, beak, bill, bow, tonsure: (n) pate, shaving.
Victor Hugo 175
Decretals digested, he flung himself upon medicine, on the liberal arts. He

studied the science of herbs, the science of unguents; he became an expert in
fevers and in contusions, in sprains and abcesses. Jacques d' Espars would have
received him as a physician; Richard Hellain, as a surgeon. He also passed
through all the degrees of licentiate, master, and doctor of arts. He studied the
languages, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, a triple sanctuary then very little frequented.
His was a veritable fever for acquiring and hoarding, in the matter of science.
At the age of eighteen, he had made his way through the four faculties; it seemed
to the young man that life had but one sole object: learning.%
It was towards this epoch, that the excessive heat of the summer of 1466
caused that grand outburst of the plague which carried off more than forty
thousand souls in the vicomty of Paris, and among others, as Jean de Troyes
states, "Master Arnoul, astrologer to the king, who was a very fine man, both
wise and pleasant." The rumor spread in the University that the Rue Tirechappe
was especially devastated by the malady. It was there that Claude's parents
resided, in the midst of their fief. The young scholar rushed in great alarm to the
paternal mansion. When he entered it, he found that both father and mother had
died on the preceding day. A very young brother of his, who was in swaddling
clothes, was still alive and crying abandoned in his cradle. This was all that
remained to Claude of his family; the young man took the child under his arm
and went off in a pensive mood. Up to that moment, he had lived only in science;
he now began to live in life.
This catastrophe was a crisis in Claude's existence. Orphaned, the eldest,
head of the family at the age of nineteen, he felt himself rudely recalled from the
reveries of school to the realities of this world. Then, moved with pity, he was
seized with passion and devotion towards that child, his brother; a sweet and
strange thing was a human affection to him, who had hitherto loved his books
alone.
This affection developed to a singular point; in a soul so new, it was like a
first love. Separated since infancy from his parents, whom he had hardly known;
cloistered and immured, as it were, in his books; eager above all things to study
Thesaurus
astrologer: (n) forecaster, predictor, (n) sickness, condition, trouble, ill. singular: (adj, n) extraordinary; (adj)
prognosticator, stargazer, Chaldean, orphaned: (adj) unparented, odd, individual, particular, peculiar,
psychic, starmonger, Babylonian, parentless. phenomenal, rare, queer, single,
seer, oracle, medium. paternal: (adj) parental, agnate, quaint, exceptional. ANTONYMS:
hoarding: (n) billboard, hoard, garner, maternal, agnatic, concerned, (adj) ordinary, normal, together,
signboard, cumulation, board, save, solicitous, patrimonial, ancestral, usual, customary.
hoards, store, notice, poster. fatherlike, racial, fraternal. veritable: (adj, v) real, true, actual,
licentiate: (n) graduate, student, ANTONYMS: (adj) filial, motherly. very; (adj) genuine, authentic, bona
scholar. rumor: (n) hearsay, talk, news; (n, v) fide, unquestionable, factual,
malady: (n, v) illness, ailment, gossip, fame, buzz, bruit, noise, truthful, right. ANTONYMS: (adj)
indisposition, distemper; (adj, n, v) rumour; (v) repute, reputation. false, unreal.
disorder; (adj, n) complaint, infirmity; ANTONYM: (n) truth.
and to learn; exclusively attentive up to that time, to his intelligence which

broadened in science, to his imagination, which expanded in letters,-- the poor
scholar had not yet had time to feel the place of his heart.%
This young brother, without mother or father, this little child which had
fallen abruptly from heaven into his arms, made a new man of him. He
perceived that there was something else in the world besides the speculations of
the Sorbonne, and the verses of Homer; that man needed affections; that life
without tenderness and without love was only a set of dry, shrieking, and
rending wheels. Only, he imagined, for he was at the age when illusions are as
yet replaced only by illusions, that the affections of blood and family were the
sole ones necessary, and that a little brother to love sufficed to fill an entire
existence.
He threw himself, therefore, into the love for his little Jehan with the passion
of a character already profound, ardent, concentrated; that poor frail creature,
pretty, fair- haired, rosy, and curly,-- that orphan with another orphan for his
only support, touched him to the bottom of his heart; and grave thinker as he
was, he set to meditating upon Jehan with an infinite compassion. He kept
watch and ward over him as over something very fragile, and very worthy of
care. He was more than a brother to the child; he became a mother to him.
Little Jehan had lost his mother while he was still at the breast; Claude gave
him to a nurse. Besides the fief of Tirechappe, he had inherited from his father
the fief of Moulin, which was a dependency of the square tower of Gentilly; it
was a mill on a hill, near the château of Winchestre (Bicêtre). There was a
miller's wife there who was nursing a fine child; it was not far from the
university, and Claude carried the little Jehan to her in his own arms.
From that time forth, feeling that he had a burden to bear, he took life very
seriously. The thought of his little brother became not only his recreation, but
the object of his studies. He resolved to consecrate himself entirely to a future for
which he was responsible in the sight of God, and never to have any other wife,
any other child than the happiness and fortune of his brother. Therefore, he
attached himself more closely than ever to the clerical profession. His merits, his
Thesaurus
affections: (n) bosom. consecrated. ANTONYMS: (v) screech, scream, belly laugh, shright,
ardent: (adj, n) enthusiastic, glowing; despoil, revile, damage, defile, howler, riot; (adj) sharp.
(adj, v) burning, fervent, deprecate; (adj) desecrated. tenderness: (n) fondness, soreness,
impassioned; (adj) keen, vehement, haired: (adj) hirsute, herd. love, affection, sympathy; (adj, n)
eager, warm, acute, fervid. meditating: (n) conception. clemency, mildness, compassion,
ANTONYMS: (adj) apathetic, cool, rosy: (adj) hopeful, blooming, gentleness, softness, delicacy.
unenthusiastic, traitorous, mild, optimistic, auspicious, promising, ANTONYMS: (n) pleasure, dryness,
frigid, dispassionate, cold, disloyal, bright, roseate, ruddy, fortunate, hatred, strength, detachment.
impassive, calm. flushed, pink. ANTONYMS: (adj) thinker: (n) intellect, mind, longhead,
consecrate: (n, v) sanctify; (v) devote, gloomy, depressing, hopeless, head, intellectual, creative thinker,
commit, ordain, apply, dedicate, unpromising. theorist, sage, wise person, pundit,
hallow, vow, exalt; (adj) dedicated, shrieking: (n) shriek, screeching, ruminator. ANTONYM: (n) realist.
Victor Hugo 177
learning, his quality of immediate vassal of the Bishop of Paris, threw the doors
of the church wide open to him. At the age of twenty, by special dispensation of
the Holy See, he was a priest, and served as the youngest of the chaplains of
Notre-Dame the altar which is called, because of the late mass which is said
there, altare pigrorum.%
There, plunged more deeply than ever in his dear books, which he quitted
only to run for an hour to the fief of Moulin, this mixture of learning and
austerity, so rare at his age, had promptly acquired for him the respect and
admiration of the monastery. From the cloister, his reputation as a learned man
had passed to the people, among whom it had changed a little, a frequent
occurrence at that time, into reputation as a sorcerer.
It was at the moment when he was returning, on Quasimodo day, from
saying his mass at the Altar of the Lazy, which was by the side of the door
leading to the nave on the right, near the image of the Virgin, that his attention
had been attracted by the group of old women chattering around the bed for
foundlings.
Then it was that he approached the unhappy little creature, which was so
hated and so menaced. That distress, that deformity, that abandonment, the
thought of his young brother, the idea which suddenly occurred to him, that if he
were to die, his dear little Jehan might also be flung miserably on the plank for
foundlings,-- all this had gone to his heart simultaneously; a great pity had
moved in him, and he had carried off the child.
When he removed the child from the sack, he found it greatly deformed, in
very sooth. The poor little wretch had a wart on his left eye, his head placed
directly on his shoulders, his spinal column was crooked, his breast bone
prominent, and his legs bowed; but he appeared to be lively; and although it was
impossible to say in what language he lisped, his cry indicated considerable
force and health. Claude's compassion increased at the sight of this ugliness; and
he made a vow in his heart to rear the child for the love of his brother, in order
that, whatever might be the future faults of the little Jehan, he should have beside
him that charity done for his sake. It was a sort of investment of good works,
Thesaurus
chattering: (n) chatter, cackle, yak, disfigurement, defect, blemish, convent; (n) friary, temple, lamasery,
grabbing, claver; (adj) talkative, disfiguration, defacement, disability, nunnery, priory; (adj) abbatial.
loquacious, noisy, gabby, garrulous; abnormality, distortion, clubfoot; (adj, sooth: (n) verity, soothsaying, fact,
(v) natter. n) irregularity. truth, reality.
crooked: (adj) bent, corrupt, dishonest, dispensation: (n) allotment, release, sorcerer: (n) magician, magus,
curved, unfair, deformed; (adj, n, v) disposal, assignment, division, necromancer, enchanter, conjurer,
awry; (adj, v) irregular, askew, wry, freedom, distribution, exemption, wizard, conjuror, sorcer , diviner,
indirect. ANTONYMS: (adj) straight, license, allocation, apportionment. exorciser, exorcist.
honest, principled, even, aboveboard, ANTONYM: (n) prohibition. vassal: (n) feudatory, liegeman, liege,
lawful, level, moral, flat, aligned, indicated: (adj) numbered. serf, helot, dependent, subject, liege
honorable. menaced: (adj) doomed, exposed. subject, follower, bondman, homager.
deformity: (n) malformation, monastery: (n, v) abbey, cloister, women: (n) sex, gentle sex.
which he was effecting in the name of his young brother; it was a stock of good
works which he wished to amass in advance for him, in case the little rogue
should some day find himself short of that coin, the only sort which is received
at the toll-bar of paradise.%
He baptized his adopted child, and gave him the name of Quasimodo, either
because he desired thereby to mark the day, when he had found him, or because
he wished to designate by that name to what a degree the poor little creature
was incomplete, and hardly sketched out. In fact, Quasimodo, blind,
hunchbacked, knock-kneed, was only an "almost."
Thesaurus
amass: (v) accumulate, collect, gather, degree: (n) extent, level, condition, effecting: (n) accomplishment,
hoard, pile, heap, accrue, store, stock, title, rank, academic degree, place, implementation, completing,
stack, save. ANTONYMS: (v) caliber, status, stair; (adj, n) order. finishing, fulfillment, carrying out;
distribute, divide, scatter, spend, designate: (n, v) denominate, appoint, (adj) effectual.
disburse, dissipate, disband, note, name; (v) allocate, assign, incomplete: (adj) faulty, deficient,
dwindle. delegate, define, allot, mark; (adj, n, v) inadequate, imperfect, short, lacking,
coin: (v) invent, mint, originate, create, denote. ANTONYMS: (v) disapprove, unfinished, half, insufficient, sketchy;
strike, cast; (n, v) forge; (n) specie, generalize, guess, oppose, elect. (adj, adv) halfway. ANTONYMS: (adj)
money, penny, piece. desired: (adj) coveted, desirable, finished, whole, entire,
creature: (n) being, brute, animal, tool, favorite, wanted, welcome, needed, comprehensive, boundless, adequate.
individual, person, body, entity, beloved, required, most wanted; (adj, thereby: (adv) whereby, hereby.
human, puppet, somebody. v) chosen; (v) consenting.
Victor Hugo 179
CHAPTER III
IMMANIS PECORIS CUSTOS, IMMANIOR IPSE
Now, in 1482, Quasimodo had grown up. 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.%
So Quasimodo was the ringer of the chimes of Notre-Dame.
In the course of time there had been formed a certain peculiarly intimate
bond which united the ringer to the church. Separated forever from the world, by
the double fatality of his unknown birth and his natural deformity, imprisoned
from his infancy in that impassable double circle, the poor wretch had grown
used to seeing nothing in this world beyond the religious walls which had
received him under their shadow. Notre-Dame had been to him successively, as
he grew up and developed, the egg, the nest, the house, the country, the
universe.
There was certainly a sort of mysterious and pre-existing harmony between
this creature and this church. When, still a little fellow, he had dragged himself
Thesaurus
barber: (v) shave, neaten; (n) shaver, closed, impossible. ANTONYMS: supporter. ANTONYM: (n) detractor.
hairdresser, Chinook, foehn, (adj) passable, open. peculiarly: (adj, adv) particularly,
khamsin, norther, vendaval, wuther, imprisoned: (adj) confined, jailed, curiously, unusually, uncommonly,
hairstylist. fenced in, unfree, locked up, singularly; (adv) especially, oddly,
fatality: (n) disaster, calamity, death, incarcerate, deeply moved, strangely, specifically, weirdly,
mishap, demise, misadventure, enraptured; (v) behind bars. specially. ANTONYMS: (adv)
lethality, adversity, loss, decease, nest: (n) den, lair, hole, burrow, home, typically, ordinarily, slightly.
dead. beehive; (adj) brood, hive, litter; (adj, ringer: (n) faker, dead ringer, bunko
impassable: (adj) impervious, n) herd; (v) embed. steerer, four flusher, capper, image,
impenetrable, impracticable, patron: (n) backer, advocate, friend, carpetbagger, horse coper, fraud,
invincible, insuperable, inaccessible, defender, customer, client, helper, straw bidder, spieler.
unpassable, innavigable, inextricable, sponsor, benefactor, frequenter,
tortuously and by jerks beneath the shadows of its vaults, he seemed, with his
human face and his bestial limbs, the natural reptile of that humid and sombre
pavement, upon which the shadow of the Romanesque capitals cast so many
strange forms.%
Later on, the first time that he caught hold, mechanically, of the ropes to the
towers, and hung suspended from them, and set the bell to clanging, it produced
upon his adopted father, Claude, the effect of a child whose tongue is unloosed
and who begins to speak.
It is thus that, little by little, developing always in sympathy with the
cathedral, living there, sleeping there, hardly ever leaving it, subject every hour
to the mysterious impress, he came to resemble it, he incrusted himself in it, so to
speak, and became an integral part of it. His salient angles fitted into the
retreating angles of the cathedral (if we may be allowed this figure of speech),
and he seemed not only its inhabitant but more than that, its natural tenant. One
might almost say that he had assumed its form, as the snail takes on the form of
its shell. It was his dwelling, his hole, his envelope. There existed between him
and the old church so profound an instinctive sympathy, so many magnetic
affinities, so many material affinities, that he adhered to it somewhat as a tortoise
adheres to its shell. The rough and wrinkled cathedral was his shell.
It is useless to warn the reader not to take literally all the similes which we
are obliged to employ here to express the singular, symmetrical, direct, almost
consubstantial union of a man and an edifice. It is equally unnecessary to state
to what a degree that whole cathedral was familiar to him, after so long and so
intimate a cohabitation. That dwelling was peculiar to him. It had no depths to
which Quasimodo had not penetrated, no height which he had not scaled. He
often climbed many stones up the front, aided solely by the uneven points of the
carving. The towers, on whose exterior surface he was frequently seen
clambering, like a lizard gliding along a perpendicular wall, those two gigantic
twins, so lofty, so menacing, so formidable, possessed for him neither vertigo,
nor terror, nor shocks of amazement.
Thesaurus
clanging: (adj) tinny, shrill, noisy, incrusted: (adj) crusted. reptile: (n) reptilian, creeper, basilisk,
metallic, clangorous. inhabitant: (n) denizen, resident, sneak, wretch, mammal, bird,
cohabitation: (n) living together, bed, occupant, citizen, tenant, occupier, shellfish; (adj) abject, vile, sordid.
sexual intercourse, inhabitation, population, native, liver, indweller; retreating: (n) flight; (adj) moving
habitation, inhabitancy, married (v) habitant. ANTONYM: (n) back.
state, sexual relations, coverture. stranger. similes: (n) imagery, images,
consubstantial: (adj) coessential, perpendicular: (adj) upright, vertical, metaphors.
similar, consubstantiate. steep, plumb, straight, right, sheer, tortuously: (adv) complexly,
gliding: (adj) sliding, flying, slipping, orthogonal, normal, precipitous, true. convolutedly, involvedly, twistingly,
labent, elusory; (n) sailing, soaring, ANTONYMS: (adj) horizontal, sinuously, meanderingly, twistily,
flight, glissando; (v) slither; (adv) parallel, inclined, oblique, prone, intricately, flexuously, indirectly,
glidingly. gentle. obliquely.
Victor Hugo 181
To see them so gentle under his hand, so easy to scale, one would have said
that he had tamed them. By dint of leaping, climbing, gambolling amid the
abysses of the gigantic cathedral he had become, in some sort, a monkey and a
goat, like the Calabrian child who swims before he walks, and plays with the sea
while still a babe.%
Moreover, it was not his body alone which seemed fashioned after the
Cathedral, but his mind also. In what condition was that mind? What bent had
it contracted, what form had it assumed beneath that knotted envelope, in that
savage life? This it would be hard to determine. Quasimodo had been born one-
eyed, hunchbacked, lame. It was with great difficulty, and by dint of great
patience that Claude Frollo had succeeded in teaching him to talk. But a fatality
was attached to the poor foundling. Bellringer of Notre-Dame at the age of
fourteen, a new infirmity had come to complete his misfortunes: the bells had
broken the drums of his ears; he had become deaf. The only gate which nature
had left wide open for him had been abruptly closed, and forever.
In closing, it had cut off the only ray of joy and of light which still made its
way into the soul of Quasimodo. His soul fell into profound night. The
wretched being's misery became as incurable and as complete as his deformity.
Let us add that his deafness rendered him to some extent dumb. For, in order
not to make others laugh, the very moment that he found himself to be deaf, he
resolved upon a silence which he only broke when he was alone. He voluntarily
tied that tongue which Claude Frollo had taken so much pains to unloose.
Hence, it came about, that when necessity constrained him to speak, his tongue
was torpid, awkward, and like a door whose hinges have grown rusty.
If now we were to try to penetrate to the soul of Quasimodo through that
thick, hard rind; if we could sound the depths of that badly constructed
organism; if it were granted to us to look with a torch behind those non-
transparent organs to explore the shadowy interior of that opaque creature, to
elucidate his obscure corners, his absurd no-thoroughfares, and suddenly to cast
a vivid light upon the soul enchained at the extremity of that cave, we should, no
doubt, find the unhappy Psyche in some poor, cramped, and ricketty attitude,
Thesaurus
deafness: (n) deaf, surdity, acute enchained: (adj) in chains, bound. misfortunes: (n) misfortune.
suppurative otitis media, hearing incurable: (adj) incorrigible, tamed: (adj) tame, broken,
loss. immedicable, cureless, inveterate, domesticated, under control, tamer,
dint: (v) indent; (n) indentation, blow, irretrievable, irrecoverable, terminal, meek, gentle, domestic, docile,
strength, percussion, agency, hollow, irremediable, irreparable, remediless, controlled, cultivated.
depression, might, impression; (adj) chronic. ANTONYM: (adj) mild. torpid: (adj) inactive, sluggish,
delve. infirmity: (adj, n) frailty, foible, indolent, dull, slow, dormant, lazy,
elucidate: (v) clear up, clarify, imbecility; (n) feebleness, impotence, dead, lifeless, flat, supine.
enlighten, explain, illuminate, disability, decrepitude, illness, ANTONYMS: (adj) energetic, lively.
expound, decipher, brighten, resolve, sickness, disease, weakness. unloose: (v) loosen, clear, liberate,
solve, clear. ANTONYMS: (v) ANTONYMS: (n) health, wellness, loose, undo, unchain, free, extricate,
obfuscate, muddy, obscure. strength. disengage, unloosen, unbind.
like those prisoners beneath the Leads of Venice, who grew old bent double in a
stone box which was both too low and too short for them.%
It is certain that the mind becomes atrophied in a defective body.
Quasimodo was barely conscious of a soul cast in his own image, moving blindly
within him. The impressions of objects underwent a considerable refraction
before reaching his mind. His brain was a peculiar medium; the ideas which
passed through it issued forth completely distorted. The reflection which
resulted from this refraction was, necessarily, divergent and perverted.
Hence a thousand optical illusions, a thousand aberrations of judgment, a
thousand deviations, in which his thought strayed, now mad, now idiotic.
The first effect of this fatal organization was to trouble the glance which he
cast upon things. He received hardly any immediate perception of them. The
external world seemed much farther away to him than it does to us.
The second effect of his misfortune was to render him malicious.
He was malicious, in fact, because he was savage; he was savage because he
was ugly. There was logic in his nature, as there is in ours.
His strength, so extraordinarily developed, was a cause of still greater
malevolence: "Malus puer robustus," says Hobbes.
This justice must, however be rendered to him. Malevolence was not,
perhaps, innate in him. From his very first steps among men, he had felt himself,
later on he had seen himself, spewed out, blasted, rejected. Human words were,
for him, always a raillery or a malediction. As he grew up, he had found nothing
but hatred around him. He had caught the general malevolence. He had picked
up the weapon with which he had been wounded.
After all, he turned his face towards men only with reluctance; his cathedral
was sufficient for him. It was peopled with marble figures,-- kings, saints,
bishops,-- who at least did not burst out laughing in his face, and who gazed
upon him only with tranquillity and kindliness. The other statues, those of the
monsters and demons, cherished no hatred for him, Quasimodo. He resembled
them too much for that. They seemed rather, to be scoffing at other men. The
Thesaurus
atrophied: (adj) cadaverous, wasted, tenderness, compassion, charity, reprobate, unnatural. ANTONYMS:
diminished; (v) shrivel. ANTONYM: consideration, helpfulness. (adj) normal, moral, unchanged.
(adj) hypertrophied. ANTONYMS: (n) indifference, refraction: (n) deflexion, deflection,
idiotic: (adj) absurd, foolish, fatuous, reserve, cruelty. deviation, aberration, diversion; (v)
imbecile, crazy, stupid, ridiculous, malevolence: (n) malice, hatred, spite, obliquation, virtual image, spectrum,
mindless, silly, unwise, daft. hate, ill will, bitterness, hostility, warp; (adj) reflection, refractive.
ANTONYMS: (adj) wise, genius, rancor, venom, grudge, enmity. scoffing: (n) scoff, mockery, jeer,
clever. ANTONYMS: (n) benevolence, good, derision, sibilation, gibe; (adj)
impressions: (n) impersonation, affection, goodwill. mocking, derisive, cynical, scoptical,
imitation. perverted: (adj) perverse, immoral, jesting.
kindliness: (n) friendliness, geniality, distorted, kinky, corrupt, twisted, strayed: (v) stray.
amiability, grace, benignancy, mercy, abnormal, debauched, deviant, underwent: (v) endure, tolerate.
Victor Hugo 183
saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends and
guarded him. So he held long communion with them. He sometimes passed
whole hours crouching before one of these statues, in solitary conversation with
it. If any one came, he fled like a lover surprised in his serenade.%
And the cathedral was not only society for him, but the universe, and all
nature beside. He dreamed of no other hedgerows than the painted windows,
always in flower; no other shade than that of the foliage of stone which spread
out, loaded with birds, in the tufts of the Saxon capitals; of no other mountains
than the colossal towers of the church; of no other ocean than Paris, roaring at
their bases.
What he loved above all else in the maternal edifice, that which aroused his
soul, and made it open its poor wings, which it kept so miserably folded in its
cavern, that which sometimes rendered him even happy, was the bells. He loved
them, fondled them, talked to them, understood them. From the chime in the
spire, over the intersection of the aisles and nave, to the great bell of the front, he
cherished a tenderness for them all. The central spire and the two towers were to
him as three great cages, whose birds, reared by himself, sang for him alone. Yet
it was these very bells which had made him deaf; but mothers often love best
that child which has caused them the most suffering.
It is true that their voice was the only one which he could still hear. On this
score, the big bell was his beloved. It was she whom he preferred out of all that
family of noisy girls which bustled above him, on festival days. This bell was
named Marie. She was alone in the southern tower, with her sister Jacqueline, a
bell of lesser size, shut up in a smaller cage beside hers. This Jacqueline was so
called from the name of the wife of Jean Montagu, who had given it to the
church, which had not prevented his going and figuring without his head at
Montfauçon. In the second tower there were six other bells, and, finally, six
smaller ones inhabited the belfry over the crossing, with the wooden bell, which
rang only between after dinner on Good Friday and the morning of the day
before Easter. So Quasimodo had fifteen bells in his seraglio; but big Marie was
his favorite.
Thesaurus
bases: (n) basis, foundation. dear, number one; (adj) favored, arrayed, clothed, dressed,
cavern: (n) hollow, cove, vault, hole, beloved, popular; (n) pet, choice, accustomed, habited; (adj, v) peopled;
enclosure, antrum, lair, antre, socket, pick, preference. ANTONYMS: (n) (adj) occupied, settled, housing.
den; (v) cavern out. indifference, superior, underdog; ANTONYMS: (adj) unoccupied,
colossal: (adj) huge, gargantuan, (adj) unwanted, despised, disliked, uninhabited, business.
prodigious, Brobdingnagian, vast, hated, unusual. intersection: (n) crossroads, cross,
enormous, great, mammoth, figuring: (n) calculation, reckoning, crossroad, crossing, intersect,
immense, massive, monstrous. estimation, computing, figure, junction, crossway, interchange,
ANTONYMS: (adj) tiny, small, approximation, conversion, point of intersection, cross-roads,
insignificant, minute, compact, derivative, differential, estimate, cutting.
microscopic, miniature, slight. derived function. seraglio: (n) hareem, palace, zenana,
favorite: (adj, n) darling, favourite, inhabited: (v) populous, full of people, serai, quarters, living quarters, serail.
No idea can be formed of his delight on days when the grand peal was
sounded. At the moment when the archdeacon dismissed him, and said, "Go!"
he mounted the spiral staircase of the clock tower faster than any one else could
have descended it. He entered perfectly breathless into the aerial chamber of the
great bell; he gazed at her a moment, devoutly and lovingly; then he gently
addressed her and patted her with his hand, like a good horse, which is about to
set out on a long journey. He pitied her for the trouble that she was about to
suffer. After these first caresses, he shouted to his assistants, placed in the lower
story of the tower, to begin. They grasped the ropes, the wheel creaked, the
enormous capsule of metal started slowly into motion. Quasimodo followed it
with his glance and trembled. The first shock of the clapper and the brazen wall
made the framework upon which it was mounted quiver. Quasimodo vibrated
with the bell.%
"Vah!" he cried, with a senseless burst of laughter. However, the movement
of the bass was accelerated, and, in proportion as it described a wider angle,
Quasimodo's eye opened also more and more widely, phosphoric and flaming.
At length the grand peal began; the whole tower trembled; woodwork, leads, cut
stones, all groaned at once, from the piles of the foundation to the trefoils of its
summit. Then Quasimodo boiled and frothed; he went and came; he trembled
from head to foot with the tower. The bell, furious, running riot, presented to the
two walls of the tower alternately its brazen throat, whence escaped that
tempestuous breath, which is audible leagues away. Quasimodo stationed
himself in front of this open throat; he crouched and rose with the oscillations of
the bell, breathed in this overwhelming breath, gazed by turns at the deep place,
which swarmed with people, two hundred feet below him, and at that enormous,
brazen tongue which came, second after second, to howl in his ear.
It was the only speech which he understood, the only sound which broke for
him the universal silence. He swelled out in it as a bird does in the sun. All of a
sudden, the frenzy of the bell seized upon him; his look became extraordinary;
he lay in wait for the great bell as it passed, as a spider lies in wait for a fly, and
flung himself abruptly upon it, with might and main. Then, suspended above
Thesaurus
alternately: (adv) alternatively, by clapper type tool box, claw, preposterous, pointless, irrational,
turns, in turn, secondarily, footboards, footboard. absurd, stupid, insensible, idiotic,
reciprocally, mutually, off-and-on, devoutly: (adv) sincerely, godly, fatuous, purposeless. ANTONYMS:
rather, anthemwise, secondly; (adj, religiously, reverently, earnestly, (adj) meaningful, wise, conscious,
adv) on and off. solemnly, heartily, holy, purely, provoked, prudent, useful,
capsule: (n) lozenge, boll, pill, tablet, heartfeltly, at heart. worthwhile.
condensation, bladder, abridgment, howl: (n, v) cry, roar, scream, bark, tempestuous: (adj, n) rough,
bolthead, alembic, space capsule; (v) shout, yell, bay, yelp; (v) bawl, growl, boisterous, severe; (adj) raging,
encapsulate. ANTONYM: (adj) yawl. ANTONYM: (v) laugh. furious, wild, angry, windy, fierce,
lengthened. phosphoric: (adj) phosphorous, gusty; (adj, v) turbulent.
clapper: (n) tongue, organ, striker, phosphorical. ANTONYMS: (adj) mild, moderate,
spit, clack valve, bell, applauder, senseless: (adj) foolish, mindless, relaxed.
Victor Hugo 185
the abyss, borne to and fro by the formidable swinging of the bell, he seized the
brazen monster by the ear-laps, pressed it between both knees, spurred it on with
his heels, and redoubled the fury of the peal with the whole shock and weight of
his body. Meanwhile, the tower trembled; he shrieked and gnashed his teeth, his
red hair rose erect, his breast heaving like a bellows, his eye flashed flames, the
monstrous bell neighed, panting, beneath him; and then it was no longer the
great bell of Notre- Dame nor Quasimodo: it was a dream, a whirlwind, a
tempest, dizziness mounted astride of noise; a spirit clinging to a flying crupper,
a strange centaur, half man, half bell; a sort of horrible Astolphus, borne away
upon a prodigious hippogriff of living bronze.%
The presence of this extraordinary being caused, as it were, a breath of life to
circulate throughout the entire cathedral. It seemed as though there escaped from
him, at least according to the growing superstitions of the crowd, a mysterious
emanation which animated all the stones of Notre-Dame, and made the deep
bowels of the ancient church to palpitate. It sufficed for people to know that he
was there, to make them believe that they beheld the thousand statues of the
galleries and the fronts in motion. And the cathedral did indeed seem a docile
and obedient creature beneath his hand; it waited on his will to raise its great
voice; it was possessed and filled with Quasimodo, as with a familiar spirit. One
would have said that he made the immense edifice breathe. He was everywhere
about it; in fact, he multiplied himself on all points of the structure. Now one
perceived with affright at the very top of one of the towers, a fantastic dwarf
climbing, writhing, crawling on all fours, descending outside above the abyss,
leaping from projection to projection, and going to ransack the belly of some
sculptured gorgon; it was Quasimodo dislodging the crows. Again, in some
obscure corner of the church one came in contact with a sort of living chimera,
crouching and scowling; it was Quasimodo engaged in thought. Sometimes one
caught sight, upon a bell tower, of an enormous head and a bundle of disordered
limbs swinging furiously at the end of a rope; it was Quasimodo ringing vespers
or the Angelus. Often at night a hideous form was seen wandering along the
frail balustrade of carved lacework, which crowns the towers and borders the
circumference of the apse; again it was the hunchback of Notre-Dame. Then,
Thesaurus
borne: (adj) weak, wanting, spoony, submissive, tame, teachable, humble, Hurlothrumbo, enfant terrible, bete
soft, sappy, shallow, little, limited. obedient, acquiescent, conformable; noire, Euryale, nightmare.
centaur: (n) constellation, the Centaur, (adj, v) tractable. ANTONYMS: (adj) lacework: (n) filigree.
sagittary, monster. stubborn, assertive, unruly, willful, palpitate: (n, v) throb, pant, thrill,
crupper: (n) strap, poop, stern, defiant, vicious, determined, heave; (v) flutter, pulsate, shiver,
crouper, heelpiece. uncooperative, obstinate, shake, quiver, pound, flicker.
dizziness: (n) giddiness, swimming, disobedient, intractable. ransack: (v) loot, pillage, seek, despoil,
faint, symptom, nausea, perkiness, emanation: (n) emission, effluvium, comb, rifle, rake, raid, sack, pry,
playfulness, flightiness, effusion, effluence, efflux, radiation, foray.
lightheartedness, laughing and excretion, exhalation, flow, egress, scowling: (adj) frowning, angry, dire,
joking; (v) scotomy. ectoplasm. frowny, grim, threatening, ugly,
docile: (adj) dutiful, compliant, meek, gorgon: (adj) mormo, ogre, unfriendly, dark.
said the women of the neighborhood, the whole church took on something
fantastic, supernatural, horrible; eyes and mouths were opened, here and there;
one heard the dogs, the monsters, and the gargoyles of stone, which keep watch
night and day, with outstretched neck and open jaws, around the monstrous
cathedral, barking. And, if it was a Christmas Eve, while the great bell, which
seemed to emit the death rattle, summoned the faithful to the midnight mass,
such an air was spread over the sombre façade that one would have declared
that the grand portal was devouring the throng, and that the rose window was
watching it. And all this came from Quasimodo. Egypt would have taken him
for the god of this temple; the Middle Ages believed him to be its demon: he was
in fact its soul.%
To such an extent was this disease that for those who know that Quasimodo
has existed, Notre-Dame is to-day deserted, inanimate, dead. One feels that
something has disappeared from it. That immense body is empty; it is a
skeleton; the spirit has quitted it, one sees its place and that is all. It is like a skull
which still has holes for the eyes, but no longer sight.
Thesaurus
barking: (adj) latrant; (n) abay, trickle, withhold. neighborhood: (n) vicinity, district,
latration. inanimate: (adj) defunct, dull, area, community, locality, place,
believed: (adj) whispered, alleged, breathless, inorganic, inactive, quarter, environs, section; (adj)
thought, held. lifeless, exanimate, deceased, extinct, neighboring, local.
devouring: (adv) devouringly; (adj) unconscious, spiritless. ANTONYMS: rattle: (n, v) jingle, jangle, clatter; (n)
esurient, edacious, avid, greedy, (adj) living, animate, spirited. click, clang, clack; (v) bang, confuse,
voraginous, ravenous; (n) fire. monstrous: (adj) huge, atrocious, shake, patter, disconcert.
emit: (adj, v) discharge; (v) shoot, heinous, monster, immense, gigantic, supernatural: (adj) mystical,
belch, reek, give off, evolve, eject, grievous, ugly, flagitious, dreadful; preternatural, weird, superhuman,
shed, radiate, emanate; (n, v) give. (adj, v) grotesque. ANTONYMS: (adj) eerie, uncanny, unnatural,
ANTONYMS: (v) absorb, contain, tiny, minute, beautiful, good, small, mysterious, ghostly, divine; (n)
repress, retain, suppress, block, lovely, attractive. occult. ANTONYM: (adj) normal.
Victor Hugo 187
CHAPTER IV
THE DOG AND HIS MASTER
Nevertheless, there was one human creature whom Quasimodo excepted

from his malice and from his hatred for others, and whom he loved even more,
perhaps, than his cathedral: this was Claude Frollo.%
The matter was simple; Claude Frollo had taken him in, had adopted him,
had nourished him, had reared him. When a little lad, it was between Claude
Frollo's legs that he was accustomed to seek refuge, when the dogs and the
children barked after him. Claude Frollo had taught him to talk, to read, to
write. Claude Frollo had finally made him the bellringer. Now, to give the big
bell in marriage to Quasimodo was to give Juliet to Romeo.
Hence Quasimodo's gratitude was profound, passionate, boundless; and
although the visage of his adopted father was often clouded or severe, although
his speech was habitually curt, harsh, imperious, that gratitude never wavered
for a single moment. The archdeacon had in Quasimodo the most submissive
slave, the most docile lackey, the most vigilant of dogs. When the poor
bellringer became deaf, there had been established between him and Claude
Frollo, a language of signs, mysterious and understood by themselves alone. In
this manner the archdeacon was the sole human being with whom Quasimodo
Thesaurus
boundless: (adj) limitless, endless, excepted: (v) except; (adj) let off, compliant, resigned, subject, lowly,
unlimited, infinite, bottomless, excused. servile. ANTONYMS: (adj) assertive,
incalculable, immense, habitually: (adv) usually, ordinarily, resistant, disobedient, defiant,
immeasurable, interminable, normally, generally, regularly, obstinate, rebellious, wild,
unbounded, vast. ANTONYMS: (adj) frequently, commonly, routinely, intractable, proactive; (adv) bossily.
limited, restricted, confined, finite, wontedly, conventionally, vigilant: (adj) alert, watchful, attentive,
incomplete, negligible, small. commonplacely. ANTONYMS: (adv) observant, cautious, guarded,
clouded: (adj, n) cloudy; (adj) gloomy, unusually, seldom, erratically, circumspect, wakeful, careful,
dark, overcast, obscure, blurred, exceptionally, occasionally. jealous; (adj, v) awake. ANTONYMS:
foggy, misty, hazy, bleary; (v) nourished: (adj) fostered. (adj) careless, negligent, reckless,
cymophanous. ANTONYM: (adj) submissive: (adj) obedient, passive, oblivious, unprepared, asleep.
clear. meek, dutiful, obsequious, docile,
had preserved communication. He was in sympathy with but two things in this
world: Notre- Dame and Claude Frollo.%
There is nothing which can be compared with the empire of the archdeacon
over the bellringer; with the attachment of the bellringer for the archdeacon. A
sign from Claude and the idea of giving him pleasure would have sufficed to
make Quasimodo hurl himself headlong from the summit of Notre- Dame. It
was a remarkable thing-- all that physical strength which had reached in
Quasimodo such an extraordinary development, and which was placed by him
blindly at the disposition of another. There was in it, no doubt, filial devotion,
domestic attachment; there was also the fascination of one spirit by another
spirit. It was a poor, awkward, and clumsy organization, which stood with
lowered head and supplicating eyes before a lofty and profound, a powerful and
superior intellect. Lastly, and above all, it was gratitude. Gratitude so pushed to
its extremest limit, that we do not know to what to compare it. This virtue is not
one of those of which the finest examples are to be met with among men. We
will say then, that Quasimodo loved the archdeacon as never a dog, never a
horse, never an elephant loved his master.
Thesaurus
blindly: (adv) darkly, dimly, adroit, elegant, coordinated, expert, hold.
blindfoldly, purblindly, obscurely, athletic, agile. intellect: (n) mind, intelligence,
heedlessly, unreasoningly, blindfold, filial: (adj) dutiful. understanding, reason, brains, head,
unsightedly, inconsiderately, headlong: (adj, adv) headfirst; (adv) intellectual, apprehension, psyche,
ignorantly. ANTONYMS: (adv) directly, hastily, precipitately; (adj) genius, brainpower. ANTONYM: (n)
sensibly, carefully, considerately, rash, hurried, desperate, precipitous, stupidity.
purposely. impetuous, sudden, precipitate. supplicating: (adj) imploring,
clumsy: (adj) bumbling, bungling, ANTONYMS: (adj) cautiously, soliciting, beseeching, entreating,
cumbersome, unwieldy, rude, inept, considered; (adv) carefully. petitioning, apologetic, begging,
inapt, maladroit, gawky, unskilled, hurl: (v) chuck, dash, pitch, throw, manifesting entreaty, petitory,
wooden. ANTONYMS: (adj) graceful, dart, pelt, toss, heave, send; (n, v) piteous; (v) supplicate.
dexterous, clever, skillful, deft, fling; (n) casting. ANTONYM: (v)
Victor Hugo 189
CHAPTER V
MORE ABOUT CLAUDE FROLLO
In 1482, Quasimodo was about twenty years of age; Claude Frollo, about
thirty-six. One had grown up, the other had grown old.%
Claude Frollo was no longer the simple scholar of the college of Torch, the
tender protector of a little child, the young and dreamy philosopher who knew
many things and was ignorant of many. He was a priest, austere, grave, morose;
one charged with souls; monsieur the archdeacon of Josas, the bishop's second
acolyte, having charge of the two deaneries of Montlhéry, and Châteaufort, and
one hundred and seventy-four country curacies. He was an imposing and
sombre personage, before whom the choir boys in alb and in jacket trembled, as
well as the machicots, and the brothers of Saint-Augustine and the matutinal
clerks of Notre-Dame, when he passed slowly beneath the lofty arches of the
choir, majestic, thoughtful, with arms folded and his head so bent upon his
breast that all one saw of his face was his large, bald brow.
Dom Claude Frollo had, however, abandoned neither science nor the
education of his young brother, those two occupations of his life. But as time
went on, some bitterness had been mingled with these things which were so
sweet. In the long run, says Paul Diacre, the best lard turns rancid. Little Jehan
Frollo, surnamed (du Moulin) "of the Mill" because of the place where he had
Thesaurus
acolyte: (n) acolouthite, acolythist, impractical, somnolent, visionary, matutinal: (adj) early, earlier, earliest,
acholithite, server, supporter, helper, sleepy, pensive, moony, idealistic, matinal, matutinary, matutine.
assistant, altar boy, help, acolyth. drowsy; (v) balmy. ANTONYMS: protector: (n) guard, guardian, patron,
ANTONYM: (n) leader. (adj) cynical, vigorous, pragmatic, champion, custodian, conservator,
austere: (adj) ascetic, stern, severe, practical, awake, alert, ordinary, escort, hero, paladin, supporter,
harsh, plain, rigorous, rigid, prosaic. benefactor.
abstemious, stark, astringent, stiff. lard: (n) grease, suet, tallow, oil; (v) rancid: (adj) putrid, sour, high, rank,
ANTONYMS: (adj) ornate, luxurious, embellish, embroider, glorify, fetid, stale, rotten; (adj, v) musty,
frivolous, hedonistic, extravagant, magnify, amplify, aggrandize, blow decayed, moldy, tainted.
lush, elaborate, spending, sunny, up. sombre: (adj) dismal, dreary, dark,
warm, indulgent. longer: (adj) longest, better, lengest; shadowy, mournful, morose, murky,
dreamy: (adj) faraway, romantic, (adv) farther; (n) yearner, thirster. gloomy, sober, dull, glum.
been reared, had not grown up in the direction which Claude would have liked
to impose upon him. The big brother counted upon a pious, docile, learned, and
honorable pupil. But the little brother, like those young trees which deceive the
gardener's hopes and turn obstinately to the quarter whence they receive sun
and air, the little brother did not grow and did not multiply, but only put forth
fine bushy and luxuriant branches on the side of laziness, ignorance, and
debauchery. He was a regular devil, and a very disorderly one, who made Dom
Claude scowl; but very droll and very subtle, which made the big brother smile.%
Claude had confided him to that same college of Torchi where he had passed
his early years in study and meditation; and it was a grief to him that this
sanctuary, formerly edified by the name of Frollo, should to-day be scandalized
by it. He sometimes preached Jehan very long and severe sermons, which the
latter intrepidly endured. After all, the young scapegrace had a good heart, as
can be seen in all comedies. But the sermon over, he none the less tranquilly
resumed his course of seditions and enormities. Now it was a bejaune or yellow
beak (as they called the new arrivals at the university), whom he had been
mauling by way of welcome; a precious tradition which has been carefully
preserved to our own day. Again, he had set in movement a band of scholars,
who had flung themselves upon a wine-shop in classic fashion, quasi classico
excitati, had then beaten the tavern-keeper "with offensive cudgels," and joyously
pillaged the tavern, even to smashing in the hogsheads of wine in the cellar. And
then it was a fine report in Latin, which the sub-monitor of Torchi carried
piteously to Dom Claude with this dolorous marginal comment,-- Rixa; prima
causa vinum optimum potatum. Finally, it was said, a thing quite horrible in a boy
of sixteen, that his debauchery often extended as far as the Rue de Glatigny.
Claude, saddened and discouraged in his human affections, by all this, had
flung himself eagerly into the arms of learning, that sister which, at least does not
laugh in your face, and which always pays you, though in money that is
sometimes a little hollow, for the attention which you have paid to her. Hence, he
became more and more learned, and, at the same time, as a natural consequence,
more and more rigid as a priest, more and more sad as a man. There are for each
Thesaurus
beak: (n) neb, snout, bill, nose, prow, lachrymose, melancholy, piteous, bravely, daringly, audaciously,
snoot, rostrum, proboscis, nib, miserable, lamentable, dark, undauntedly, gallantly, heroically,
pecker; (v) peck. cheerless; (v) dolorific. ANTONYMS: hardily. ANTONYMS: (adv)
causa: (n) casing, suit, cause, caseful, (adj) hopeful, cheery, cheerful, cautiously, nervously.
campaign, lawsuit. upbeat. quasi: (adv) nearly, almost, partly,
debauchery: (n) dissipation, droll: (adj) comical, humorous, funny, practically, just as; (adj) mock,
depravity, revel, excess, laughable, burlesque, ludicrous, ostensible, similar, pseudo; (n) semi.
dissoluteness, riot, revelry, orgy, vice, ridiculous; (adj, n) comic, witty; (n) scapegrace: (n) black sheep, scalawag,
bacchanal, Bacchanalia. buffoon, clown. ANTONYMS: (adj) miscreant; (adj) rashling, madcap, fire
ANTONYMS: (n) chastity, dramatic, dull, grave, tragic, solemn. eater, desperado, daredevil, hotspur,
uprightness, decency, restraint. intrepidly: (adv) valiantly, bully, bravo.
dolorous: (adj) tearful, dismal, doleful, courageously, boldly, dauntlessly, seditions: (adj) lawless, riotous.
Victor Hugo 191
of us several parallelisms between our intelligence, our habits, and our character,
which develop without a break, and break only in the great disturbances of life.%
As Claude Frollo had passed through nearly the entire circle of human
learning-- positive, exterior, and permissible-- since his youth, he was obliged,
unless he came to a halt, ubi defuit orbis, to proceed further and seek other
aliments for the insatiable activity of his intelligence. The antique symbol of the
serpent biting its tail is, above all, applicable to science. It would appear that
Claude Frollo had experienced this. Many grave persons affirm that, after
having exhausted the fas of human learning, he had dared to penetrate into the
nefas. He had, they said, tasted in succession all the apples of the tree of
knowledge, and, whether from hunger or disgust, had ended by tasting the
forbidden fruit. He had taken his place by turns, as the reader has seen, in the
conferences of the theologians in Sorbonne,-- in the assemblies of the doctors of
art, after the manner of Saint-Hilaire,-- in the disputes of the decretalists, after the
manner of Saint-Martin,-- in the congregations of physicians at the holy water
font of Notre- Dame, ad cupam Nostroe-Dominoe. All the dishes permitted and
approved, which those four great kitchens called the four faculties could
elaborate and serve to the understanding, he had devoured, and had been
satiated with them before his hunger was appeased. Then he had penetrated
further, lower, beneath all that finished, material, limited knowledge; he had,
perhaps, risked his soul, and had seated himself in the cavern at that mysterious
table of the alchemists, of the astrologers, of the hermetics, of which Averroès,
Gillaume de Paris, and Nicolas Flamel hold the end in the Middle Ages; and
which extends in the East, by the light of the seven- branched candlestick, to
Solomon, Pythagoras, and Zoroaster.
That is, at least, what was supposed, whether rightly or not. It is certain that
the archdeacon often visited the cemetery of the Saints-Innocents, where, it is
true, his father and mother had been buried, with other victims of the plague of
1466; but that he appeared far less devout before the cross of their grave than
before the strange figures with which the tomb of Nicolas Flamel and Claude
Pernelle, erected just beside it, was loaded.
Thesaurus
affirm: (v) prove, assert, declare, candleholder, holder, electrolier, hassle, annoy, badger, pester, disturb,
protest, avow, maintain, approve, gaselier, girandola, luster. beleaguer; (n, v) worry; (adj, n, v)
accept, assure, profess, promise. font: (n) type, fountain, baptistery, bother. ANTONYM: (v) comfort.
ANTONYMS: (v) negate, veto, typeface, spring, print, well, boldface, satiated: (adj) full, replete, gorged,
nullify, refute, repress. black letter, baptistry, baptismal font. satisfied, jaded, sated, glutted, fat, fed
appeased: (adj) content, pacate. insatiable: (adj) ravenous, voracious, up, corpulent, disgusted.
branched: (adj) bifurcate, branching, insatiate, gluttonous, avaricious, ANTONYM: (adj) insatiate.
ramous, ramose, divided, biramous, quenchless, avid, unquenchable, tasting: (n) degustation, gustation,
branchy, prongy, bearing branches, unsatiable, grasping, sateless. savoring, relishing, sample, gustatory
split, pronged. ANTONYM: (adj) moderate. sensation, gustatory perception,
candlestick: (n) candelabra, sconce, penetrated: (adj) perforated, entered. discernment, drinking, eating,
chandelier, candle holder, girandole, plague: (v) molest, harass, afflict, feeding.
It is certain that he had frequently been seen to pass along the Rue des
Lombards, and furtively enter a little house which formed the corner of the Rue
des Ecrivans and the Rue Marivault. It was the house which Nicolas Flamel had
built, where he had died about 1417, and which, constantly deserted since that
time, had already begun to fall in ruins,-- so greatly had the hermetics and the
alchemists of all countries wasted away the walls, merely by carving their names
upon them. Some neighbors even affirm that they had once seen, through an air-
hole, Archdeacon Claude excavating, turning over, digging up the earth in the
two cellars, whose supports had been daubed with numberless couplets and
hieroglyphics by Nicolas Flamel himself. It was supposed that Flamel had
buried the philosopher's stone in the cellar; and the alchemists, for the space of
two centuries, from Magistri to Father Pacifique, never ceased to worry the soil
until the house, so cruelly ransacked and turned over, ended by falling into dust
beneath their feet.%
Again, it is certain that the archdeacon had been seized with a singular
passion for the symbolical door of Notre- Dame, that page of a conjuring book
written in stone, by Bishop Guillaume de Paris, who has, no doubt, been damned
for having affixed so infernal a frontispiece to the sacred poem chanted by the
rest of the edifice. Archdeacon Claude had the credit also of having fathomed
the mystery of the colossus of Saint Christopher, and of that lofty, enigmatical
statue which then stood at the entrance of the vestibule, and which the people, in
derision, called "Monsieur Legris." But, what every one might have noticed was
the interminable hours which he often employed, seated upon the parapet of the
area in front of the church, in contemplating the sculptures of the front;
examining now the foolish virgins with their lamps reversed, now the wise
virgins with their lamps upright; again, calculating the angle of vision of that
raven which belongs to the left front, and which is looking at a mysterious point
inside the church, where is concealed the philosopher's stone, if it be not in the
cellar of Nicolas Flamel.
It was, let us remark in passing, a singular fate for the Church of Notre-Dame
at that epoch to be so beloved, in two different degrees, and with so much
Thesaurus
conjuring: (n) magic, hocus-pocus, admiration, praise, approval. sneakingly, underhandedly,
incantation, sorcery, witchcraft, enigmatical: (adj) mysterious, obscure, undercoverly, craftily. ANTONYMS:
sleight of hand, adjuration, figgum, indeterminate, oracular, perplexing, (adv) deliberately, brazenly.
conjury, evocation; (adj) magical. unintelligible, ambiguous, cabalistic, infernal: (adj) devilish, fiendish,
daubed: (adj) beplastered, covered, confusing, dark, difficult. diabolical, demonic, damned, cursed,
greasy. excavating: (v) excavate. blasted, unholy, wicked; (adj, v)
degrees: (n) degree, temperature, frontispiece: (n) front, heading, diabolic, satanic.
compass rose, cardinal points. frontage, facia, face, groundwork, ransacked: (adj) plundered, pillaged,
derision: (n) contempt, mockery, endpapers, pediment, proscenium. emptier, despoiled, empty.
scorn, banter, jeering, disdain, scoff, furtively: (adv) stealthily, covertly, raven: (v) guttle, feed, devour, gulp,
insult, irony, sport, gibe. surreptitiously, sneakily, harry, eat; (n) crow, plunder; (adj)
ANTONYMS: (n) applause, esteem, clandestinely, secretively, sly, black, jet; (n, v) gorge.
Victor Hugo 193
devotion, by two beings so dissimilar as Claude and Quasimodo. Beloved by

one, a sort of instinctive and savage half-man, for its beauty, for its stature, for
the harmonies which emanated from its magnificent ensemble; beloved by the
other, a learned and passionate imagination, for its myth, for the sense which it
contains, for the symbolism scattered beneath the sculptures of its front,-- like the
first text underneath the second in a palimpsest,-- in a word, for the enigma
which it is eternally propounding to the understanding.%
Furthermore, it is certain that the archdeacon had established himself in that
one of the two towers which looks upon the Grève, just beside the frame for the
bells, a very secret little cell, into which no one, not even the bishop, entered
without his leave, it was said. This tiny cell had formerly been made almost at
the summit of the tower, among the ravens' nests, by Bishop Hugo de Besançon
who had wrought sorcery there in his day. What that cell contained, no one
knew; but from the strand of the Terrain, at night, there was often seen to appear,
disappear, and reappear at brief and regular intervals, at a little dormer window
opening upon the back of the tower, a certain red, intermittent, singular light
which seemed to follow the panting breaths of a bellows, and to proceed from a
flame, rather than from a light. In the darkness, at that height, it produced a
singular effect; and the goodwives said: "There's the archdeacon blowing! hell is
sparkling up yonder!"
There were no great proofs of sorcery in that, after all, but there was still
enough smoke to warrant a surmise of fire, and the archdeacon bore a tolerably
formidable reputation. We ought to mention however, that the sciences of
Egypt, that necromancy and magic, even the whitest, even the most innocent,
had no more envenomed enemy, no more pitiless denunciator before the
gentlemen of the officialty of Notre-Dame. Whether this was sincere horror, or
the game played by the thief who shouts, "stop thief!" at all events, it did not
prevent the archdeacon from being considered by the learned heads of the
chapter, as a soul who had ventured into the vestibule of hell, who was lost in
the caves of the cabal, groping amid the shadows of the occult sciences. Neither
were the people deceived thereby; with any one who possessed any sagacity,
Thesaurus
bellows: (n) blower, lung, bellowing, envenomed: (adj) caustic, venomous, mysterious, cryptic, cryptical, dark,
blowpipe, organ; (v) air blower, air virulent, mordacious, acrimonious. esoteric, magical, unseen,
pump, fan, punkah, ventilator. groping: (adj) fumbling, gropingly, confidential; (adj, n, v) secret.
cabal: (n) scheme, junto, faction, investigative, incertain, blind, reappear: (v) recur, come back, appear,
conspiracy, plot, intrigue, ring, probing, tentative, uncertain, unsure, repeat, be restored, get back, happen
camarilla; (v) conspire, machinate, hesitant, exploratory. again, haunt, persist, revert, resume.
complot. necromancy: (n) sorcery, conjuration, ANTONYM: (v) disappear.
enigma: (adj, n) mystery, riddle; (n) black magic, incantation, sagacity: (n, v) discernment, judgment,
puzzle, secret, perplexity, poser, enchantment, black art, divination, penetration; (n) judiciousness, sense,
question, problem, closed book, nut witchcraft, charm, soothsaying, prudence, gumption, acumen,
to crack, logogriph. ANTONYMS: (n) thaumaturgy. perspicacity; (adj, n) discretion,
clearness, explanation. occult: (adj) hidden, obscure, wisdom. ANTONYM: (n) foolishness.
Quasimodo passed for the demon; Claude Frollo, for the sorcerer. It was evident
that the bellringer was to serve the archdeacon for a given time, at the end of
which he would carry away the latter's soul, by way of payment. Thus the
archdeacon, in spite of the excessive austerity of his life, was in bad odor among
all pious souls; and there was no devout nose so inexperienced that it could not
smell him out to be a magician.%
And if, as he grew older, abysses had formed in his science, they had also
formed in his heart. That at least, is what one had grounds for believing on
scrutinizing that face upon which the soul was only seen to shine through a
sombre cloud. Whence that large, bald brow? that head forever bent? that breast
always heaving with sighs? What secret thought caused his mouth to smile with
so much bitterness, at the same moment that his scowling brows approached
each other like two bulls on the point of fighting? Why was what hair he had left
already gray? What was that internal fire which sometimes broke forth in his
glance, to such a degree that his eye resembled a hole pierced in the wall of a
furnace?
These symptoms of a violent moral preoccupation, had acquired an especially
high degree of intensity at the epoch when this story takes place. More than once
a choir-boy had fled in terror at finding him alone in the church, so strange and
dazzling was his look. More than once, in the choir, at the hour of the offices, his
neighbor in the stalls had heard him mingle with the plain song, ad omnem tonum,
unintelligible parentheses. More than once the laundress of the Terrain charged
"with washing the chapter" had observed, not without affright, the marks of nails
and clenched fingers on the surplice of monsieur the archdeacon of Josas.
However, he redoubled his severity, and had never been more exemplary.
By profession as well as by character, he had always held himself aloof from
women; he seemed to hate them more than ever. The mere rustling of a silken
petticoat caused his hood to fall over his eyes. Upon this score he was so jealous
of austerity and reserve, that when the Dame de Beaujeu, the king's daughter,
came to visit the cloister of Notre-Dame, in the month of December, 1481, he
gravely opposed her entrance, reminding the bishop of the statute of the Black
Thesaurus
aloof: (adj) distant, reserved, cool, crematorium. thoroughly, inquisitive, searching,
standoffish, unconcerned, indifferent, heaving: (v) tremor, twitter; (adj) penetrating.
unfriendly, frigid, arrogant, cold; swelling, full, full up, jammed; (n) surplice: (n) robe, Geneva gown frock,
(adv) afar. ANTONYMS: (adj) murmur, forcing out, groan, grumble, gown, pallium.
friendly, involved, approachable, mutter. ANTONYM: (adj) deserted. unintelligible: (adj) opaque,
sociable, outgoing, open, laundress: (n) washwoman, inarticulate, unfathomable,
enthusiastic, relaxed, communicative, laundrywoman, laundryman, impenetrable, unaccountable,
affable, respectful. washer, bedmaker; (v) washerman. ambiguous, not clear, obscure,
clenched: (adj) tight, clinched. rustling: (n) rustle, whispering, indistinct, inconceivable, secret.
furnace: (n) forge, heater, blast whisper, larceny; (adj) murmurous, ANTONYMS: (adj) understandable,
furnace, fireplace, hearth, stove, susurrous, active, soughing. clear, comprehensible, intelligible,
oven, kiln, electric furnace, cupola, scrutinizing: (adj) exploring obvious.
Victor Hugo 195
Book, dating from the vigil of Saint-Barthélemy, 1334, which interdicts access to
the cloister to "any woman whatever, old or young, mistress or maid." Upon
which the bishop had been constrained to recite to him the ordinance of Legate
Odo, which excepts certain great dames, aliquoe magnates mulieres, quoe sine
scandalo vitari non possunt. And again the archdeacon had protested, objecting
that the ordinance of the legate, which dated back to 1207, was anterior by a
hundred and twenty-seven years to the Black Book, and consequently was
abrogated in fact by it. And he had refused to appear before the princess.%
It was also noticed that his horror for Bohemian women and gypsies had
seemed to redouble for some time past. He had petitioned the bishop for an
edict which expressly forbade the Bohemian women to come and dance and beat
their tambourines on the place of the Parvis; and for about the same length of
time, he had been ransacking the mouldy placards of the officialty, in order to
collect the cases of sorcerers and witches condemned to fire or the rope, for
complicity in crimes with rams, sows, or goats.
Thesaurus
abrogated: (adj) abrogate. law, act, observance, regulation, reduplicate. ANTONYMS: (v) reduce,
anterior: (adj, adv) antecedent, fore; institution, institute, enactment, decrease.
(adj) prior, previous, preceding, ceremony. refused: (adj) forbidden, refuse,
forward, former, precedent, ransacking: (n) rummage, hunting, prohibited, hence.
foregoing, ventral; (adj, n) front. depredation, digging. sine: (n) without, circular function,
ANTONYMS: (adj) posterior, after, recite: (v) relate, enumerate, describe, hell, cotangent, angle, cosine,
ending, following. narrate, recount, repeat, say, hypothenuse.
dating: (n) invitation. rehearse, detail, lecture; (n, v) vigil: (n) wake, lookout; (adj, n, v)
forbade: (v) prohibit, to prohibit. declaim. watch; (adj, n) vigilance, surveillance;
objecting: (adj) disappointed, redouble: (v) intensify, double, (v) wakefulness, guard; (adj) vigilant,
disinclined, opposed. magnify, echo, duplicate, deepen, eyes of Argus, watch and ward; (n, v)
ordinance: (n) command, edict, order, enhance, repeat, reproduce, escalate, sentry.
Victor Hugo 197
CHAPTER VI
UNPOPULARITY
The archdeacon and the bellringer, as we have already said, were but little
loved by the populace great and small, in the vicinity of the cathedral. When
Claude and Quasimodo went out together, which frequently happened, and
when they were seen traversing in company, the valet behind the master, the
cold, narrow, and gloomy streets of the block of Notre-Dame, more than one evil
word, more than one ironical quaver, more than one insulting jest greeted them
on their way, unless Claude Frollo, which was rarely the case, walked with head
upright and raised, showing his severe and almost august brow to the
dumbfounded jeerers.
Both were in their quarter like "the poets" of whom Régnier 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,
Thesaurus
brushed: (adj) napped, fleecy. lump; (n, v) hunch; (v) jazz, fuck, bed. grubby, seamy, sleazy. ANTONYMS:
ditty: (n) ballad, canzonet, canticle, ANTONYM: (n) crater. (adj) clean, reputable, smart,
bravura, cantata, carol, tune, pastoral, quaver: (n, v) quiver, quake, shake, respectable, fresh, comfortable,
recitative, recitativo, solfeggio. shudder, shiver, tremble; (n) tremor, wholesome, habitable.
dumbfounded: (adj) astounded, eighth note; (v) warble, flutter, valet: (n) man, attendant, lackey,
amazed, staggered, stupefied, flicker. butler, flunkey, manservant, waiter,
speechless, stunned, bewildered, saucy: (adj, n) pert; (adj) bold, gentleman, livery servant, servant,
dazed, taken aback, flabbergasted, impudent, audacious, insolent, fresh, retainer.
surprised. ANTONYMS: (adj) aware, forward, impertinent, flippant, rude, warblers: (n) rooks, robins,
unsurprised. brazen. ANTONYM: (adj) respectful. Phylloscopus, Passeriformes, order
hump: (n) bulge, swelling, knob, squalid: (adj) sordid, nasty, foul, Passeriformes, swallows, finches, tits,
gibbosity, protuberance, bunch, seedy, filthy, grimy, abject, dingy, genus Phylloscopus, sparrows.
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. %
Thesaurus
classically: (adv) typically, refinedly, courteous, compassionate, kind, silently, calmly, peacefully, softly.
ideally, modelly, exemplarily, accommodating, civil; (adj, n) priest: (adj, n) clergyman, divine; (n)
archetypally, purely, correctly, benevolent, congenial, gentle. minister, ecclesiastic, churchman,
primely, excellently, conventionally. ANTONYMS: (adj) ungracious, pastor, celebrant, parson, cleric,
curse: (n, v) blight, plague; (n) boorish, discourteous, reserved, rude, presbyter, chaplain.
anathema, blasphemy, malediction, abrupt, critical, unkind, hardhearted, unnoticed: (v) unheeded, unthought
denunciation; (adj, v) beshrew; (v) harsh, poor. of, unregarded; (adj) disregarded,
swear, ban, damn, vituperate. noisily: (adv) clamorously, unmarked, hidden, neglected,
ANTONYMS: (n) blessing, boisterously, vociferously, riotously, ignored, obscure; (adj, v)
benediction, making; (v) raucously, uproariously, loudly, unremarked, unobserved.
communicate. blatantly, rowdily, stridently, vocally. ANTONYMS: (adj) evident, seen,
gracious: (adj) genial, benign, good, ANTONYMS: (adv) noiselessly, noticeable, noted, obvious.
Victor Hugo 199
BOOK V
Victor Hugo 201
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.
Thesaurus
crammed: (adj) packed, full, famished: (adj) ravenous, starving, meditation: (n, v) contemplation,
overcrowded, chock-full, stuffed, starved, empty, voracious, greedy, study; (n) consideration, reflection,
jammed, brimming, congested, malnourished, thin; (adj, v) esurient; deliberation, thought, introspection,
overflowing, saturated, teeming. (v) peckish, lickerish. ANTONYMS: musing, rumination, conception,
equivocal: (adj) ambiguous, indefinite, (adj) full, satisfied, satiated, gorged, reflexion. ANTONYM: (n)
doubtful, dubious, questionable, healthy. distraction.
elusive, cryptic, precarious, folio: (n) leaf, sheet, number, page piety: (n) godliness, devoutness, faith,
problematic, apocryphal, double. number, flyleaf, quarto, octavo, righteousness, holiness, reverence,
ANTONYMS: (adj) clear, blade, foliage, number the folios, religion, religiousness, piousness,
unequivocal, definite, obvious, plain, book. sanctity, goodness. ANTONYMS: (n)
unquestionable, certain, direct. leaves: (n) departure, leaving, plants, sin, profanity, wickedness.
extracted: (v) descended, extraught. trees, vegetation. rested: (adj) comfortable.
A voice without replied, "Your friend, Jacques Coictier." He went to open the
door.%
It was, in fact, the king's physician; a person about fifty years of age, whose
harsh physiognomy was modified only by a crafty eye. Another man
accompanied him. Both wore long slate-colored robes, furred with minever,
girded and closed, with caps of the same stuff and hue. Their hands were
concealed by their sleeves, their feet by their robes, their eyes by their caps.
"God help me, messieurs!" said the archdeacon, showing them in; "I was not
expecting distinguished visitors at such an hour." And while speaking in this
courteous fashion he cast an uneasy and scrutinizing glance from the physician
to his companion.
"'Tis never too late to come and pay a visit to so considerable a learned man
as Dom Claude Frollo de Tirechappe," replied Doctor Coictier, whose Franche-
Comté accent made all his phrases drag along with the majesty of a train-robe.
There then ensued between the physician and the archdeacon one of those
congratulatory prologues which, in accordance with custom, at that epoch
preceded all conversations between learned men, and which did not prevent
them from detesting each other in the most cordial manner in the world.
However, it is the same nowadays; every wise man's mouth complimenting
another wise man is a vase of honeyed gall.
Claude Frollo's felicitations to Jacques Coictier bore reference principally to
the temporal advantages which the worthy physician had found means to
extract, in the course of his much envied career, from each malady of the king, an
operation of alchemy much better and more certain than the pursuit of the
philosopher's stone.
"In truth, Monsieur le Docteur Coictier, I felt great joy on learning of the
bishopric given your nephew, my reverend seigneur Pierre Verse. Is he not
Bishop of Amiens?"
"Yes, monsieur Archdeacon; it is a grace and mercy of God."
Thesaurus
alchemy: (n) pseudoscience, alchymy, cordial: (adj) genial, warm, affable, ingenuous, blatant, straight.
interpersonal chemistry, alchemist, amiable, friendly, genuine, ardent, detesting: (adj) abhorring, detestable,
alchemistic, magic, sorcery, unaffected, gracious, honest; (n) abhorrent; (n) execration, loathing.
alchemistry. liqueur. ANTONYMS: (adj) furred: (adj) hairy, hirsute, fur lined,
bishopric: (n) eparchy, episcopate, unfriendly, stern, cold, cool, wooly, fuzzy.
archdiocese, jurisdiction, see, disagreeable, aloof, reserved, distant, honeyed: (adj) honied, dulcet,
bishopdom. rude, uncordial, unpleasant. luscious, syrupy, mellifluous,
congratulatory: (adj) gratulatory, crafty: (adj) cunning, adroit, sly, astute, melodic, melodious, sugary,
festive, congratulant, triumphant, artful, wily, clever, tricky, shifty, saccharine, complimentary, candied.
prideful, glowing, fulsome, admiring, designing, scheming. ANTONYMS: vase: (n) jar, urn, barrel, vessel,
felicitous, commemorative, (adj) naive, open, honest, guileless, container, jug, pitcher, pot, bouquet,
appreciative. artless, straightforward, trustworthy, bushel.
Victor Hugo 203
"Do you know that you made a great figure on Christmas Day at the bead of
your company of the chamber of accounts, Monsieur President?"
"Vice-President, Dom Claude. Alas! nothing more."
"How is your superb house in the Rue Saint-André des Arcs coming on? 'Tis
a Louvre. I love greatly the apricot tree which is carved on the door, with this
play of words: 'a l'abri-cotier-- Sheltered from reefs.'"
"Alas! Master Claude, all that masonry costeth me dear. In proportion as the
house is erected, I am ruined."
"Ho! have you not your revenues from the jail, and the bailiwick of the
Palais, and the rents of all the houses, sheds, stalls, and booths of the enclosure?
'Tis a fine breast to suck."
"My castellany of Poissy has brought me in nothing this year."
"But your tolls of Triel, of Saint-James, of Saint-Germainen-Laye are always
good."
"Six score livres, and not even Parisian livres at that."
"You have your office of counsellor to the king. That is fixed."
"Yes, brother Claude; but that accursed seigneury of Poligny, which people
make so much noise about, is worth not sixty gold crowns, year out and year in."
In the compliments which Dom Claude addressed to Jacques Coictier, there
was that sardonical, biting, and covertly mocking accent, and the sad cruel smile
of a superior and unhappy man who toys for a moment, by way of distraction,
with the dense prosperity of a vulgar man. The other did not perceive it.%
"Upon my soul," said Claude at length, pressing his hand, "I am glad to see
you and in such good health."
"Thanks, Master Claude."
"By the way," exclaimed Dom Claude, "how is your royal patient?"
"He payeth not sufficiently his physician," replied the doctor, casting a side
glance at his companion.
Thesaurus
apricot: (n) apricot tree, peach, salutation, respect, applause, flattery, collectively.
abricock, abricot, apricots, pink, acclamation, regards, approbation. mocking: (adj) derisive, ironic, jeering,
orange, salmon pink, yellowish pink. covertly: (adv) surreptitiously, mock, quizzical, sarcastic, taunting,
bailiwick: (n) domain, jurisdiction, furtively, privately, clandestinely, derisory, teasing, sardonic, sneering.
shrievalty, department, area, region, stealthily, privily, underhandedly, ANTONYMS: (adj) respectful,
province, sphere, walk, technology, undercoverly, mysteriously, approving, complimentary,
ward. obscurely, quietly. ANTONYMS: sympathetic; (n) praise.
bead: (n, v) drop; (n) astragal, beading, (adv) blatantly, overtly, publicly, revenues: (n) earnings, receipts,
pearl, dot, necklace, pellet, droplet, brazenly. proceeds, income, profits.
beadwork, bubble; (v) beautify. masonry: (n) brickwork, stonework, seigneury: (n) seigniory, signory,
compliments: (n) respects, construction, bricklaying, structure, demesne, estate, land, landed estate,
commendation, wish, greetings, trade, dry masonry, craft, freemasons acres.
"Think you so, Gossip Coictier," said the latter.%

These words, uttered in a tone of surprise and reproach, drew upon this
unknown personage the attention of the archdeacon which, to tell the truth, had
not been diverted from him a single moment since the stranger had set foot
across the threshold of his cell. It had even required all the thousand reasons
which he had for handling tenderly Doctor Jacques Coictier, the all-powerful
physician of King Louis XI., to induce him to receive the latter thus accompanied.
Hence, there was nothing very cordial in his manner when Jacques Coictier said
to him,
"By the way, Dom Claude, I bring you a colleague who has desired to see you
on account of your reputation."
"Monsieur belongs to science?" asked the archdeacon, fixing his piercing eye
upon Coictier's companion. He found beneath the brows of the stranger a glance
no less piercing or less distrustful than his own.
He was, so far as the feeble light of the lamp permitted one to judge, an old
man about sixty years of age and of medium stature, who appeared somewhat
sickly and broken in health. His profile, although of a very ordinary outline, had
something powerful and severe about it; his eyes sparkled beneath a very deep
superciliary arch, like a light in the depths of a cave; and beneath his cap which
was well drawn down and fell upon his nose, one recognized the broad expanse
of a brow of genius.
He took it upon himself to reply to the archdeacon's question,
"Reverend master," he said in a grave tone, "your renown has reached my
ears, and I wish to consult you. I am but a poor provincial gentleman, who
removeth his shoes before entering the dwellings of the learned. You must know
my name. I am called Gossip Tourangeau."
"Strange name for a gentleman," said the archdeacon to himself.
Nevertheless, he had a feeling that he was in the presence of a strong and
earnest character. The instinct of his own lofty intellect made him recognize an
intellect no less lofty under Gossip Tourangeau's furred cap, and as he gazed at
Thesaurus
all-powerful: (adj) almighty, kudos, name, popularity, prestige, (adj) sick, ailing, pale, sallow,
omnipotent, autocratic, predominant, prominence, honor. ANTONYMS: (n) indisposed, morbid, diseased; (adj, n,
powerful, divine, formidable. infamy, commonness; (adj) v) infirm; (adj, v) faint. ANTONYMS:
distrustful: (adj) suspicious, doubtful, anonymity. (adj) healthy, bitter, robust.
diffident, distrust, jealous, leery, shy, reproach: (n, v) blame, rebuke, charge, sixty: (adj) threescore; (n) three score,
apprehensive, skeptical, scrupulous, abuse, disgrace, reprimand, large integer, lux.
disbelieving. ANTONYMS: (adj) invective; (v) accuse, chide, condemn; tenderly: (adv) softly, kindly,
trusting, trustful, aggressive, assured, (n) condemnation. ANTONYMS: (n, delicately, affectionately, fondly,
believing, faithful, unwary, certain, v) praise; (v) commend, approve; (n) warmly, painfully, sensitively,
optimistic. compliment, commendation, caringly, sympathetically, gently.
renown: (n, v) fame; (n) glory, approval. ANTONYMS: (adv) roughly,
distinction, eminence, notoriety, sickly: (adj, adv) poorly; (n) invalid; severely, disapprovingly, harshly.
Victor Hugo 205
the solemn face, the ironical smile which Jacques Coictier's presence called forth
on his gloomy face, gradually disappeared as twilight fades on the horizon of
night. Stern and silent, he had resumed his seat in his great armchair; his elbow
rested as usual, on the table, and his brow on his hand. After a few moments of
reflection, he motioned his visitors to be seated, and, turning to Gossip
Tourangeau he said,
"You come to consult me, master, and upon what science?"
"Your reverence," replied Tourangeau, "I am ill, very ill. You are said to be
great AEsculapius, and I am come to ask your advice in medicine."
"Medicine!" said the archdeacon, tossing his head. He seemed to meditate for
a moment, and then resumed: "Gossip Tourangeau, since that is your name, turn
your head, you will find my reply already written on the wall."
Gossip Tourangeau obeyed, and read this inscription engraved above his
head: "Medicine is the daughter of dreams.-- Jamblique."
Meanwhile, Doctor Jacques Coictier had heard his companion's question with
a displeasure which Dom Claude's response had but redoubled. He bent down
to the ear of Gossip Tourangeau, and said to him, softly enough not to be heard
by the archdeacon: "I warned you that he was mad. You insisted on seeing him."
"'Tis very possible that he is right, madman as he is, Doctor Jacques," replied
his comrade in the same low tone, and with a bitter smile.%
"As you please," replied Coictier dryly. Then, addressing the archdeacon:
"You are clever at your trade, Dom Claude, and you are no more at a loss over
Hippocrates than a monkey is over a nut. Medicine a dream! I suspect that the
pharmacopolists and the master physicians would insist upon stoning you if
they were here. So you deny the influence of philtres upon the blood, and
unguents on the skin! You deny that eternal pharmacy of flowers and metals,
which is called the world, made expressly for that eternal invalid called man!"
"I deny," said Dom Claude coldly, "neither pharmacy nor the invalid. I reject
the physician."
Thesaurus
comrade: (n) colleague, chum, buddy, equanimity, approval. v) harsh; (n) back; (adj, n) rear.
fellow, compeer, partner, brother, dryly: (adv) coldly, sternly, sourly, ANTONYMS: (adj) friendly,
mate, familiar; (adj, n) associate, ally. sarcastically, laconically, huskily. approving, lenient, funny, genial,
ANTONYMS: (n) stranger, enemy, ANTONYMS: (adv) interestingly, gentle, kindly, lax, liberal, cheerful,
foe, opponent. warmly. flexible.
displeasure: (n) resentment, pharmacy: (n) dispensary, drugstore, stoning: (n) pitting, lapidation.
discomfort, dissatisfaction, dislike, pharmaceutics, apothecary, chemist, tossing: (n) cast; (adj) moving.
discontent, exasperation, disfavor, druggist, pharmacology, twilight: (n) nightfall, night, sunset,
annoyance, offense, pique, dispensatory, medicine, chemist's gloaming, evening, sundown,
disapproval. ANTONYMS: (n) shop, store. eventide, fall, decline, evenfall; (adj)
satisfaction, pleasure, enjoyment, stern: (adj) rigid, rigorous, austere, aurora. ANTONYMS: (n) daybreak,
happiness, delight, contentment, hard, strict, grim, solemn, rough; (adj, sunrise.
"Then it is not true," resumed Coictier hotly, "that gout is an internal

eruption; that a wound caused by artillery is to be cured by the application of a
young mouse roasted; that young blood, properly injected, restores youth to
aged veins; it is not true that two and two make four, and that emprostathonos
follows opistathonos."
The archdeacon replied without perturbation: "There are certain things of
which I think in a certain fashion."
Coictier became crimson with anger.%
"There, there, my good Coictier, let us not get angry," said Gossip
Tourangeau. "Monsieur the archdeacon is our friend."
Coictier calmed down, muttering in a low tone,
"After all, he's mad."
"Pasque-dieu, Master Claude," resumed Gossip Tourangeau, after a silence,
"You embarrass me greatly. I had two things to consult you upon, one touching
my health and the other touching my star."
"Monsieur," returned the archdeacon, "if that be your motive, you would
have done as well not to put yourself out of breath climbing my staircase. I do
not believe in Medicine. I do not believe in Astrology."
"Indeed!" said the man, with surprise.
Coictier gave a forced laugh.
"You see that he is mad," he said, in a low tone, to Gossip Tourangeau. "He
does not believe in astrology."
"The idea of imagining," pursued Dom Claude, "that every ray of a star is a
thread which is fastened to the head of a man!"
"And what then, do you believe in?" exclaimed Gossip Tourangeau.
The archdeacon hesitated for a moment, then he allowed a gloomy smile to
escape, which seemed to give the lie to his response: "Credo in Deum."
"Dominum nostrum," added Gossip Tourangeau, making the sign of the cross.
Thesaurus
artillery: (n) battery, gun, cannon, complicate, impede, discomfit; (adj, v) mildly.
field-artillery, cannonry, persuasion, bewilder, encumber. ANTONYMS: muttering: (n) grumbling, mutter,
voltigeur, dragoon, uhlan, mounted (v) comfort, please, soothe, relieve. murmuring, grumble, murmuration,
rifles, light horse. gout: (n) taste, relish, arthritis, go-out; murmur vowel, complaint, heart
crimson: (adj, n) carmine, ruby, scarlet, (v) cephalalgia, earache, otalgia, murmur, cardiac murmur; (adj)
maroon; (v) blush, flush, redden; (adj) odontalgia, neuralgia, lumbago, mumbling, faint.
bloody, ruddy, cherry; (n) deep red. sciatica. perturbation: (n) commotion,
cured: (adj) recovered, corned, aged, hotly: (adv) heatedly, passionately, agitation, fuss, emotion, excitement,
mellow, whole, better, pickle cured, fervidly, fervently, pepperily, confusion, dislocation, discomposure,
salted, vulcanised, well, vulcanized. sultrily, intensely, sharply, torridly; interruption; (adj, n, v) trepidation;
embarrass: (v) baffle, bother, (adj, adv) violently, vehemently. (adj, n) flutter.
confound, hinder, disconcert, block, ANTONYMS: (adv) impassively, roasted: (adj) fried, baked.
Victor Hugo 207
"Amen," said Coictier.%

"Reverend master," resumed Tourangeau, "I am charmed in soul to see you in
such a religious frame of mind. But have you reached the point, great savant as
you are, of no longer believing in science?"
"No," said the archdeacon, grasping the arm of Gossip Tourangeau, and a ray
of enthusiasm lighted up his gloomy eyes, "no, I do not reject science. I have not
crawled so long, flat on my belly, with my nails in the earth, through the
innumerable ramifications of its caverns, without perceiving far in front of me, at
the end of the obscure gallery, a light, a flame, a something, the reflection, no
doubt, of the dazzling central laboratory where the patient and the wise have
found out God."
"And in short," interrupted Tourangeau, "what do you hold to be true and
certain?"
"Alchemy."
Coictier exclaimed, "Pardieu, Dom Claude, alchemy has its use, no doubt, but
why blaspheme medicine and astrology?"
"Naught is your science of man, naught is your science of the stars," said the
archdeacon, commandingly.
"That's driving Epidaurus and Chaldea very fast," replied the physician with
a grin.
"Listen, Messire Jacques. This is said in good faith. I am not the king's
physician, and his majesty has not given me the Garden of Daedalus in which to
observe the constellations. Don't get angry, but listen to me. What truth have
you deduced, I will not say from medicine, which is too foolish a thing, but from
astrology? Cite to me the virtues of the vertical boustrophedon, the treasures of
the number ziruph and those of the number zephirod!"
"Will you deny," said Coictier, "the sympathetic force of the collar bone, and
the cabalistics which are derived from it?"
"An error, Messire Jacques! None of your formulas end in reality. Alchemy
on the other hand has its discoveries. Will you contest results like this? Ice
Thesaurus
astrology: (n) horoscope, astronomy, imperiously, superiorly, imposingly, physician: (n) doctor, medico, doc,
judicial astrology, pseudoscience, grandly, domineeringly, medic, quack, surgeon, leech,
astrologies, starcraft, star divination, imperatively, bossily, overbearingly. houseman, MD, allergist, intern.
magic, genethlialogy. ANTONYM: (adv) weakly. results: (n) consequences, outcome,
blaspheme: (adj, v) desecrate, profane; grasping: (adj) avaricious, covetous, return, aftermath, data.
(v) swear, defile, damn, cuss, acquisitive, greedy, avid, voracious, savant: (n) scholar, connoisseur,
imprecate, utter, violate; (adj) be rapacious, grabby, mercenary, stingy; scientist, initiate, learned person,
impious, scoff. ANTONYM: (v) (n) seizing. ANTONYMS: (adj) wrangler, Schoolman, specialist; (n, v)
consecrate. generous, altruistic. enlightened; (v) solid; (adj) erudite.
boustrophedon: (n) orthography. naught: (n) cipher, nothing, null, virtues: (n) brawn, sinew, qualities,
commandingly: (adv) peremptorily, aught, nix, nought, zip, cypher, nada; nerve, manner, habit, disposition,
commanding, impressively, (adj, n, pron) nil; (n, pron) zilch. custom.
confined beneath the earth for a thousand years is transformed into rock crystals.
Lead is the ancestor of all metals. For gold is not a metal, gold is light. Lead
requires only four periods of two hundred years each, to pass in succession from
the state of lead, to the state of red arsenic, from red arsenic to tin, from tin to
silver. Are not these facts? But to believe in the collar bone, in the full line and in
the stars, is as ridiculous as to believe with the inhabitants of Grand-Cathay that
the golden oriole turns into a mole, and that grains of wheat turn into fish of the
carp species."
"I have studied hermetic science!" exclaimed Coictier, "and I affirm"
The fiery archdeacon did not allow him to finish: "And I have studied
medicine, astrology, and hermetics. Here alone is the truth." (As he spoke thus,
he took from the top of the coffer a phial filled with the powder which we have
mentioned above), "here alone is light! Hippocrates is a dream; Urania is a
dream; Hermes, a thought. Gold is the sun; to make gold is to be God. Herein
lies the one and only science. I have sounded the depths of medicine and
astrology, I tell you! Naught, nothingness! The human body, shadows! the
planets, shadows!"
And he fell back in his armchair in a commanding and inspired attitude.
Gossip Touraugeau watched him in silence. Coictier tried to grin, shrugged his
shoulders imperceptibly, and repeated in a low voice,
"A madman!"
"And," said Tourangeau suddenly, "the wondrous result,-- have you attained
it, have you made gold?"
"If I had made it," replied the archdeacon, articulating his words slowly, like
a man who is reflecting, "the king of France would be named Claude and not
Louis."
The stranger frowned.%
"What am I saying?" resumed Dom Claude, with a smile of disdain. "What
would the throne of France be to me when I could rebuild the empire of the
Orient?"
Thesaurus
ancestor: (n) forerunner, forefather, quietly, softly, observably, world oriole, blackbird, cazique,
parent, father, precursor, antecedent, indistinctly, scarcely, hardly. meadowlark, lark, American oriole,
forebear, forbear, prototype, ancestry, ANTONYMS: (adv) obviously, oscine, northern oriole, American
ascendant. ANTONYMS: (n) visibly, audibly, conspicuously, songbird.
descendant, successor, offspring, perceptibly, heavily, clearly, strongly. phial: (n) ampoule, bottle, cruet,
progeny. nothingness: (n) nothing, void, ampul, ampule, noggin, caster, flask,
arsenic: (n) as, arsenic trioxide, nullity, nihility, emptiness, stoup.
element, trioxide, white arsenic, insignificance, nonentity, blankness, wondrous: (adj) marvelous,
American Samoa, arsenous oxide, vacuum, cipher; (adj) nonbeing. miraculous, marvellous, astonishing,
arsenous anhydride. ANTONYMS: (n) being, importance, tremendous, fantastic, phenomenal,
imperceptibly: (adv) unnoticeably, significance. extraordinary, rattling; (adv)
gradually, slightly, invisibly, gently, oriole: (n) cacique, bobolink, old wonderfully, marvellously.
Victor Hugo 209
"Very good!" said the stranger.%

"Oh, the poor fool!" murmured Coictier.
The archdeacon went on, appearing to reply now only to his thoughts,
"But no, I am still crawling; I am scratching my face and knees against the
pebbles of the subterranean pathway. I catch a glimpse, I do not contemplate! I
do not read, I spell out!"
"And when you know how to read!" demanded the stranger, "will you make
gold?"
"Who doubts it?" said the archdeacon.
"In that case Our Lady knows that I am greatly in need of money, and I
should much desire to read in your books. Tell me, reverend master, is your
science inimical or displeasing to Our Lady?"
"Whose archdeacon I am?" Dom Claude contented himself with replying,
with tranquil hauteur.
"That is true, my master. Well! will it please you to initiate me? Let me spell
with you."
Claude assumed the majestic and pontifical attitude of a Samuel.
"Old man, it requires longer years than remain to you, to undertake this
voyage across mysterious things. Your head is very gray! One comes forth from
the cavern only with white hair, but only those with dark hair enter it. Science
alone knows well how to hollow, wither, and dry up human faces; she needs not
to have old age bring her faces already furrowed. Nevertheless, if the desire
possesses you of putting yourself under discipline at your age, and of
deciphering the formidable alphabet of the sages, come to me; 'tis well, I will
make the effort. I will not tell you, poor old man, to go and visit the sepulchral
chambers of the pyramids, of which ancient Herodotus speaks, nor the brick
tower of Babylon, nor the immense white marble sanctuary of the Indian temple
of Eklinga. I, no more than yourself, have seen the Chaldean masonry works
constructed according to the sacred form of the Sikra, nor the temple of Solomon,
which is destroyed, nor the stone doors of the sepulchre of the kings of Israel,
Thesaurus
hauteur: (n) arrogance, pride, disdain, pontifical: (adj) papal, apostolic, (n) funeral.
conceit, assumption, conceitedness, Episcopal, portentous, apostolical, speaks: (n) talks.
insolence, loftiness, lordliness, airs, overblown, grandiloquent, subterranean: (adj) underground,
elegance. ANTONYM: (n) modesty. pretentious, Episcopalian, popish, backdoor, profound, subaqueous,
inimical: (adj) harmful, adverse, clerical. submarine, subterrene, subterrestrial,
detrimental, malign, contrary, pyramids: (n) billiards, pingpong, deep, hole-and-corner,
antagonistic, injurious, noxious, pool, bagatelle, jackstones, pushball, subterraneous, subterrany.
pernicious, repugnant, unfriendly. hopscotch. wither: (v) shrink, wilt, contract,
ANTONYMS: (adj) helpful, friendly, replying: (adj) respondent, responsive. shrivel, languish, droop, dry, waste,
favorable. sepulchral: (adj, v) hollow, hoarse; (v) wane, atrophy, decay. ANTONYMS:
pebbles: (n) shingle, grit, gravel, mortuary, harsh, rough, horrisonous, (v) swell, strengthen, grow, blossom,
stones. grum; (adj) ghastly, raucous, husky; flourish.
which are broken. We will content ourselves with the fragments of the book of
Hermes which we have here. I will explain to you the statue of Saint Christopher,
the symbol of the sower, and that of the two angels which are on the front of the
Sainte-Chapelle, and one of which holds in his hands a vase, the other, a cloud"
Here Jacques Coictier, who had been unhorsed by the archdeacon's
impetuous replies, regained his saddle, and interrupted him with the triumphant
tone of one learned man correcting another,-- "Erras amice Claudi. The symbol is
not the number. You take Orpheus for Hermes."
"'Tis you who are in error," replied the archdeacon, gravely. "Daedalus is the
base; Orpheus is the wall; Hermes is the edifice, that is all. You shall come when
you will," he continued, turning to Tourangeau, "I will show you the little
parcels of gold which remained at the bottom of Nicholas Flamel's alembic, and
you shall compare them with the gold of Guillaume de Paris. I will teach you the
secret virtues of the Greek word, peristera. But, first of all, I will make you read,
one after the other, the marble letters of the alphabet, the granite pages of the
book. We shall go to the portal of Bishop Guillaume and of Saint-Jean le Rond at
the Sainte- Chapelle, then to the house of Nicholas Flamel, Rue Manvault, to his
tomb, which is at the Saints-Innocents, to his two hospitals, Rue de
Montmorency. I will make you read the hieroglyphics which cover the four
great iron cramps on the portal of the hospital Saint-Gervais, and of the Rue de la
Ferronnerie. We will spell out in company, also, the façade of Saint-Come, of
Sainte-Geneviève-des-Ardents, of Saint Martin, of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie."
For a long time, Gossip Tourangeau, intelligent as was his glance, had
appeared not to understand Dom Claude. He interrupted.%
"Pasque-dieu! what are your books, then?"
"Here is one of them," said the archdeacon.
And opening the window of his cell he pointed out with his finger the
immense church of Notre-Dame, which, outlining against the starry sky the
black silhouette of its two towers, its stone flanks, its monstrous haunches,
seemed an enormous two-headed sphinx, seated in the middle of the city.
Thesaurus
alembic: (n) retort, can, kettle, capsule, rectification, adjustment, baggage, appurtenances, letters.
matrix, bolthead, flask, limbec, compensation, reading. sower: (n) seeder, farmer, sodbuster,
matrass, receiver; (n, v) crucible. cramps: (n) spasm. husbandman, granger, seed drill.
alphabet: (n) rudiments, rudiment, impetuous: (adj) boisterous, hasty, sphinx: (adj) phoenix, hydra; (n)
elements, grammar, ABC, fiery, headlong, heady, hot, brash, monitor, Tiresias, statue, enigma,
fundamentals, basics, first rudiment, foolhardy, dashing, fierce; (adj, v) mythical monster, Cassandra,
first principle, outlines, abecedary. impulsive. ANTONYMS: (adj) Minotaur, mystery, mythical
amice: (n) ames, amess, amict, almuce, considered, careful, slow, sensible, creature.
capouch. patient. starry: (adj) sidereal, starlike, radiant,
books: (n) notebook, account, ledger, outlining: (n) delineation, showy, gleaming, bright, lustrous,
literature, accountancy. demarcation, exactness. shiny, lucid, stellar, fulgent.
correcting: (n) amendment, correction, parcels: (n) post, correspondence, ANTONYMS: (adj) starless, dull.
Victor Hugo 211
The archdeacon gazed at the gigantic edifice for some time in silence, then
extending his right hand, with a sigh, towards the printed book which lay open
on the table, and his left towards Notre-Dame, and turning a sad glance from the
book to the church,-- "Alas," he said, "this will kill that."
Coictier, who had eagerly approached the book, could not repress an
exclamation. "Hé, but now, what is there so formidable in this: 'Glossa in epistolas
D. Pauli, Norimbergoe, Antonius Koburger, 1474.' This is not new. 'Tis a book of
Pierre Lombard, the Master of Sentences. Is it because it is printed?"
"You have said it," replied Claude, who seemed absorbed in a profound
meditation, and stood resting, his forefinger bent backward on the folio which
had come from the famous press of Nuremberg. Then he added these
mysterious words: "Alas! alas! small things come at the end of great things; a
tooth triumphs over a mass. The Nile rat kills the crocodile, the swordfish kills
the whale, the book will kill the edifice."
The curfew of the cloister sounded at the moment when Master Jacques was
repeating to his companion in low tones, his eternal refrain, "He is mad!" To
which his companion this time replied, "I believe that he is."
It was the hour when no stranger could remain in the cloister. The two
visitors withdrew. "Master," said Gossip Tourangeau, as he took leave of the
archdeacon, "I love wise men and great minds, and I hold you in singular
esteem. Come to-morrow to the Palace des Tournelles, and inquire for the Abbé
de Sainte-Martin, of Tours."
The archdeacon returned to his chamber dumbfounded, comprehending at
last who Gossip Tourangeau was, and recalling that passage of the register of
Sainte-Martin, of Tours:-- Abbas beati Martini, SCILICET REX FRANCIAE, est
canonicus de consuetudine et habet parvam proebendam quam habet sanctus Venantius,
et debet sedere in sede thesaurarii.%
It is asserted that after that epoch the archdeacon had frequent conferences
with Louis XI., when his majesty came to Paris, and that Dom Claude's influence
quite overshadowed that of Olivier le Daim and Jacques Coictier, who, as was his
habit, rudely took the king to task on that account.
Thesaurus
comprehending: (adj) intelligent, scorn, hate, disdain, insult, despise, recognition.
general, observant, sympathetic, abominate, abhor, dislike, reject; (n) refrain: (v) desist, cease, fast, avoid,
brotherly, conversant. disesteem, disapproval. leave off, withhold, stop, spare; (adj,
crocodile: (n) alacran, octopus, forefinger: (n) index finger, index, v) forbear; (n) chorus, hold.
mosquito, crocodilian, mugger. forefingers, paw, thumb, hand, ANTONYMS: (v) participate, act,
curfew: (n) rescript, deadline, decree, exponent, antenna, feeler. consume, persist.
dusk, edict, eleventh hour, fiat, order, inquire: (v) demand, ask, explore, sanctus: (n) Ave Maria.
signaling, signal, twilight. enquire, inspect, research, consult, swordfish: (n) broadbill, scombroid
esteem: (n) deference, admiration; (n, pry, request, wonder; (n, v) question. fish, scombroid, saltwater fish.
v) respect, value, consideration, ANTONYM: (v) answer. tooth: (n) palate, denticle, trident,
account; (v) appreciate, deem, adore, pauli: (n) Wolfgang Pauli. sprocket, saw, premolar, nap, incisor,
admire, count. ANTONYMS: (v) recalling: (adj) revocatory; (n) grain, eyetooth; (adj) nib.
Victor Hugo 213
CHAPTER II
THIS WILL KILL THAT
Our lady readers will pardon us if we pause for a moment to seek what could
have been the thought concealed beneath those enigmatic words of the
archdeacon: "This will kill that. The book will kill the edifice."%
To our mind, this thought had two faces. In the first place, it was a priestly
thought. It was the affright of the priest in the presence of a new agent, the
printing press. It was the terror and dazzled amazement of the men of the
sanctuary, in the presence of the luminous press of Gutenberg. It was the pulpit
and the manuscript taking the alarm at the printed word: something similar to
the stupor of a sparrow which should behold the angel Legion unfold his six
million wings. It was the cry of the prophet who already hears emancipated
humanity roaring and swarming; who beholds in the future, intelligence sapping
faith, opinion dethroning belief, the world shaking off Rome. It was the
prognostication of the philosopher who sees human thought, volatilized by the
press, evaporating from the theocratic recipient. It was the terror of the soldier
who examines the brazen battering ram, and says:-- "The tower will crumble." It
signified that one power was about to succeed another power. It meant, "The
press will kill the church."
Thesaurus
battering: (n) batter, beating, combat, priestly: (adj) ministerial, hieratic, sparrow: (n) hedge sparrow, sparrows,
fighting, fight, whipping, attack, sacerdotal, priestlike, hieratical, passerine, house sparrow, accentor,
mugging, physical attack, spanking, religious, theocratic, ecclesiastical; true sparrow, spur, snag, passeriform
rough treatment. (adv) divinely, hieratically, bird, incitement.
dazzled: (adj) confused, dazzle, theocratically. ANTONYM: (adj) unfold: (v) spread, open, extend,
bewildered, blind, blinder, secular. develop, stretch, spread out, reveal,
fascinated, unsighted. prognostication: (n) divination, display, stretch out; (adj, v) expound,
emancipated: (adj) free, freed, prediction, prognosis, prevision, explain. ANTONYMS: (v) fold, block,
uncontrolled, released, unbound, presage, omen, forecast, anticipation, stagnate, stop, hide, withhold, check,
open, uninhibited, freer, vaticination, prophecy; (adj, n) wrap, conceal.
disentangled, disengaged, boundless. augury. volatilized: (adj) gasified, vaporized,
evaporating: (n) contraction. sapping: (adj) murderous. gaseous, vaporised.
But underlying this thought, the first and most simple one, no doubt, there
was in our opinion another, newer one, a corollary of the first, less easy to
perceive and more easy to contest, a view as philosophical and belonging no
longer to the priest alone but to the savant and the artist. It was a presentiment
that human thought, in changing its form, was about to change its mode of
expression; that the dominant idea of each generation would no longer be
written with the same matter, and in the same manner; that the book of stone, so
solid and so durable, was about to make way for the book of paper, more solid
and still more durable. In this connection the archdeacon's vague formula had a
second sense. It meant, "Printing will kill architecture."
In fact, from the origin of things down to the fifteenth century of the
Christian era, inclusive, architecture is the great book of humanity, the principal
expression of man in his different stages of development, either as a force or as
an intelligence.%
When the memory of the first races felt itself overloaded, when the mass of
reminiscences of the human race became so heavy and so confused that speech
naked and flying, ran the risk of losing them on the way, men transcribed them
on the soil in a manner which was at once the most visible, most durable, and
most natural. They sealed each tradition beneath a monument.
The first monuments were simple masses of rock, "which the iron had not
touched," as Moses says. Architecture began like all writing. It was first an
alphabet. Men planted a stone upright, it was a letter, and each letter was a
hieroglyph, and upon each hieroglyph rested a group of ideas, like the capital on
the column. This is what the earliest races did everywhere, at the same moment,
on the surface of the entire world. We find the "standing stones" of the Celts in
Asian Siberia; in the pampas of America.
Later on, they made words; they placed stone upon stone, they coupled those
syllables of granite, and attempted some combinations. The Celtic dolmen and
cromlech, the Etruscan tumulus, the Hebrew galgal, are words. Some, especially
the tumulus, are proper names. Sometimes even, when men had a great deal of
Thesaurus
corollary: (n) consequence, aftermath, temporary, shoddy, cheap, unstable, presentiment: (n) premonition, hunch,
result, rider, effect, reasoning, soft, insubstantial, fickle. apprehension, feeling, foreboding,
outcome, upshot, implication, inclusive: (adj) included, broad, anticipation, intuition, boding,
ramification; (adj) consequent. comprehensive, sweeping, overall, suspicion; (v) augury; (n, v) omen.
cromlech: (n) dolmen, megalith, total, general, whole, extensive, sealed: (adj) hermetic, tight, certain,
tumulus, barrow, cairn, quoit, tope. complete; (v) include. ANTONYMS: plastered, Solen, shut, impervious,
dolmen: (n) megalith, tolmen. (adj) local, narrow, sketchy, elite, irrevocable, tighter, still, preserved.
durable: (adj, v) stable, fast; (adj) partial, restricted. transcribed: (adj) written, tinned.
lasting, permanent, sturdy, strong, pampas: (n) downs, desert, wold, tumulus: (n) burial mound, mound,
serviceable, enduring, firm, tough, savanna, veldt, weary waste, tope, grave mound, cromlech, hill,
abiding. ANTONYMS: (adj) weak, geographical region, grassland, lawn cart, garden cart, barrowful,
flimsy, lightweight, undependable, heath, plain, geographic region. cairn.
Victor Hugo 215
stone, and a vast plain, they wrote a phrase. The immense pile of Karnac is a
complete sentence.%
At last they made books. Traditions had brought forth symbols, beneath
which they disappeared like the trunk of a tree beneath its foliage; all these
symbols in which humanity placed faith continued to grow, to multiply, to
intersect, to become more and more complicated; the first monuments no longer
sufficed to contain them, they were overflowing in every part; these monuments
hardly expressed now the primitive tradition, simple like themselves, naked and
prone upon the earth. The symbol felt the need of expansion in the edifice. Then
architecture was developed in proportion with human thought; it became a giant
with a thousand heads and a thousand arms, and fixed all this floating
symbolism in an eternal, visible, palpable form. While Daedalus, who is force,
measured; while Orpheus, who is intelligence, sang;-- the pillar, which is a letter;
the arcade, which is a syllable; the pyramid, which is a word,-- all set in
movement at once by a law of geometry and by a law of poetry, grouped
themselves, combined, amalgamated, descended, ascended, placed themselves
side by side on the soil, ranged themselves in stories in the sky, until they had
written under the dictation of the general idea of an epoch, those marvellous
books which were also marvellous edifices: the Pagoda of Eklinga, the
Rhamseion of Egypt, the Temple of Solomon.
The generating idea, the word, was not only at the foundation of all these
edifices, but also in the form. The temple of Solomon, for example, was not alone
the binding of the holy book; it was the holy book itself. On each one of its
concentric walls, the priests could read the word translated and manifested to the
eye, and thus they followed its transformations from sanctuary to sanctuary,
until they seized it in its last tabernacle, under its most concrete form, which still
belonged to architecture: the arch. Thus the word was enclosed in an edifice, but
its image was upon its envelope, like the human form on the coffin of a mummy.
And not only the form of edifices, but the sites selected for them, revealed the
thought which they represented, according as the symbol to be expressed was
graceful or grave. Greece crowned her mountains with a temple harmonious to
Thesaurus
arcade: (n) colonnade, arch, portico, elementary geometry. insignificant, obscure, unclear.
piazza, arc, construction, bow, overflowing: (adj) full, copious, pyramid: (n) pile, mass, heap, lump,
horseshoe, crane neck, vault, loop. exuberant, flooding, bountiful, prism, congeries, stack, pyramis; (adj)
dictation: (n) command, bidding, bid, generous, brimming, profuse; (n, v) spire, steeple; (v) raise.
dictate, control, behest, charge, flood, inundation, deluge. symbolism: (n) symbolization,
commission, order, direction, ANTONYMS: (adj) sparse, scarce. charactery, allegory, practice,
commandment. palpable: (adj) tangible, obvious, distinctive mark, suggestion,
geometry: (v) arithmetic, analysis, evident, apparent, clear, transparent, symbolic, symbolics, symbol, pattern.
algebra, stereometry, hypsometry, indubitable, noticeable, lucid, patent, tabernacle: (n) church, synagogue,
configuration, analytic geometry, perceptible. ANTONYMS: (adj) dwelling, chapel, meetinghouse,
analytical geometry, coordinate imaginary, intangible, impalpable, abode, address, subtectacle, sojourn,
geometry, descriptive geometry, doubtful, furtive, imperceptible, seat; (v) tent.
the eye; India disembowelled hers, to chisel therein those monstrous

subterranean pagodas, borne up by gigantic rows of granite elephants.%
Thus, during the first six thousand years of the world, from the most
immemorial pagoda of Hindustan, to the cathedral of Cologne, architecture was
the great handwriting of the human race. And this is so true, that not only every
religious symbol, but every human thought, has its page and its monument in
that immense book.
All civilization begins in theocracy and ends in democracy. This law of liberty
following unity is written in architecture. For, let us insist upon this point,
masonry must not be thought to be powerful only in erecting the temple and in
expressing the myth and sacerdotal symbolism; in inscribing in hieroglyphs
upon its pages of stone the mysterious tables of the law. If it were thus,-- as there
comes in all human society a moment when the sacred symbol is worn out and
becomes obliterated under freedom of thought, when man escapes from the
priest, when the excrescence of philosophies and systems devour the face of
religion,-- architecture could not reproduce this new state of human thought; its
leaves, so crowded on the face, would be empty on the back; its work would be
mutilated; its book would he incomplete. But no.
Let us take as an example the Middle Ages, where we see more clearly
because it is nearer to us. During its first period, while theocracy is organizing
Europe, while the Vatican is rallying and reclassing about itself the elements of a
Rome made from the Rome which lies in ruins around the Capitol, while
Christianity is seeking all the stages of society amid the rubbish of anterior
civilization, and rebuilding with its ruins a new hierarchic universe, the keystone
to whose vault is the priest-- one first hears a dull echo from that chaos, and then,
little by little, one sees, arising from beneath the breath of Christianity, from
beneath the hand of the barbarians, from the fragments of the dead Greek and
Roman architectures, that mysterious Romanesque architecture, sister of the
theocratic masonry of Egypt and of India, inalterable emblem of pure
catholicism, unchangeable hieroglyph of the papal unity. All the thought of that
day is written, in fact, in this sombre, Romanesque style. One feels everywhere
Thesaurus
chisel: (v) cut, cheat, shape, beguile, invariable, changeless, fixed, temple.
screw, engrave, beat, victimize, irrevocable, incommutable, incurable, rallying: (n) effort, mobilization,
sculpture, cozen; (n) burin. last, laster, final. ANTONYM: (adj) mobilisation, mass meeting, feat,
erecting: (n) construction, building, alterable. deed, exchange; (adj) moving,
erection. mutilated: (adj) maimed, disabled, encouraging, convalescent.
excrescence: (n) outgrowth, bump, truncated, crippled, lacerated, unchangeable: (adj) invariable, firm,
protuberance, growth, jut, wart, nub, shapeless, mutilous, mutilate, immutable, permanent, irrevocable,
protrusion, hump, caput, process. lopped, lacerate, imperfect. irreversible, unalterable, immovable,
hierarchic: (adj) hierarchal, obliterated: (adj) obliterate, destroyed, inflexible, determined, definite.
hierarchical, stratified, graded. lost, forgotten, invisible; (v) erased, ANTONYMS: (adj) changing,
ANTONYM: (adj) nonhierarchical. effaced. inconstant, flexible, uncertain, fluid,
inalterable: (adj) unchangeable, pagoda: (n) tower, pagod, pagody, unconfirmed, impermanent.
Victor Hugo 217
in it authority, unity, the impenetrable, the absolute, Gregory VII.; always the
priest, never the man; everywhere caste, never the people.%
But the Crusades arrive. They are a great popular movement, and every
great popular movement, whatever may be its cause and object, always sets free
the spirit of liberty from its final precipitate. New things spring into life every
day. Here opens the stormy period of the Jacqueries, Pragueries, and Leagues.
Authority wavers, unity is divided. Feudalism demands to share with theocracy,
while awaiting the inevitable arrival of the people, who will assume the part of
the lion: Quia nominor leo. Seignory pierces through sacerdotalism; the
commonality, through seignory. The face of Europe is changed. Well! the face
of architecture is changed also. Like civilization, it has turned a page, and the
new spirit of the time finds her ready to write at its dictation. It returns from the
crusades with the pointed arch, like the nations with liberty.
Then, while Rome is undergoing gradual dismemberment, Romanesque
architecture dies. The hieroglyph deserts the cathedral, and betakes itself to
blazoning the donjon keep, in order to lend prestige to feudalism. The cathedral
itself, that edifice formerly so dogmatic, invaded henceforth by the bourgeoisie,
by the community, by liberty, escapes the priest and falls into the power of the
artist. The artist builds it after his own fashion. Farewell to mystery, myth, law.
Fancy and caprice, welcome. Provided the priest has his basilica and his altar, he
has nothing to say. The four walls belong to the artist. The architectural book
belongs no longer to the priest, to religion, to Rome; it is the property of poetry,
of imagination, of the people. Hence the rapid and innumerable transformations
of that architecture which owns but three centuries, so striking after the stagnant
immobility of the Romanesque architecture, which owns six or seven.
Nevertheless, art marches on with giant strides. Popular genius amid originality
accomplish the task which the bishops formerly fulfilled. Each race writes its
line upon the book, as it passes; it erases the ancient Romanesque hieroglyphs on
the frontispieces of cathedrals, and at the most one only sees dogma cropping
out here and there, beneath the new symbol which it has deposited. The popular
drapery hardly permits the religious skeleton to be suspected. One cannot even
Thesaurus
caprice: (n) fancy, fantasy, humor, ANTONYM: (n) discord. impenetrable: (adj) impassable, thick,
quirk, freak, notion, impulse, fit, cropping: (n) harvest, napping, incomprehensible, hard, mysterious,
capriccio, fad, vagary. ANTONYMS: masking. unfathomable, unintelligible,
(n) plan, strategy, blueprint, reality. dismemberment: (n) division, impervious, opaque, heavy, obscure.
caste: (n) rank, class, sort, variety, separation, mutilation, taking apart, ANTONYMS: (adj) penetrable,
estate, tribe, race, genus; (adj) degree, dislocation. readable, straightforward, apparent,
baccalaureate, condition. drapery: (n) drape, clothing, dress, simple, sparse, vulnerable, accessible,
commonality: (n) generality, blind, raiment, costume, toilette, transparent, understandable, open.
community, society, coarseness, furnishings, trim, guise, toilet. marches: (n) precinct, Marche, stint.
cohesion, common, common land, erases: (v) erase. sacerdotalism: (adj) odium
commonness, commons, feudalism: (n) feodality, structure, theologicum; (n) ultramontanism,
commonwealth, commune. feudality, slavery. belief, Episcopalianism.
form an idea of the liberties which the architects then take, even toward the
Church. There are capitals knitted of nuns and monks, shamelessly coupled, as
on the hall of chimney pieces in the Palais de Justice, in Paris. There is Noah's
adventure carved to the last detail, as under the great portal of Bourges. There is
a bacchanalian monk, with ass's ears and glass in hand, laughing in the face of a
whole community, as on the lavatory of the Abbey of Bocherville. There exists at
that epoch, for thought written in stone, a privilege exactly comparable to our
present liberty of the press. It is the liberty of architecture.%
This liberty goes very far. Sometimes a portal, a façade, an entire church,
presents a symbolical sense absolutely foreign to worship, or even hostile to the
Church. In the thirteenth century, Guillaume de Paris, and Nicholas Flamel, in
the fifteenth, wrote such seditious pages. Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie was a
whole church of the opposition.
Thought was then free only in this manner; hence it never wrote itself out
completely except on the books called edifices. Thought, under the form of
edifice, could have beheld itself burned in the public square by the hands of the
executioner, in its manuscript form, if it had been sufficiently imprudent to risk
itself thus; thought, as the door of a church, would have been a spectator of the
punishment of thought as a book. Having thus only this resource, masonry, in
order to make its way to the light, flung itself upon it from all quarters. Hence
the immense quantity of cathedrals which have covered Europe-- a number so
prodigious that one can hardly believe it even after having verified it. All the
material forces, all the intellectual forces of society converged towards the same
point: architecture. In this manner, under the pretext of building churches to
God, art was developed in its magnificent proportions.
Then whoever was born a poet became an architect. Genius, scattered in the
masses, repressed in every quarter
under feudalism as under a testudo of brazen bucklers, finding no issue
except in the direction of architecture,-- gushed forth through that art, and its
Iliads assumed the form of cathedrals. All other arts obeyed, and placed
themselves under the discipline of architecture. They were the workmen of the
Thesaurus
bacchanalian: (adj) bacchantic, ANTONYMS: (adj) sensible, prudent, immodestly, unblushingly,
bacchant, carousing, orgiastic, cautious, wise, deliberate, discreet, unabashedly, gracelessly.
bacchic; (v) thirsty soul, carouser, guarded, judicious, advisable. ANTONYMS: (adv) ashamedly,
reveler. liberties: (n) freedoms, familiarity, penitently.
executioner: (n) killer, murderer, intimacy. testudo: (n) protective covering, genus
hangman, headsman, electrocutioner, seditious: (adj) incendiary, rebellious, testudo, protection.
executor, tormentor, executer, public insurgent, subversive, disloyal, verified: (adj) substantiated,
executioner, slaughterer, slayer. insubordinate, mutinous, factious, confirmed, hard, proven,
imprudent: (adj) foolish, foolhardy, turbulent, lawless, revolutionary. demonstrated, authoritative, actual,
indiscreet, hasty, improvident, shamelessly: (adv) barefacedly, established. ANTONYM: (adj)
impolitic, heedless, unadvised, impudently, boldly, brazenly, unproven.
injudicious, unwary, unwise. brashly, insolently, audaciously,
Victor Hugo 219
great work. The architect, the poet, the master, summed up in his person the
sculpture which carved his façades, painting which illuminated his windows,
music which set his bells to pealing, and breathed into his organs. There was
nothing down to poor poetry,-- properly speaking, that which persisted in
vegetating in manuscripts,-- which was not forced, in order to make something
of itself, to come and frame itself in the edifice in the shape of a hymn or of
prose; the same part, after all, which the tragedies of AEschylus had played in
the sacerdotal festivals of Greece; Genesis, in the temple of Solomon.%
Thus, down to the time of Gutenberg, architecture is the principal writing,
the universal writing. In that granite book, begun by the Orient, continued by
Greek and Roman antiquity, the Middle Ages wrote the last page. Moreover,
this phenomenon of an architecture of the people following an architecture of
caste, which we have just been observing in the Middle Ages, is reproduced with
every analogous movement in the human intelligence at the other great epochs
of history. Thus, in order to enunciate here only summarily, a law which it
would require volumes to develop: in the high Orient, the cradle of primitive
times, after Hindoo architecture came Phoenician architecture, that opulent
mother of Arabian architecture; in antiquity, after Egyptian architecture, of
which Etruscan style and cyclopean monuments are but one variety, came Greek
architecture (of which the Roman style is only a continuation), surcharged with
the Carthaginian dome; in modern times, after Romanesque architecture came
Gothic architecture. And by separating there three series into their component
parts, we shall find in the three eldest sisters, Hindoo architecture, Egyptian
architecture, Romanesque architecture, the same symbol; that is to say,
theocracy, caste, unity, dogma, myth, God: and for the three younger sisters,
Phoenician architecture, Greek architecture, Gothic architecture, whatever,
nevertheless, may be the diversity of form inherent in their nature, the same
signification also; that is to say, liberty, the people, man.
In the Hindu, Egyptian, or Romanesque architecture, one feels the priest,
nothing but the priest, whether he calls himself Brahmin, Magian, or Pope. It is
not the same in the architectures of the people. They are richer and less sacred.
Thesaurus
cradle: (n) cot, birthplace, nursery, hymn: (n) song, canticle, chant, signification: (n, v) meaning, import;
berth, crib, nest, hammock, bassinet, anthem, carol, chorale, doxology; (v) (n) purport, intent, consequence,
origin; (v) hold, groundwork. glorify, laud, sing, extol. significance, moment, implication,
dogma: (n) tenet, creed, belief, opulent: (adj) rich, affluent, luxurious, gist, connotation, denotation.
doctrine, principle, faith, gospel, lush, deluxe, wealthy, sumptuous, sisters: (n) sistren.
theory, canon, way of thinking, copious, lavish, generous, costly. summarily: (adj, adv) briefly; (adv)
opinion. ANTONYMS: (adj) meager, shabby, shortly, succinctly, tersely,
enunciate: (v) articulate, declare, Spartan, stark, humble, unadorned, immediately, compendiously,
vocalize, voice, pronounce, utter, say, impoverished. compactly, concisely, speedily,
enounce, speak, express; (n, v) allege. pealing: (n) axial motion, roll, coil, condensedly, abridgedly.
ANTONYMS: (v) mumble, thunder, curl, curlicue, drum roll, ANTONYM: (adv) eventually.
mispronounce, muffle, mutter. gyre, paradiddle, cast; (adj) loud. vegetating: (n) idleness; (v) vegetative.
In the Phoenician, one feels the merchant; in the Greek, the republican; in the
Gothic, the citizen.%
The general characteristics of all theocratic architecture are immutability,
horror of progress, the preservation of traditional lines, the consecration of the
primitive types, the constant bending of all the forms of men and of nature to the
incomprehensible caprices of the symbol. These are dark books, which the
initiated alone understand how to decipher. Moreover, every form, every
deformity even, has there a sense which renders it inviolable. Do not ask of
Hindoo, Egyptian, Romanesque masonry to reform their design, or to improve
their statuary. Every attempt at perfecting is an impiety to them. In these
architectures it seems as though the rigidity of the dogma had spread over the
stone like a sort of second petrifaction. The general characteristics of popular
masonry, on the contrary, are progress, originality, opulence, perpetual
movement. They are already sufficiently detached from religion to think of their
beauty, to take care of it, to correct without relaxation their parure of statues or
arabesques. They are of the age. They have something human, which they
mingle incessantly with the divine symbol under which they still produce.
Hence, edifices comprehensible to every soul, to every intelligence, to every
imagination, symbolical still, but as easy to understand as nature. Between
theocratic architecture and this there is the difference that lies between a sacred
language and a vulgar language, between hieroglyphics and art, between
Solomon and Phidias.
If the reader will sum up what we have hitherto briefly, very briefly,
indicated, neglecting a thousand proofs and also a thousand objections of detail,
be will be led to this: that architecture was, down to the fifteenth century, the
chief register of humanity; that in that interval not a thought which is in any
degree complicated made its appearance in the world, which has not been
worked into an edifice; that every popular idea, and every religious law, has had
its monumental records; that the human race has, in short, had no important
thought which it has not written in stone. And why? Because every thought,
either philosophical or religious, is interested in perpetuating itself; because the
Thesaurus
consecration: (adj, n) dedication; (n) invariability, majesty, infinity, inviolate, inalienable, impenetrable,
blessing, devotion, celebration, unchangeableness, sovereignty, absolute, impregnable; (v)
ordination, sanctification, unchangeability, unchangingness, imprescriptible, unimpeachable.
canonization, loyalty, translation; fixedness, fixity, permanency. ANTONYMS: (adj) acceptable,
(adj) enshrinement, glorification. ANTONYM: (n) mutability. breakable.
ANTONYM: (n) violation. impiety: (n) disrespect, irreligion, neglecting: (n) neglect, disregard.
decipher: (v) interpret, explain, solve, blasphemy, unrighteousness, perfecting: (n) development,
decode, translate, disentangle, impiousness, sacrilege, profanity, reiteration.
resolve, construe, read, decrypt, godlessness, irreverence, sin, evil. petrifaction: (n) petrification, fossil,
discover. ANTONYMS: (v) encode, ANTONYMS: (n) restraint, goodness. stupor, trance, obduracy,
code, encipher, scramble, confuse. inviolable: (adj) sacrosanct, lapidification, callousness; (adj)
immutability: (n) changelessness, infrangible, hallowed, invulnerable, induration.
Victor Hugo 221
idea which has moved one generation wishes to move others also, and leave a
trace. Now, what a precarious immortality is that of the manuscript! How much
more solid, durable, unyielding, is a book of stone! In order to destroy the
written word, a torch and a Turk are sufficient. To demolish the constructed
word, a social revolution, a terrestrial revolution are required. The barbarians
passed over the Coliseum; the deluge, perhaps, passed over the Pyramids.%
In the fifteenth century everything changes.
Human thought discovers a mode of perpetuating itself, not only more
durable and more resisting than architecture, but still more simple and easy.
Architecture is dethroned. Gutenberg's letters of lead are about to supersede
Orpheus's letters of stone.
The book is about to kill the edifice.
The invention of printing is the greatest event in history. It is the mother of
revolution. It is the mode of expression of humanity which is totally renewed; it
is human thought stripping off one form and donning another; it is the complete
and definitive change of skin of that symbolical serpent which since the days of
Adam has represented intelligence.
In its printed form, thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile,
irresistible, indestructible. It is mingled with the air. In the days of architecture
it made a mountain of itself, and took powerful possession of a century and a
place. Now it converts itself into a flock of birds, scatters itself to the four winds,
and occupies all points of air and space at once.
We repeat, who does not perceive that in this form it is far more indelible? It
was solid, it has become alive. It passes from duration in time to immortality.
One can demolish a mass; bow can one extirpate ubiquity? If a flood comes, the
mountains will have long disappeared beneath the waves, while the birds will
still be flying about; and if a single ark floats on the surface of the cataclysm, they
will alight upon it, will float with it, will be present with it at the ebbing of the
waters; and the new world which emerges from this chaos will behold, on its
awakening, the thought of the world which has been submerged soaring above
it, winged and living.
Thesaurus
cataclysm: (n) disaster, upheaval, immortality: (n) sempiternity, memorable, fixed, ineradicable,
catastrophe, tragedy, wreck, deluge, perpetuity, athanasia, glory, aye, lasting, irrevocable, ingrained; (adj, v)
wrack, flood, earthquake, misfortune, fame, everness, immortal, indestructible; (n) impressive, deep;
bouleversement. ANTONYMS: (n) permanency, deathlessness, undying. (v) incorruptible. ANTONYMS: (adj)
miracle, boon. ANTONYM: (n) mortality. erasable, fleeting.
ebbing: (n) wane, ebb, diminution, imperishable: (adj) immortal, eternal, supersede: (n, v) supplant, displace;
disappearance; (adj) dying, refluent. abiding, deathless, enduring, (v) substitute, replace, succeed,
extirpate: (v) eradicate, uproot, permanent, perpetual, perennial, commute, annul, deputize, cut out,
annihilate, deracinate, extinguish, incorruptible; (adj, v) undying, overrule; (n) remove.
destroy, root, excise, root out, raze; indestructible. ANTONYMS: (adj) ubiquity: (n) ubiquitousness, ubiety,
(adj, v) obliterate. ANTONYMS: (v) temporary, fragile. presence, infinity, ubiquitariness,
breed, propagate, generate, foster. indelible: (adj) ineffaceable, everywhereness, prevalence.
And when one observes that this mode of expression is not only the most
conservative, but also the most simple, the most convenient, the most practicable
for all; when one reflects that it does not drag after it bulky baggage, and does
not set in motion a heavy apparatus; when one compares thought forced, in
order to transform itself into an edifice, to put in motion four or five other arts
and tons of gold, a whole mountain of stones, a whole forest of timber-work, a
whole nation of workmen; when one compares it to the thought which becomes
a book, and for which a little paper, a little ink, and a pen suffice,-- how can one
be surprised that human intelligence should have quitted architecture for
printing? Cut the primitive bed of a river abruptly with a canal hollowed out
below its level, and the river will desert its bed.%
Behold how, beginning with the discovery of printing, architecture withers
away little by little, becomes lifeless and bare. How one feels the water sinking,
the sap departing, the thought of the times and of the people withdrawing from
it! The chill is almost imperceptible in the fifteenth century; the press is, as yet,
too weak, and, at the most, draws from powerful architecture a superabundance
of life. But practically beginning with the sixteenth century, the malady of
architecture is visible; it is no longer the expression of society; it becomes classic
art in a miserable manner; from being Gallic, European, indigenous, it becomes
Greek and Roman; from being true and modern, it becomes pseudo-classic. It is
this decadence which is called the Renaissance. A magnificent decadence,
however, for the ancient Gothic genius, that sun which sets behind the gigantic
press of Mayence, still penetrates for a while longer with its rays that whole
hybrid pile of Latin arcades and Corinthian columns.
It is that setting sun which we mistake for the dawn.
Nevertheless, from the moment when architecture is no longer anything but
an art like any other; as soon as it is no longer the total art, the sovereign art, the
tyrant art,-- it has no longer the power to retain the other arts. So they
emancipate themselves, break the yoke of the architect, and take themselves off,
each one in its own direction. Each one of them gains by this divorce. Isolation
aggrandizes everything. Sculpture becomes statuary, the image trade becomes
Thesaurus
becomes: (v) become. depart. ANTONYM: (n) arrival. autocrat, disciplinarian, bully,
decadence: (n) degeneracy, emancipate: (v) discharge, liberate, authoritarian, sovereign, czar,
deterioration, decadency, decay, deliver, save, enfranchise, disengage, monarch, suzerain, stickler.
decline, degradation, depravity, release, rescue, free, absolve, relieve. withdrawing: (adj) receding, outgoing,
degeneration, become rotten, become ANTONYMS: (v) imprison, retiring, moving back, modest, lowly;
gangrenous, downfall. ANTONYMS: incarcerate. (n) departure, privacy, seclusion,
(n) restraint, righteousness, superabundance: (n) overabundance, cancellation.
parsimony, decency. glut, surplus, surfeit, abundance, withers: (n) flange, lip, sensibility.
departing: (adj, v) parting; (adj, n) overmuchness, copiousness, yoke: (adj, n, v) couple, link; (n, v) pair,
leaving, going away; (adj) outgoing, plethora, redundancy, superfluity, tie; (adj, n) brace; (v) connect, join,
outbound, outward, passing, surplusage. bind, attach; (n) coupling, team.
decedent, valedictory, retiring; (v) tyrant: (n) dictator, oppressor, ANTONYMS: (v) disconnect, disjoin.
Victor Hugo 223
painting, the canon becomes music. One would pronounce it an empire

dismembered at the death of its Alexander, and whose provinces become
kingdoms.%
Hence Raphael, Michael Angelo, Jean Goujon, Palestrina, those splendors of
the dazzling sixteenth century.
Thought emancipates itself in all directions at the same time as the arts. The
arch-heretics of the Middle Ages had already made large incisions into
Catholicism. The sixteenth century breaks religious unity. Before the invention
of printing, reform would have been merely a schism; printing converted it into a
revolution. Take away the press; heresy is enervated. Whether it be Providence
or Fate, Gutenburg is the precursor of Luther.
Nevertheless, when the sun of the Middle Ages is completely set, when the
Gothic genius is forever extinct upon the horizon, architecture grows dim, loses
its color, becomes more and more effaced. The printed book, the gnawing worm
of the edifice, sucks and devours it. It becomes bare, denuded of its foliage, and
grows visibly emaciated. It is petty, it is poor, it is nothing. It no longer
expresses anything, not even the memory of the art of another time. Reduced to
itself, abandoned by the other arts, because human thought is abandoning it, it
summons bunglers in place of artists. Glass replaces the painted windows. The
stone-cutter succeeds the sculptor. Farewell all sap, all originality, all life, all
intelligence. It drags along, a lamentable workshop mendicant, from copy to
copy. Michael Angelo, who, no doubt, felt even in the sixteenth century that it
was dying, had a last idea, an idea of despair. That Titan of art piled the
Pantheon on the Parthenon, and made Saint-Peter's at Rome. A great work,
which deserved to remain unique, the last originality of architecture, the
signature of a giant artist at the bottom of the colossal register of stone which was
closed forever. With Michael Angelo dead, what does this miserable
architecture, which survived itself in the state of a spectre, do? It takes Saint-
Peter in Rome, copies it and parodies it. It is a mania. It is a pity. Each century
has its Saint-Peter's of Rome; in the seventeenth century, the Val-de-Grâce; in the
eighteenth, Sainte-Geneviève. Each country has its Saint-Peter's of Rome.
Thesaurus
denuded: (adj) naked, denudate, bald, enfeebled. ANTONYMS: (adj) madness.
exposed, stripped, bereft, bereaved, activated, invigorated, strengthened, precursor: (n) harbinger, herald,
devoid, bleak, barefaced; (v) minus. energized, strong. messenger, predecessor, antecedent,
dismembered: (adj) broken. gnawing: (v) corroding, biting; (n) indication, ancestor, sign, forebear,
emaciated: (adj) bony, lean, thin, arrosion. omen, leader. ANTONYM: (n)
gaunt, skinny, meager, wasted, heresy: (n) paganism, heathenism, successor.
haggard, slender, slim, lanky. false doctrine, nonconformity, spectre: (n) phantasm, shadow, shade,
ANTONYMS: (adj) fat, obese, heavy, revisionism, unbelief, orientation, phantom, apparition, ghost, spook,
bloated, beefy, overweight. apostasy, fallacy, schism, dissent. wraith, revenant, terror, eidolon.
enervated: (adj) debilitated, limp, mania: (n) passion, craze, delirium, worm: (v) squirm, wriggle, twist,
tired, lethargic, weak, languid, faint, fad, fury, enthusiasm, rage, spiral, helix, writhe; (n) helminth,
colorless, adynamic, asthenic, obsession; (adj, n) insanity, lunacy, maggot; (adj) emmet, midge, fly.
London has one; Petersburg has another; Paris has two or three. The
insignificant testament, the last dotage of a decrepit grand art falling back into
infancy before it dies.%
If, in place of the characteristic monuments which we have just described, we
examine the general aspect of art from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, we
notice the same phenomena of decay and phthisis. Beginning with François II.,
the architectural form of the edifice effaces itself more and more, and allows the
geometrical form, like the bony structure of an emaciated invalid, to become
prominent. The fine lines of art give way to the cold and inexorable lines of
geometry. An edifice is no longer an edifice; it is a polyhedron. Meanwhile,
architecture is tormented in her struggles to conceal this nudity. Look at the
Greek pediment inscribed upon the Roman pediment, and vice versa. It is still
the Pantheon on the Parthenon: Saint-Peter's of Rome. Here are the brick houses
of Henri IV., with their stone corners; the Place Royale, the Place Dauphine.
Here are the churches of Louis XIII., heavy, squat, thickset, crowded together,
loaded with a dome like a hump. Here is the Mazarin architecture, the wretched
Italian pasticcio of the Four Nations. Here are the palaces of Louis XIV., long
barracks for courtiers, stiff, cold, tiresome. Here, finally, is Louis XV., with
chiccory leaves and vermicelli, and all the warts, and all the fungi, which
disfigure that decrepit, toothless, and coquettish old architecture. From
François II. to Louis XV., the evil has increased in geometrical progression. Art
has no longer anything but skin upon its bones. It is miserably perishing.
Meanwhile what becomes of printing? All the life which is leaving
architecture comes to it. In proportion as architecture ebbs, printing swells and
grows. That capital of forces which human thought had been expending in
edifices, it henceforth expends in books. Thus, from the sixteenth century
onward, the press, raised to the level of decaying architecture, contends with it
and kills it. In the seventeenth century it is already sufficiently the sovereign,
sufficiently triumphant, sufficiently established in its victory, to give to the world
the feast of a great literary century. In the eighteenth, having reposed for a long
time at the Court of Louis XIV., it seizes again the old sword of Luther, puts it
Thesaurus
contends: (v) contend. disbursement, consumption, cornice, pedicle, gable wall,
coquettish: (adj) flirtatious, coy, disbursal, expenditure; (v) spend. entablature, gable end.
kittenish, charming, coquet, arch, nudity: (n) nude, nudeness, perishing: (adj) chilly, cold and damp,
fickle. nakedness, altogether, undress, crumbly, starving, inclement; (n)
corners: (adj) cornered. status, naked, raw, buff, birthday decay.
dotage: (adj, n) fatuity; (n) senility, suit, condition. phthisis: (n) pulmonary tuberculosis,
second childhood, old age, age, pasticcio: (n) miscellany, ambigu, marasmus; (adj) pertussis, necrosis,
decrepitude, imbecility, feebleness, hotchpot, mess, melange, magma, ringworm, quinsy, pneumonia,
insanity, years; (adj) second patchwork, odds and ends, tertium psora, pyrosis, rachitis, rubeola.
childishness. ANTONYM: (n) quid, all sorts. toothless: (adj) powerless,
adolescence. pediment: (n) gable, epistyle, frieze, immobilized, edentulous, dull.
expending: (n) outlay, spending, coping stone, capital, architrave, ANTONYM: (adj) effective.
Victor Hugo 225
into the hand of Voltaire, and rushes impetuously to the attack of that ancient
Europe, whose architectural expression it has already killed. At the moment
when the eighteenth century comes to an end, it has destroyed everything. In the
nineteenth, it begins to reconstruct.%
Now, we ask, which of the three arts has really represented human thought
for the last three centuries? which translates it? which expresses not only its
literary and scholastic vagaries, but its vast, profound, universal movement?
which constantly superposes itself, without a break, without a gap, upon the
human race, which walks a monster with a thousand legs?-- Architecture or
printing?
It is printing. Let the reader make no mistake; architecture is dead;
irretrievably slain by the printed book,-- slain because it endures for a shorter
time,-- slain because it costs more. Every cathedral represents millions. Let the
reader now imagine what an investment of funds it would require to rewrite the
architectural book; to cause thousands of edifices to swarm once more upon the
soil; to return to those epochs when the throng of monuments was such,
according to the statement of an eye witness, "that one would have said that the
world in shaking itself, had cast off its old garments in order to cover itself with a
white vesture of churches." Erat enim ut si mundus, ipse excutiendo semet, rejecta
vetustate, candida ecclesiarum vestem indueret (Glaber Radolphus).
A book is so soon made, costs so little, and can go so far! How can it surprise
us that all human thought flows in this channel? This does not mean that
architecture will not still have a fine monument, an isolated masterpiece, here
and there. We may still have from time to time, under the reign of printing, a
column made I suppose, by a whole army from melted cannon, as we had under
the reign of architecture, Iliads and Romanceros, Mahabâhrata, and Nibelungen
Lieds, made by a whole people, with rhapsodies piled up and melted together.
The great accident of an architect of genius may happen in the twentieth century,
like that of Dante in the thirteenth. But architecture will no longer be the social
art, the collective art, the dominating art. The grand poem, the grand edifice, the
grand work of humanity will no longer be built: it will be printed.
Thesaurus
candida: (n) torula. sensibly, patiently. rewrite: (n) rescript, revision, writing;
dominating: (adj) autocratic, bossy, irretrievably: (adv) permanently, for (v) transliterate, decode, correct,
ascendant, ascendent, high, all time, irremediably, forever, redraft, write, reform, adapt, copy.
inextinguishable, unquenchable, irrecoverably, once and for all, rushes: (n) rush, grasses.
domineering, predominant, irrevocably, irreversibly. slain: (v) slay; (adj) overthrown, mat,
dominant, chief. masterpiece: (adj, n) tour de force; (n) fallen, dejected, cast down.
impetuously: (adv) rashly, achievement, chef d'oeuvre, vagaries: (n) whims, disposition,
impulsively, vehemently, standard, model, paragon, creation; facetiousness, freaks, humor, ill
precipitately, fiercely, headily, (adj) prime, pick, nonpareil, humor, mood, temper, caprices.
passionately, intensely, fierily, nonesuch. vesture: (n) clothing, raiment, dress,
spontaneously, thoughtlessly. piled: (adj) heaped, dense, aggregate, clothes, apparel, garment, vestment,
ANTONYMS: (adv) deliberately, collective, concentrated, cumulous. garb, attire, array, togs.
And henceforth, if architecture should arise again accidentally, it will no

longer be mistress. It will be subservient to the law of literature, which formerly
received the law from it. The respective positions of the two arts will be
inverted. It is certain that in architectural epochs, the poems, rare it is true,
resemble the monuments. In India, Vyasa is branching, strange, impenetrable as
a pagoda. In Egyptian Orient, poetry has like the edifices, grandeur and
tranquillity of line; in antique Greece, beauty, serenity, calm; in Christian
Europe, the Catholic majesty, the popular naivete, the rich and luxuriant
vegetation of an epoch of renewal. The Bible resembles the Pyramids; the Iliad,
the Parthenon; Homer, Phidias. Dante in the thirteenth century is the last
Romanesque church; Shakespeare in the sixteenth, the last Gothic cathedral.%
Thus, to sum up what we have hitherto said, in a fashion which is necessarily
incomplete and mutilated, the human race has two books, two registers, two
testaments: masonry and printing; the Bible of stone and the Bible of paper. No
doubt, when one contemplates these two Bibles, laid so broadly open in the
centuries, it is permissible to regret the visible majesty of the writing of granite,
those gigantic alphabets formulated in colonnades, in pylons, in obelisks, those
sorts of human mountains which cover the world and the past, from the pyramid
to the bell tower, from Cheops to Strasburg. The past must be reread upon these
pages of marble. This book, written by architecture, must be admired and
perused incessantly; but the grandeur of the edifice which printing erects in its
turn must not be denied.
That edifice is colossal. Some compiler of statistics has calculated, that if all
the volumes which have issued from the press since Gutenberg's day were to be
piled one upon another, they would fill the space between the earth and the
moon; but it is not that sort of grandeur of which we wished to speak.
Nevertheless, when one tries to collect in one's mind a comprehensive image of
the total products of printing down to our own days, does not that total appear
to us like an immense construction, resting upon the entire world, at which
humanity toils without relaxation, and whose monstrous crest is lost in the
Thesaurus
branching: (n) branch, ramification, ANTONYMS: (adj) barren, meager, obedient, servile, slavish, ancillary,
fork, divarication, arborescence; (adj) unhealthy, arid, withering, sparse, menial, compliant, humble.
branched, branchy, diverging, shabby, unadorned. ANTONYMS: (adj) disobedient,
forked, ramose; (n, v) forking. naivete: (n) artlessness, innocence, independent, superior, assertive.
compiler: (n) program, author, naiveness, credulousness, gullibility, toils: (n) net, cobweb, meshes, mesh.
compiling program, programme, ingenuousness, sincerity, simplicity, tranquillity: (adj, n, v) quiet; (n)
compiling, bookmaker, editor, naturalness, candor; (adj) bonhomie. serenity, quietness, relaxation,
translator, writer, compilator, ANTONYM: (n) sophistication. quietude, peacefulness, calmness; (n,
encyclopedist. reread: (v) read, read again, brush up, v) repose, rest; (adj, n) stillness, calm.
luxuriant: (adj, n) lush; (adj) abundant, look over. ANTONYMS: (n) noise, agitation,
lavish, exuberant, dense, thick, fertile, subservient: (adj) submissive, movement, panic, turbulence,
flourishing, fecund, opulent, profuse. subordinate, obsequious, accessory, turmoil.
Victor Hugo 227
profound mists of the future? It is the anthill of intelligence. It is the hive

whither come all imaginations, those golden bees, with their honey.%
The edifice has a thousand stories. Here and there one beholds on its
staircases the gloomy caverns of science which pierce its interior. Everywhere
upon its surface, art causes its arabesques, rosettes, and laces to thrive
luxuriantly before the eyes. There, every individual work, however capricious
and isolated it may seem, has its place and its projection. Harmony results from
the whole. From the cathedral of Shakespeare to the mosque of Byron, a
thousand tiny bell towers are piled pell-mell above this metropolis of universal
thought. At its base are written some ancient titles of humanity which
architecture had not registered. To the left of the entrance has been fixed the
ancient bas-relief, in white marble, of Homer; to the right, the polyglot Bible
rears its seven heads. The hydra of the Romancero and some other hybrid forms,
the Vedas and the Nibelungen bristle further on.
Nevertheless, the prodigious edifice still remains incomplete. The press, that
giant machine, which incessantly pumps all the intellectual sap of society,
belches forth without pause fresh materials for its work. The whole human race
is on the scaffoldings. Each mind is a mason. The humblest fills his hole, or
places his stone. Retif dè le Bretonne brings his hod of plaster. Every day a new
course rises. Independently of the original and individual contribution of each
writer, there are collective contingents. The eighteenth century gives the
Encyclopedia, the revolution gives the Moniteur. Assuredly, it is a construction
which increases and piles up in endless spirals; there also are confusion of
tongues, incessant activity, indefatigable labor, eager competition of all
humanity, refuge promised to intelligence, a new Flood against an overflow of
barbarians. It is the second tower of Babel of the human race.
Thesaurus
anthill: (n) formicary, ant-hill, mound. unflagging, untiring, inexhaustible, opulently, plentifully, richly,
bas-relief: (n) bass-relief. energetic, unremitting, indomitable, profusely, generously, bountifully,
contingents: (n) reinforcements, laborious, unwearying, unwearied. thickly, riotously, exuberantly,
succors, supplies, reenforcements. ANTONYMS: (adj) idle, feeble, copiously.
incessant: (adj) endless, continual, unrelenting, weary. pierce: (n, v) cut, prick, stick; (v)
everlasting, eternal, constant, labor: (n, v) toil, endeavor, drudgery, perforate, bore, enter, thrust,
continuous, perpetual, unremitting, travail, struggle, confinement, puncture, penetrate; (adj, v) stab,
interminable, persistent; (adj, v) childbirth, delivery, grind; (n) effort, wound. ANTONYM: (v) seal.
frequent. ANTONYMS: (adj) exertion. ANTONYMS: (n, v) rest; (v) polyglot: (n) linguist, someone,
intermittent, occasional, sporadic, relax, ignore; (n) management, somebody, soul; (v) different, diverse,
broken, finite. leisure, death, relaxation. heterogeneous, multifarious; (adj)
indefatigable: (adj) tireless, assiduous, luxuriantly: (adv) abundantly, hexaglot, diglot, multilingual.
Victor Hugo 229
BOOK VI
Victor Hugo 231
CHAPTER I
AN IMPARTIAL GLANCE AT THE ANCIENT

MAGISTRACY
A very happy personage in the year of grace 1482, was the noble gentleman
Robert d'Estouteville, chevalier, Sieur de Beyne, Baron d'Ivry and Saint Andry en
la Marche, counsellor and chamberlain to the king, and guard of the provostship
of Paris. It was already nearly seventeen years since he had received from the
king, on November 7, 1465, the comet year, that fine charge of the provostship of
Paris, which was reputed rather a seigneury than an office. Dignitas, says
Joannes Loemnoeus, quoe cum non exigua potestate politiam concernente, atque
proerogativis multis et juribus conjuncta est. A marvellous thing in '82 was a
gentleman bearing the king's commission, and whose letters of institution ran
back to the epoch of the marriage of the natural daughter of Louis XI. with
Monsieur the Bastard of Bourbon.%
The same day on which Robert d'Estouteville took the place of Jacques de
Villiers in the provostship of Paris, Master Jehan Dauvet replaced Messire Helye
de Thorrettes in the first presidency of the Court of Parliament, Jehan Jouvenel
des Ursins supplanted Pierre de Morvilliers in the office of chancellor of France,
Regnault des Dormans ousted Pierre Puy from the charge of master of requests
in ordinary of the king's household. Now, upon how many heads had the
Thesaurus
chamberlain: (n) bailiff, seneschal, thumping. superintendence, term of office,
castellan, treasurer, steward, Neville noble: (adj, n) grand, glorious, place, position.
chamberlain, Arthur Neville patrician; (adj) imposing, impressive, reputed: (adj) supposed, renowned,
chamberlain. elevated, majestic, generous, high; famous, conjectural, assumed, famed,
counsellor: (n) counselor, advocate, (adj, v) dignified, great. ANTONYMS: eminent, prominent, alleged, well-
adviser, councillor, advisor, mentor, (adj) shameful, humble, dishonorable, known, distinguished. ANTONYM:
pleader, attorney, lawyer, consultant, lowly, lowborn, disgraceful, (adj) known.
solicitor. unimpressive, ignoble, modest, petty; requests: (n) desires, requirements,
marvellous: (adj) fantastic, (n) lady. needs, wants.
extraordinary, terrific, tremendous, presidency: (n) presidentship, seventeen: (n) large integer.
wondrous, marvelous, wonderful, presidential term, government,
tall, miraculous, improbable, chairmanship, spot, tenure, situation,
presidency, %the chancellorship, the mastership passed since Robert

d'Estouteville had held the provostship of Paris. It had been "granted to him for
safekeeping," as the letters patent said; and certainly he kept it well. He had
clung to it, he had incorporated himself with it, he had so identified himself with
it that he had escaped that fury for change which possessed Louis XI., a
tormenting and industrious king, whose policy it was to maintain the elasticity
of his power by frequent appointments and revocations. More than this; the
brave chevalier had obtained the reversion of the office for his son, and for two
years already, the name of the noble man Jacques d'Estouteville, equerry, had
figured beside his at the head of the register of the salary list of the provostship
of Paris. A rare and notable favor indeed! It is true that Robert d'Estouteville
was a good soldier, that he had loyally raised his pennon against "the league of
public good," and that he had presented to the queen a very marvellous stag in
confectionery on the day of her entrance to Paris in 14... Moreover, he possessed
the good friendship of Messire Tristan l'Hermite, provost of the marshals of the
king's household. Hence a very sweet and pleasant existence was that of Messire
Robert. In the first place, very good wages, to which were attached, and from
which hung, like extra bunches of grapes on his vine, the revenues of the civil
and criminal registries of the provostship, plus the civil and criminal revenues of
the tribunals of Embas of the Châtelet, without reckoning some little toll from the
bridges of Mantes and of Corbeil, and the profits on the craft of Shagreen-makers
of Paris, on the corders of firewood and the measurers of salt. Add to this the
pleasure of displaying himself in rides about the city, and of making his fine
military costume, which you may still admire sculptured on his tomb in the
abbey of Valmont in Normandy, and his morion, all embossed at Montlhéry,
stand out a contrast against the parti-colored red and tawny robes of the
aldermen and police. And then, was it nothing to wield absolute supremacy
over the sergeants of the police, the porter and watch of the Châtelet, the two
auditors of the Châtelet, auditores castelleti, the sixteen commissioners of the
sixteen quarters, the jailer of the Châtelet, the four enfeoffed sergeants, the
hundred and twenty mounted sergeants, with maces, the chevalier of the watch
with his watch, his sub-watch, his counter-watch and his rear-watch? Was it
Thesaurus
chancellorship: (n) position, post, custodian, goaler, lawman. mail, corner stone, cowcatcher,
situation, spot, office, berth, loyally: (adv) steadfastly, devotedly, cuirass, backplate; (n) cabasset.
chancellery. staunchly, unwaveringly, constantly, pennon: (n) pennant, flag, banner,
confectionery: (n) sweet, candy store, steadily, dutifully, obediently, truly, ensign, wing, standard, streamer,
candy, bakery, sweetmeat, comfit, trustily, firmly. ANTONYMS: (adv) pennoncel, pennoncelle, colors, waft.
confectionary, goody, goodies, disloyally, unfaithfully, carelessly. tormenting: (v) bothering, teasing,
dessert, patisserie. mastership: (n) dominion, command, pestering, harassing; (adj) harrowing,
embossed: (adj) raised, brocaded, situation, office, skill, superiority, perturbing, plaguy, raging, upsetting,
stamped, decorated, prominent, excellence, knack, masterdom; (adj) vexatious; (adj, v) worrying.
bossy; (n) relief. panurgy. wield: (v) ply, wave, exercise,
jailer: (n) prison guard, guard, keeper, morion: (v) helmet, bulletproof vest, brandish, hold, manipulate, flourish,
screw, turnkey, warder, jailor, custos, carapace, gauntlet, buffer, coat of exert, manage, use, swing.
Victor Hugo 233
nothing to exercise high and low justice, the right to interrogate, to hang and to
draw, without reckoning petty jurisdiction in the first resort (in prima instantia, as
the charters say), on that viscomty of Paris, so nobly appanaged with seven
noble bailiwicks? Can anything sweeter be imagined than rendering judgments
and decisions, as Messire Robert d'Estouteville daily did in the Grand Châtelet,
under the large and flattened arches of Philip Augustus? and going, as he was
wont to do every evening, to that charming house situated in the Rue Galilee, in
the enclosure of the royal palace, which he held in right of his wife, Madame
Ambroise de Lore, to repose after the fatigue of having sent some poor wretch to
pass the night in "that little cell of the Rue de Escorcherie, which the provosts and
aldermen of Paris used to make their prison; the same being eleven feet long,
seven feet and four inches wide, and eleven feet high?"
And not only had Messire Robert d'Estouteville his special court as provost
and vicomte of Paris; but in addition he had a share, both for eye and tooth, in
the grand court of the king. There was no head in the least elevated which had
not passed through his hands before it came to the headsman. It was he who
went to seek M. de Nemours at the Bastille Saint Antoine, in order to conduct
him to the Halles; and to conduct to the Grève M. de Saint-Pol, who clamored
and resisted, to the great joy of the provost, who did not love monsieur the
constable.%
Here, assuredly, is more than sufficient to render a life happy and illustrious,
and to deserve some day a notable page in that interesting history of the provosts
of Paris, where one learns that Oudard de Villeneuve had a house in the Rue des
Boucheries, that Guillaume de Hangest purchased the great and the little Savoy,
that Guillaume Thiboust gave the nuns of Sainte-Geneviève his houses in the
Rue Clopin, that Hugues Aubriot lived in the Hôtel du Pore-Epic, and other
domestic facts.
Nevertheless, with so many reasons for taking life patiently and joyously,
Messire Robert d'Estouteville woke up on the morning of the seventh of January,
1482, in a very surly and peevish mood. Whence came this ill temper? He could
not have told himself. Was it because the sky was gray? or was the buckle of his
Thesaurus
buckle: (n, v) clasp, warp; (v) curve, catechize, query, quiz, probe, captious, petulant, cross,
crumple, distort, fasten; (adj, n) investigate. ANTONYMS: (v) reply, cantankerous, touchy.
button; (n) screw, hook, fastener; (adj) answer. repose: (n, v) recline, peace, lie, calm;
strap. ANTONYMS: (v) unbuckle, nobly: (adv) generously, (n) composure, ease, quiet, leisure,
flatten, smooth, straighten. magnificently, grandly, greatly, recreation, relaxation; (v) lay.
flattened: (adj) planate, packed down, splendidly, honorably, heroically, ANTONYMS: (n, v) work; (n)
trodden, unconscious, depressed, aristocratically, bravely, activity, panic, agitation.
compressed. magnanimously, courageously. woke: (v) arouse.
headsman: (n) headman, executioner, ANTONYMS: (adv) immorally, wont: (adj, n) use, custom, usage; (n)
hangman, chieftain. poorly, timidly. practice, tradition, cleanliness,
interrogate: (n, v) question, pump; (v) peevish: (adj) fretful, fractious, assuetude, assuefaction, convention,
ask, demand, examine, enquire, morose, testy, irascible, moody, rut; (v) practise.
old belt of Montlhéry badly fastened, so that it confined his provostal portliness
too closely? had he beheld ribald fellows, marching in bands of four, beneath his
window, and setting him at defiance, in doublets but no shirts, hats without
crowns, with wallet and bottle at their side? Was it a vague presentiment of the
three hundred and seventy livres, sixteen sous, eight farthings, which the future
King Charles VII. was to cut off from the provostship in the following year? The
reader can take his choice; we, for our part, are much inclined to believe that he
was in a bad humor, simply because he was in a bad humor.%
Moreover, it was the day after a festival, a tiresome day for every one, and
above all for the magistrate who is charged with sweeping away all the filth,
properly and figuratively speaking, which a festival day produces in Paris. And
then he had to hold a sitting at the Grand Châtelet. Now, we have noticed that
judges in general so arrange matters that their day of audience shall also be their
day of bad humor, so that they may always have some one upon whom to vent it
conveniently, in the name of the king, law, and justice.
However, the audience had begun without him. His lieutenants, civil,
criminal, and private, were doing his work, according to usage; and from eight
o'clock in the morning, some scores of bourgeois and bourgeoises, heaped and
crowded into an obscure corner of the audience chamber of Embas du Châtelet,
between a stout oaken barrier and the wall, had been gazing blissfully at the
varied and cheerful spectacle of civil and criminal justice dispensed by Master
Florian Barbedienne,
auditor of the Châtelet, lieutenant of monsieur the provost, in a somewhat
confused and utterly haphazard manner.
The hall was small, low, vaulted. A table studded with fleurs-de-lis stood at
one end, with a large arm-chair of carved oak, which belonged to the provost
and was empty, and a stool on the left for the auditor, Master Florian. Below sat
the clerk of the court, scribbling; opposite was the populace; and in front of the
door, and in front of the table were many sergeants of the provostship in
sleeveless jackets of violet camlet, with white crosses. Two sergeants of the
Parloir- aux-Bourgeois, clothed in their jackets of Toussaint, half red, half blue,
Thesaurus
blissfully: (adv) gladly, joyfully, factually. ribald: (adj) coarse, gross, obscene,
blessedly, delightfully, joyously, humor: (n, v) caprice, freak, humour; lewd, indelicate, filthy, dirty,
cheerfully, ecstatically, merrily, (n) temper, mood, disposition, wit; salacious, licentious, loose, broad.
delightedly, gleefully, contentedly. (v) indulge, gratify; (adj, n) spirit, studded: (adj) muricated, bristling,
ANTONYM: (adv) sadly. frame of mind. ANTONYMS: (n) peopled, crowded, manifold,
camlet: (n) chamolet, chamelot, seriousness, gravity, solemnity; (v) multinominal, multiple, multiplied,
chamlet. displease. multitudinous, populous; (v)
figuratively: (adv) allegorically, oaken: (adj) woody. freckled.
symbolically, tropically, typically, portliness: (n) fatness, corpulence, vaulted: (adj) domed, hollow, hooked,
representatively, parabolically, obesity, fleshiness, plumpness, testudinated, rounded, arcuated, in
parabolicly, flowerily, symbolicly, stoutness, chubbiness, beefiness, the form of an arch, curved, concave,
floridly, figurally. ANTONYM: (adv) heaviness. roofed.
Victor Hugo 235
were posted as sentinels before a low, closed door, which was visible at the
extremity of the hall, behind the table. A single pointed window, narrowly
encased in the thick wall, illuminated with a pale ray of January sun two
grotesque figures,-- the capricious demon of stone carved as a tail-piece in the
keystone of the vaulted ceiling, and the judge seated at the end of the hall on the
fleurs-de-lis.%
Imagine, in fact, at the provost's table, leaning upon his elbows between two
bundles of documents of cases, with his foot on the train of his robe of plain
brown cloth, his face buried in his hood of white lamb's skin, of which his brows
seemed to be of a piece, red, crabbed, winking, bearing majestically the load of
fat on his cheeks which met under his chin, Master Florian Barbedienne, auditor
of the Châtelet.
Now, the auditor was deaf. A slight defect in an auditor. Master Florian
delivered judgment, none the less, without appeal and very suitably. It is
certainly quite sufficient for a judge to have the .air of listening; and the
venerable auditor fulfilled this condition, the sole one in justice, all the better
because his attention could not be distracted by any noise.
Moreover, he had in the audience, a pitiless censor of his deeds and gestures,
in the person of our friend Jehan Frollo du Moulin, that little student of
yesterday, that "stroller," whom one was sure of encountering all over Paris,
anywhere except before the rostrums of the professors.
"Stay," he said in a low tone to his companion, Robin Poussepain, who was
grinning at his side, while he was making his comments on the scenes which
were being unfolded before his eyes, "yonder is Jehanneton du Buisson. The
beautiful daughter of the lazy dog at the Marché-Neuf!-- Upon my soul, he is
condemning her, the old rascal! he has no more eyes than ears. Fifteen sous, four
farthings, parisian, for having worn two rosaries! 'Tis somewhat dear. Lex duri
carminis. Who's that? Robin Chief-de-Ville, hauberkmaker. For having been
passed and received master of the said trade! That's his entrance money. He!
two gentlemen among these knaves! Aiglet de Soins, Hutin de Mailly Two
equerries, Corpus Christi! Ah! they have been playing at dice. When shall I see
Thesaurus
censor: (n) critic, functionary, licenser; dice, bet; (n) die, dice box, bone, dees. commonplace, attractive.
(v) ban, suppress, criminalize, distracted: (adj) demented, inattentive, illuminated: (adj) lit, lighted,
evaluate, squelch, illegalize, abstracted, crazy, frenzied, luminous, enlightened, clear, light,
expurgate, muzzle. ANTONYMS: (v) distraught, preoccupied, distressed, shining, irradiated, lighter, Lighty,
sanction, endorse, approve, allow, confused; (adj, v) mad, disconcerted. irradiate.
divulge; (n) fan. ANTONYMS: (adj) attentive, alert, posted: (adj) knowledgeable, learned.
cheeks: (n) Gemini, twins, couple, assured, calm, mellow. professors: (n) faculty.
posterior, pair, deuce, two, duet. encased: (adj) incased, sheathed. unfolded: (adj) extended, stretched,
condemning: (adj) inculpative, grotesque: (adj) fantastic, bizarre, outspread, outstretched, widely
censorious, inculpatory, critical; (n) funny, antic, absurd, droll, strange, spread, stretched out, explicate,
conviction, reproachful. baroque, weird, ugly, hideous. evolved, displayed, expanded,
dice: (v) cube, cut, chop, cut up, play ANTONYMS: (adj) lovely, normal, detailed.
our rector here? A hundred livres parisian, fine to the king! That Barbedienne
strikes like a deaf man,-- as he is! I'll be my brother the archdeacon, if that keeps
me from gaming; gaming by day, gaming by night, living at play, dying at play,
and gaming away my soul after my shirt. Holy Virgin, what damsels! One after
the other my lambs. Ambroise Lécuyere, Isabeau la Paynette, Bérarde Gironin! I
know them all, by Heavens! A fine! a fine! That's what will teach you to wear
gilded girdles! ten sous parisis! you coquettes! Oh! the old snout of a judge! deaf
and imbecile! Oh! Florian the dolt! Oh! Barbedienne the blockhead! There he
is at the table! He's eating the plaintiff, he's eating the suits, he eats, he chews, he
crams, he fills himself. Fines, lost goods, taxes, expenses, loyal charges, salaries,
damages, and interests, gehenna, prison, and jail, and fetters with expenses are
Christmas spice cake and marchpanes of Saint-John to him! Look at him, the
pig!--Come! Good! Another amorous woman! Thibaud-la-Thibaude, neither
more nor less! For having come from the Rue Glatigny! What fellow is this?
Gieffroy Mabonne, gendarme bearing the crossbow. He has cursed the name of
the Father. A fine for la Thibaude! A fine for Gieffroy! A fine for them both!
The deaf old fool! he must have mixed up the two cases! Ten to one that he
makes the wench pay for the oath and the gendarme for the amour! Attention,
Robin Poussepain! What are they going to bring in? Here are many sergeants!
By Jupiter! all the bloodhounds of the pack are there. It must be the great beast
of the hunt-- a wild boar. And 'tis one, Robin, 'tis one. And a fine one too!
Hercle! 'tis our prince of yesterday, our Pope of the Fools, our bellringer, our one-
eyed man, our hunchback, our grimace! 'Tis Quasimodo!"
It was he indeed.%
It was Quasimodo, bound, encircled, roped, pinioned, and under good
guard. The squad of policemen who surrounded him was assisted by the
chevalier of the watch in person, wearing the arms of France embroidered on his
breast, and the arms of the city on his back. There was nothing, however, about
Quasimodo, except his deformity, which could justify the display of halberds
and arquebuses; he was gloomy, silent, and tranquil. Only now and then did his
Thesaurus
amour: (n) affair, affaire, love, love sling, arcubalist, catapult, latch. gehenna: (n) Tartarus, perdition, hell,
affair, liaison, flirtation, romance, dolt: (n) ass, fool, dummy, dunce, inferno, limbo, purgatory.
relationship, passion; (n, v) intrigue; clod, dumbbell, dullard, stupid, imbecile: (adj) foolish, idiotic, fatuous,
(adj) amourette. pudding head, oaf, numskull. dumb, imbecilic, simple; (n) idiot,
blockhead: (n) dunderhead, ass, idiot, ANTONYMS: (n) intellect, whiz. moron, cretin, ass, oaf. ANTONYM:
beetlehead, dunce, dolt, fool, fetters: (n) chains, captivity, bond, (adj) genius.
loggerhead, muttonhead, restraint, irons, handcuffs, iron, snout: (n) proboscis, beak, neb, nozzle,
knucklehead; (n, v) block. enduring; (v) confine, fee, embellish. hooter, rostrum, snoot, trunk,
boar: (n) pig, swine, dog, wild boar, ANTONYM: (n) liberation. schnozzle, honker; (v) muzzle.
hog, Sus scrofa, entire horse, stallion, gaming: (n) play, game, diversion, spice: (n) sauce, condiment, seasoning,
sow, horse, hart. speculation, wager, frolic, bet, piquancy, dash, salt, smack, tang;
crossbow: (n) balister, bow, arbalest, gamble, recreation, vice, betting. (adj, v) season; (v) flavor; (n, v) zest.
Victor Hugo 237
single eye cast a sly and wrathful glance upon the bonds with which he was
loaded.%
He cast the same glance about him, but it was so dull and sleepy that the
women only pointed him out to each other in derision.
Meanwhile Master Florian, the auditor, turned over attentively the document
in the complaint entered against Quasimodo, which the clerk handed him, and,
having thus glanced at it, appeared to reflect for a moment. Thanks to this
precaution, which he always was careful to take at the moment when on the
point of beginning an examination, he knew beforehand the names, titles, and
misdeeds of the accused, made cut and dried responses to questions foreseen,
and succeeded in extricating himself from all the windings of the interrogation
without allowing his deafness to be too apparent. The written charges were to
him what the dog is to the blind man. If his deafness did happen to betray him
here and there, by some incoherent apostrophe or some unintelligible question,
it passed for profundity with some, and for imbecility with others. In neither
case did the honor of the magistracy sustain any injury; for it is far better that a
judge should be reputed imbecile or profound than deaf. Hence he took great
care to conceal his deafness from the eyes of all, and he generally succeeded so
well that he had reached the point of deluding himself, which is, by the way,
easier than is supposed. All hunchbacks walk with their heads held high, all
stutterers harangue, all deaf people speak low. As for him, he believed, at the
most, that his ear was a little refractory. It was the sole concession which he
made on this point to public opinion, in his moments of frankness and
examination of his conscience.
Having, then, thoroughly ruminated Quasimodo's affair, he threw back his
head and half closed his eyes, for the sake of more majesty and impartiality, so
that, at that moment, he was both deaf and blind. A double condition, without
which no judge is perfect. It was in this magisterial attitude that he began the
examination.
"Your name?"
Thesaurus
apostrophe: (n) address, adventitious, accidental, predictable. berth.
interpellation, invocation, imbecility: (n) folly, foolishness, profundity: (n) deepness,
punctuation, salutation, monologue, idiocy, fatuity, weakness, stupidity, profoundness, abstruseness,
stream of consciousness, soliloquy, feeblemindedness, lunacy; (adj, n) penetration, wisdom, obscurity,
motion, appeal, digression. debility, feebleness; (adj) infirmity. astuteness, abstrusity, erudition; (adj)
deluding: (adj) commanding, magisterial: (adj) haughty, profound, extensive. ANTONYMS:
circumventive, beguiling, false, domineering, imperious, dictatorial, (n) superficiality, banality, flippancy,
imposing, hypocritical, fallacious, authoritative, authoritarian, lordly, height, mildness, simplicity.
deceptive, delusive, misleading. peremptory, dogmatic, arbitrary, refractory: (adj) disobedient, obstinate,
foreseen: (v) foresee, long expected; bossy. perverse, recalcitrant, stubborn,
(adj) envisioned, foretold, contingent, magistracy: (n) post, situation, spot, fractious, contumacious, headstrong,
concourse, coming, casual, position, office, place, jurisdiction, unruly, wayward, restive.
Now this was a case which had not been "provided for by law," where a deaf
man should be obliged to question a deaf man.%
Quasimodo, whom nothing warned that a question had been addressed to
him, continued to stare intently at the judge, and made no reply. The judge,
being deaf, and being in no way warned of the deafness of the accused, thought
that the latter had answered, as all accused do in general, and therefore he
pursued, with his mechanical and stupid self-possession,
"Very well. And your age?"
Again Quasimodo made no reply to this question. The judge supposed that
it had been replied to, and continued,
"Now, your profession?"
Still the same silence. The spectators had begun, meanwhile, to whisper
together, and to exchange glances.
"That will do," went on the imperturbable auditor, when he supposed that
the accused had finished his third reply. "You are accused before us, primo, of
nocturnal disturbance; secundo, of a dishonorable act of violence upon the person
of a foolish woman, in proejudicium meretricis; tertio, of rebellion and disloyalty
towards the archers of the police of our lord, the king. Explain yourself upon all
these points.-- Clerk, have you written down what the prisoner has said thus
far?"
At this unlucky question, a burst of laughter rose from the clerk's table
caught by the audience, so violent, so wild, so contagious, so universal, that the
two deaf men were forced to perceive it. Quasimodo turned round, shrugging
his hump with disdain, while Master Florian, equally astonished, and supposing
that the laughter of the spectators had been provoked by some irreverent reply
from the accused, rendered visible to him by that shrug of the shoulders,
apostrophized him indignantly,
"You have uttered a reply, knave, which deserves the halter. Do you know to
whom you are speaking?"
Thesaurus
dishonorable: (adj) disgraceful, base, ANTONYMS: (n) loyalty, approving, respectful.
mean, ignoble, shameful, infamous, faithfulness, honesty, allegiance, primo: (adj) special, primary, unique,
unfair, disreputable, degrading, commitment, dedication, reliability. remarkable, outstanding, leading,
wrong, unethical. ANTONYMS: (adj) halter: (n) gibbet, rein, bridle, gallows, foremost, fantastic, fabulous,
honorable, noble, ethical, glorious, rope, noose, cestus, collar, drop; (v) extraordinary; (adv) first off.
respectable, admirable, trustworthy, confine, cramp. self-possession: (n) composure, poise,
incorrupt, sporting, reputable, irreverent: (adj, v) profane; (adj) imperturbability, serenity, aplomb,
professional. blasphemous, disrespectful, coolness, balance, restraint, self-
disloyalty: (n) treason, betrayal, irreligious, impertinent, impudent, control, morale, presence.
treachery, dishonesty, unfaithfulness, pert, saucy, aweless, godless, uttered: (adj) expressed, express,
sedition, faithlessness, perfidy, irreverend. ANTONYMS: (adj) pious, verbalised, verbalized, vocal, explicit,
infidelity, deceitfulness, duplicity. reverent, deferential, mature, devout, oral; (v) spoke, quoth, said.
Victor Hugo 239
This sally was not fitted to arrest the explosion of general merriment. It
struck all as so whimsical, and so ridiculous, that the wild laughter even
attacked the sergeants of the Parloi- aux-Bourgeois, a sort of pikemen, whose
stupidity was part of their uniform. Quasimodo alone preserved his seriousness,
for the good reason that he understood nothing of what was going on around
him. The judge, more and more irritated, thought it his duty to continue in the
same tone, hoping thereby to strike the accused with a terror which should react
upon the audience, and bring it back to respect.%
"So this is as much as to say, perverse and thieving knave that you are, that
you permit yourself to be lacking in respect towards the Auditor of the Châtelet,
to the magistrate committed to the popular police of Paris, charged with
searching out crimes, delinquencies, and evil conduct; with controlling all trades,
and interdicting monopoly; with maintaining the pavements; with debarring the
hucksters of chickens, poultry, and water-fowl; of superintending the measuring
of fagots and other sorts of wood; of purging the city of mud, and the air of
contagious maladies; in a word, with attending continually to public affairs,
without wages or hope of salary! Do you know that I am called Florian
Barbedienne, actual lieutenant to monsieur the provost, and, moreover,
commissioner, inquisitor, controller, and examiner, with equal power in
provostship, bailiwick, preservation, and inferior court of judicature?"
There is no reason why a deaf man talking to a deaf man should stop. God
knows where and when Master Florian would have landed, when thus launched
at full speed in lofty eloquence, if the low door at the extreme end of the room
had not suddenly opened, and given entrance to the provost in person. At his
entrance Master Florian did not stop short, but, making a half-turn on his heels,
and aiming at the provost the harangue with which he had been withering
Quasimodo a moment before,
"Monseigneur," said he, "I demand such penalty as you shall deem fitting
against the prisoner here present, for grave and aggravated offence against the
court."
Thesaurus
attacked: (adj) assaulted, corroded. purging: (n) purge, catharsis, philanthropic, benevolent.
debarring: (n) debarment. purgation, cleaning, cleanup, whimsical: (adj, n) fanciful, eccentric;
inquisitor: (n) interrogator, examiner; purification, clearing, katharsis, (adj) capricious, freakish, humorous,
(v) investigator, inspector, querist; abreaction; (adj) purifying, changeable, fickle, erratic, wayward,
(adj) disciplinarian, bashaw, hard purgatorial. odd, arbitrary. ANTONYMS: (adj)
master, despot, Draco, vulture. superintending: (adj) administrative, reasonable, behaving, normal,
merriment: (n) fun, amusement, overseeing, superintendent. serious, predictable.
cheerfulness, hilarity, glee, jollity, thieving: (n) larceny, stealing, robbery, withering: (adj) devastating,
frolic, gaiety, happiness, festivity; embezzlement, misapplication, extortionate, grinding; (v) dry,
(adj, n) mirth. ANTONYMS: (n) misappropriation, peculation, sarcastic, sharp, severe, satirical,
misery, gloom, seriousness, defalcation, burglary, thievery; (adj) sardonic, cutting; (n) shrinkage.
despondency, boredom. thievish. ANTONYMS: (adj) ANTONYM: (adj) hopeful.
And he seated himself, utterly breathless, wiping away the great drops of
sweat which fell from his brow and drenched, like tears, the parchments spread
out before him. Messire Robert d'Estouteville frowned and made a gesture so
imperious and significant to Quasimodo, that the deaf man in some measure
understood it.%
The provost addressed him with severity, "What have you done that you
have been brought hither, knave?"
The poor fellow, supposing that the provost was asking his name, broke the
silence which he habitually preserved, and replied, in a harsh and guttural voice,
"Quasimodo."
The reply matched the question so little that the wild laugh began to circulate
once more, and Messire Robert exclaimed, red with wrath,
"Are you mocking me also, you arrant knave?"
"Bellringer of Notre-Dame," replied Quasimodo, supposing that what was
required of him was to explain to the judge who he was.
"Bellringer!" interpolated the provost, who had waked up early enough to be
in a sufficiently bad temper, as we have said, not to require to have his fury
inflamed by such strange responses. "Bellringer! I'll play you a chime of rods on
your back through the squares of Paris! Do you hear, knave?"
"If it is my age that you wish to know," said Quasimodo, "I think that I shall
be twenty at Saint Martin's day."
This was too much; the provost could no longer restrain himself.
"Ah! you are scoffing at the provostship, wretch! Messieurs the sergeants of
the mace, you will take me this knave to the pillory of the Grève, you will flog
him, and turn him for an hour. He shall pay me for it, tête Dieu! And I order that
the present judgment shall be cried, with the assistance of four sworn
trumpeters, in the seven castellanies of the viscomty of Paris."
The clerk set to work incontinently to draw up the account of the sentence.
Thesaurus
arrant: (adj) rank, unmitigated, trounce, flagellate, birch, castigate, inflamed: (adj) impassioned, excited,
thorough, stark, utter, ill, gross, cane, strap, wallop. angry, hot, flaming, ablaze, irritated,
infamous, bad, blatant, base. guttural: (adj) hoarse, throaty, gruff, passionate, painful, burning; (n) red.
ANTONYM: (adj) minor. croaking, husky, harsh, velar, mace: (n) cudgel, bludgeon, hammer,
circulate: (v) broadcast, circle, raucous, grum; (n) dental; (v) nasal. official, shillelah, spice, sprig, stick,
disseminate, disperse, distribute, ANTONYMS: (adj) soft, smooth, nutmeg, rod, scepter.
propagate, circularize, mobilize, high. squares: (n) square.
diffuse, proclaim, issue. hither: (adv) here, whither, supposing: (adv) admitting,
ANTONYMS: (v) suppress, hide, hitherward, thither. conditionally, in case; (n)
block, withhold, concentrate. incontinently: (adv) directly, at once, supposition, conjecture, thought,
drops: (n) tear. immediately, helter-skelter, pell-mell, theory, assumption; (conj) although,
flog: (v) lash, whip, chastise, lick, incontinent, rakishly, meretriciously. what if; (v) suppose.
Victor Hugo 241
"Ventre Dieu! 'tis well adjudged!" cried the little scholar, Jehan Frollo du
Moulin, from his corner.%
The provost turned and fixed his flashing eyes once more on Quasimodo. "I
believe the knave said 'Ventre Dieu' Clerk, add twelve deniers Parisian for the
oath, and let the vestry of Saint Eustache have the half of it; I have a particular
devotion for Saint Eustache."
In a few minutes the sentence was drawn up. Its tenor was simple and brief.
The customs of the provostship and the viscomty had not yet been worked over
by President Thibaut Baillet, and by Roger Barmne, the king's advocate; they had
not been obstructed, at that time, by that lofty hedge of quibbles and
procedures, which the two jurisconsults planted there at the beginning of the
sixteenth century. All was clear, expeditious, explicit. One went straight to the
point then, and at the end of every path there was immediately visible, without
thickets and without turnings; the wheel, the gibbet, or the pillory. One at least
knew whither one was going.
The clerk presented the sentence to the provost, who affixed his seal to it, and
departed to pursue his round of the audience hall, in a frame of mind which
seemed destined to fill all the jails in Paris that day. Jehan Frollo and Robin
Poussepain laughed in their sleeves. Quasimodo gazed on the whole with an
indifferent and astonished air.
However, at the moment when Master Florian Barbedienne was reading the
sentence in his turn, before signing it, the clerk felt himself moved with pity for
the poor wretch of a prisoner, and, in the hope of obtaining some mitigation of
the penalty, he approached as near the auditor's ear as possible, and said,
pointing to Quasimodo, "That man is deaf."
He hoped that this community of infirmity would awaken Master Florian's
interest in behalf of the condemned man. But, in the first place, we have already
observed that Master Florian did not care to have his deafness noticed. In the
next place, he was so hard of hearing That he did not catch a single word of what
the clerk said to him; nevertheless, he wished to have the appearance of hearing,
Thesaurus
awaken: (v) arouse, wake, rouse, call, blinking, meteoric, scintillating, light, unobstructed.
stir, kindle, get up, raise, wake up, brilliant, dazzling, gleaming; (n) flare, planted: (adj) ingrained, established,
waken, revive. ANTONYMS: (v) flashes. set, concealed.
dampen, calm, retire, suppress, spoil, mitigation: (n) alleviation, easement, quibbles: (n) disreputable tricks.
quench, douse, stifle. relief, assuagement, palliation, tenor: (n) purport, meaning,
expeditious: (adj) agile, brisk, swift, abatement, mollification, softening, substance, tendency, spirit, tone,
prompt, quick, hasty, fast, rapid, lessening; (n, v) relaxation; (v) mood, effect, set, temper; (adj)
speedy, efficient, ready. remission. soprano.
ANTONYMS: (adj) ineffectual, obstructed: (adj) blind, blocked, vestry: (n) nave, quire, convocation,
sluggish, slothful, inefficient, congested, impeded, impedite, foiled, consistory, synod, choir, chapter,
leisurely. tight, thwarted, stymied, frustrated, chancel, transept, aisle, conclave.
flashing: (adj) bright, sparkling, impassable. ANTONYM: (adj) worked: (adj) elaborated, beaten.
and replied, "Ah! ah! that is different; I did not know that. An hour more of the
pillory, in that case."
And he signed the sentence thus modified.%
"'Tis well done," said Robin Poussepain, who cherished a grudge against
Quasimodo. "That will teach him to handle people roughly."
Thesaurus
different: (adj) dissimilar, various, avoid. communicative, nonverbal.
assorted, unusual, alien, hour: (n) clock, o'clock, hours, time, hr, teach: (v) enlighten, educate, instruct,
miscellaneous, new, fresh, discrete, term, nonce, moment, occasion, coach, indoctrinate, drill, learn,
diverse; (v) differ. ANTONYMS: (adj) dawn, dusk. lecture, school; (adj, v) guide, show.
identical, corresponding, equal, like, sentence: (v) condemn, convict, judge, thus: (adv) then, so, consequently,
typical, same, conventional, familiar, damn; (n) finding, phrase, conviction, hence, thence, accordingly, as a
unified, uniform, Standard. punishment; (n, v) decision, doom, result, ergo, thusly, for that reason,
handle: (n, v) conduct, administer; (v) condemnation. ANTONYMS: (n) as.
feel, wield, deal, treat, touch, control, reward, absolution; (v) absolve,
manipulate, direct; (n) clutch. acquit.
ANTONYMS: (n) blade, head; (v) signed: (adj) gestural, engaged,
mishandle, bungle, conceal, crumble, employed, communicatory,
Victor Hugo 243
CHAPTER II
THE RAT-HOLE
The reader must permit us to take him back to the Place de Grève, which we
quitted yesterday with Gringoire, in order to follow la Esmeralda.%
It is ten o'clock in the morning; everything is indicative of the day after a
festival. The pavement is covered with rubbish; ribbons, rags, feathers from
tufts of plumes, drops of wax from the torches, crumbs of the public feast. A
goodly number of bourgeois are "sauntering," as we say, here and there, turning
over with their feet the extinct brands of the bonfire, going into raptures in front
of the Pillar House, over the memory of the fine hangings of the day before, and
to-day staring at the nails that secured them a last pleasure. The venders of cider
and beer are rolling their barrels among the groups. Some busy passers-by come
and go. The merchants converse and call to each other from the thresholds of
their shops. The festival, the ambassadors, Coppenole, the Pope of the Fools, are
in all mouths; they vie with each other, each trying to criticise it best and laugh
the most. And, meanwhile, four mounted sergeants, who have just posted
themselves at the four sides of the pillory, have already concentrated around
themselves a goodly proportion of the populace scattered on the Place, who
condemn themselves to immobility and fatigue in the hope of a small execution.
Thesaurus
cider: (v) Brazil tea, ice water, claret; (v) confer, confabulate, speak; (n) exhausted, inanimate, out, quenched,
(n) inebriant, alcoholic beverage, conversation, colloquy, contrast; (adj, gone. ANTONYMS: (adj) alive,
hard cider, pomade, sicer, sider, n) opposite; (adj) counter. living, extant, active, dormant,
alcohol, beverage. ANTONYMS: (adj, n) equal; (adj) thriving, existing, live.
condemn: (v) censure, reproach, similar, complementary; (n) feathers: (n) plumage, fur, indument,
castigate, attaint, deplore, sentence, similarity. garment, garb, fine hair, clothing,
excoriate, upbraid, knock, doom, criticise: (v) comment, criminate, dress, apparel, attire, array.
criticize. ANTONYMS: (v) praise, chide, berate, reprehend, knock, hangings: (n) long curtains.
approve, commend, free, pardon, reprove, denounce, deplore, criticize; ribbons: (n) cavesson, hackamore,
absolve, acquit, clear, exonerate, (adj) judge. jaquima, lines, streamer, streamers,
release, support. extinct: (adj) dead, deceased, defunct, ticker tape, paper chain, decoration,
converse: (n, v) chat, discourse, argue; departed, obsolete, extinguished, decorations, bunting.
If the reader, after having contemplated this lively and noisy scene which is
being enacted in all parts of the Place, will now transfer his gaze towards that
ancient demi-Gothic, demi-Romanesque house of the Tour-Roland, which forms
the corner on the quay to the west, he will observe, at the angle of the façade, a
large public breviary, with rich illuminations, protected from the rain by a little
penthouse, and from thieves by a small grating, which, however, permits of the
leaves being turned. Beside this breviary is a narrow, arched window, closed by
two iron bars in the form of a cross, and looking on the square; the only opening
which admits a small quantity of light and air to a little cell without a door,
constructed on the ground-floor, in the thickness of the walls of the old house,
and filled with a peace all the more profound, with a silence all the more gloomy,
because a public place, the most populous and most noisy in Paris swarms and
shrieks around it.%
This little cell had been celebrated in Paris for nearly three centuries, ever
since Madame Rolande de la Tour-Roland, in mourning for her father who died
in the Crusades, had caused it to be hollowed out in the wall of her own house,
in order to immure herself there forever, keeping of all her palace only this
lodging whose door was walled up, and whose window stood open, winter and
summer, giving all the rest to the poor and to God. The afflicted damsel had, in
fact, waited twenty years for death in this premature tomb, praying night and
day for the soul of her father, sleeping in ashes, without even a stone for a pillow,
clothed in a black sack, and subsisting on the bread and water which the
compassion of the passers-by led them to deposit on the ledge of her window,
thus receiving charity after having bestowed it. At her death, at the moment
when she was passing to the other sepulchre, she had bequeathed this one in
perpetuity to afflicted women, mothers, widows, or maidens, who should wish
to pray much for others or for themselves, and who should desire to inter
themselves alive in a great grief or a great penance. The poor of her day had
made her a fine funeral, with tears and benedictions; but, to their great regret, the
pious maid had not been canonized, for lack of influence. Those among them
who were a little inclined to impiety, had hoped that the matter might be
accomplished in Paradise more easily than at Rome, and had frankly besought
Thesaurus
canonized: (adj) glorified, authorized. constrain, cage; (n) Mure. perpetuity: (n) immortality,
contemplated: (adj) intended, willful. mourning: (n) lament, lamentation, sempiternity, permanency, infinity,
grating: (adj) hoarse, strident, harsh, bereavement, gloom, woe, memorial, permanence, endlessness, continuity,
discordant, gravelly, raspy, gruff, sorrowfulness, sadness, sorrow; (adj) time without end, everness,
raucous; (n, v) lattice; (n) grate, grid. grieving; (v) lamenting. sequence, aye.
ANTONYMS: (adj) pleasing, penance: (n) atonement, sacrament, populous: (adj) multitudinous,
soothing, smooth, harmonious. confession, compunction, penalty, crowded, densely populated,
illuminations: (n) flourish of expiation, remorse, repentance, multiple, thick, inhabited, numerous,
trumpets, fanfare, feu de joie, punishment, reparation, hair shirt. manifold, multiplied; (adj, v) teeming;
illumination. penthouse: (n) awning, apartment, (v) closely packed. ANTONYM: (adj)
immure: (v) confine, incarcerate, jail, canopy, outhouse, hovel, pentice, uninhabited.
gaol, detain, jug, lag, enclose, penthouse apartment. subsisting: (adj) extant, living.
Victor Hugo 245
God, instead of the pope, in behalf of the deceased. The majority had contented
themselves with holding the memory of Rolande sacred, and converting her rags
into relics. The city, on its side, had founded in honor of the damoiselle, a public
breviary, which had been fastened near the window of the cell, in order that
passers-by might halt there from time to time, were it only to pray; that prayer
might remind them of alms, and that the poor recluses, heiresses of Madame
Rolande's vault, might not die outright of hunger and forgetfulness.%
Moreover, this sort of tomb was not so very rare a thing in the cities of the
Middle Ages. One often encountered in the most frequented street, in the most
crowded and noisy market, in the very middle, under the feet of the horses,
under the wheels of the carts, as it were, a cellar, a well, a tiny walled and grated
cabin, at the bottom of which a human being prayed night and day, voluntarily
devoted to some eternal lamentation, to some great expiation. And all the
reflections which that strange spectacle would awaken in us to-day; that horrible
cell, a sort of intermediary link between a house and the tomb, the cemetery and
the city; that living being cut off from the human community, and thenceforth
reckoned among the dead; that lamp consuming its last drop of oil in the
darkness; that remnant of life flickering in the grave; that breath, that voice, that
eternal prayer in a box of stone; that face forever turned towards the other world;
that eye already illuminated with another sun; that ear pressed to the walls of a
tomb; that soul a prisoner in that body; that body a prisoner in that dungeon cell,
and beneath that double envelope of flesh and granite, the murmur of that soul
in pain;-- nothing of all this was perceived by the crowd. The piety of that age,
not very subtle nor much given to reasoning, did not see so many facets in an act
of religion. It took the thing in the block, honored, venerated, hallowed the
sacrifice at need, but did not analyze the sufferings, and felt but moderate pity
for them. It brought some pittance to the miserable penitent from time to time,
looked through the hole to see whether he were still living, forgot his name,
hardly knew how many years ago he had begun to die, and to the stranger, who
questioned them about the living skeleton who was perishing in that cellar, the
neighbors replied simply, "It is the recluse."
Thesaurus
begun: (adj) present. lamentation: (n) dirge, grief, smidgen, a little bit, driblet, trifle,
damoiselle: (n) damosel, maiden, mourning, plaint, regret, complaint, payment.
maid, demoiselle, damozel, damsel. cry, crying, wail, moan, condolence. remnant: (n) end, relic, remains,
dungeon: (n, v) keep; (n) prison, cell, ANTONYM: (n) celebration. residue, fragment, leftover, survival,
jail, penitentiary, fastness, oubliette, penitent: (adj) contrite, apologetic, trace, oddment, balance, stub.
Bastille, bridewell, detention, house sorry, remorseful, regretful, guilty, thenceforth: (adv) thenceforward,
of correction. sorrowful, rueful, penitential; (n) thence, elsewhere, absent, not there,
expiation: (n) amends, penance, flagellant, religionist. ANTONYMS: then.
compensation, recompense, (adj) unrepentant, impenitent, venerated: (adj) reverenced, reverend,
satisfaction, propitiation, reparation, unashamed, unremorseful. sublime, venerable, honored,
conciliation, expiate, restitution, pittance: (n) mite, meed, alimony, respected, admired, inspiring awe,
salvation. chicken feed, a few, donation, a acclaimed, August, beloved.
Everything was then viewed without metaphysics, without exaggeration,

without magnifying glass, with the naked eye. The microscope had not yet been
invented, either for things of matter or for things of the mind.%
Moreover, although people were but little surprised by it, the examples of
this sort of cloistration in the hearts of cities were in truth frequent, as we have
just said. There were in Paris a considerable number of these cells, for praying to
God and doing penance; they were nearly all occupied. It is true that the clergy
did not like to have them empty, since that implied lukewarmness in believers,
and that lepers were put into them when there were no penitents on hand.
Besides the cell on the Grève, there was one at Montfauçon, one at the Charnier
des Innocents, another I hardly know where,-- at the Clichon House, I think;
others still at many spots where traces of them are found in traditions, in default
of memorials. The University had also its own. On Mount Sainte-Geneviève a
sort of Job of the Middle Ages, for the space of thirty years, chanted the seven
penitential psalms on a dunghill at the bottom of a cistern, beginning anew
when he had finished, singing loudest at night, magna voce per umbras, and to-
day, the antiquary fancies that he hears his voice as he enters the Rue du Puits-
qui-parle-- the street of the "Speaking Well."
To confine ourselves to the cell in the Tour-Roland, we must say that it had
never lacked recluses. After the death of Madame Roland, it had stood vacant
for a year or two, though rarely. Many women had come thither to mourn, until
their death, for relatives, lovers, faults. Parisian malice, which thrusts its finger
into everything, even into things which concern it the least, affirmed that it had
beheld but few widows there.
In accordance with the fashion of the epoch, a Latin inscription on the wall
indicated to the learned passer-by the pious purpose of this cell. The custom was
retained until the middle of the sixteenth century of explaining an edifice by a
brief device inscribed above the door. Thus, one still reads in France, above the
wicket of the prison in the seignorial mansion of Tourville, Sileto et spera; in
Ireland, beneath the armorial bearings which surmount the grand door to
Fortescue Castle, Forte scutum, salus ducum; in England, over the principal
Thesaurus
anew: (adv) again, newly, lately, coldness, dullness, hebetude, rejoice, celebrate, applaud.
recently, over again, once more, once inappetency, indifference, coolness, penitential: (adj) repentant, contrite,
again, new; (adj) only yesterday, the frigidity, supineness, phlegm. remorseful, apologetic, sorry.
other day, just now. magnifying: (adj) cumulative. scutum: (v) aegis, shield, buckler,
antiquary: (n) antiquarian, expert, memorials: (n) memoir. armor, carapace, fender, face guard,
archaeologist, antiquist. metaphysics: (n) ontology, cowcatcher, corner stone, bulletproof
dunghill: (adj) base, craven, jakes, metaphysic, outside actual vest, buffer.
sink, recreant, privy; (n) experience, ontological, cosmological, surmount: (v) overcome, conquer,
unsanitariness, laystall, mixen, philosophy. subdue, defeat, master, excel,
muckheap, muckhill. mourn: (v) bewail, grieve, deplore, cry, transcend, outstrip, surpass,
hears: (v) hear. bemoan, regret, distress, sad, wail, vanquish, outmatch. ANTONYMS:
lukewarmness: (n) apathy, tepidness, mourning, weep. ANTONYMS: (v) (v) yield, fail.
Victor Hugo 247
entrance to the hospitable mansion of the Earls Cowper: Tuum est. At that time
every edifice was a thought.%
As there was no door to the walled cell of the Tour-Roland, these two words
had been carved in large Roman capitals over the window,-- TU, ORA.
And this caused the people, whose good sense does not perceive so much
refinement in things, and likes to translate Ludovico Magno by "Porte Saint-
Denis," to give to this dark, gloomy, damp cavity, the name of "The Rat-Hole."
An explanation less sublime, perhaps, than the other; but, on the other hand,
more picturesque.
Thesaurus
capitals: (n) brevier, caps, pica ANTONYMS: (n) hovel, shack, hut. refinement: (n) culture, cultivation,
boldface. perceive: (v) comprehend, apprehend, purification, gentility, polish, finish,
cavity: (n) antrum, cave, hole, pocket, discover, see, grasp, find, know, civilization, nicety, courtesy, grace;
hollow, void, pit, chamber, caries, observe, sense, appreciate; (adj, v) (adj, n) elegance. ANTONYMS: (n)
depression, hollowness. discern. ANTONYMS: (v) Miss, vulgarity, adulteration, tackiness,
ANTONYMS: (n) hump, lump. observe, ignore. uncouthness, tastelessness,
cell: (n) cage, jail, cadre, hole, cave, picturesque: (adj, v) pictorial; (adj) inelegance, coarseness, clumsiness,
booth, cavity, compartment, coop, beautiful, striking, colorful, idyllic, awkwardness, crudeness.
cubicle; (adj) cellular. scenic, vivid, quaint, lovely, translate: (v) construe, transform,
mansion: (n) house, manor, residence, romantic, colourful. ANTONYMS: decipher, explain, render, read,
castle, home, manor house, hall, (adj) drab, dull, ugly, unattractive, convert, define, turn, understand,
building, palace, villa, abode. modern. alter. ANTONYM: (v) stagnate.
Victor Hugo 249
CHAPTER III
HISTORY OF A LEAVENED CAKE OF MAIZE
At the epoch of this history, the cell in the Tour-Roland was occupied. If the
reader desires to know by whom, he has only to lend an ear to the conversation
of three worthy gossips, who, at the moment when we have directed his
attention to the Rat-Hole, were directing their steps towards the same spot,
coming up along the water's edge from the Châtelet, towards the Grève.%
Two of these women were dressed like good bourgeoises of Paris. Their fine
white ruffs; their petticoats of linsey- woolsey, striped red and blue; their white
knitted stockings, with clocks embroidered in colors, well drawn upon their legs;
the square-toed shoes of tawny leather with black soles, and, above all, their
headgear, that sort of tinsel horn, loaded down with ribbons and laces, which the
women of Champagne still wear, in company with the grenadiers of the imperial
guard of Russia, announced that they belonged to that class wives which holds
the middle ground between what the lackeys call a woman and what they term a
lady. They wore neither rings nor gold crosses, and it was easy to see that, in
their ease, this did not proceed from poverty, but simply from fear of being
fined. Their companion was attired in very much the same manner; but there
was that indescribable something about her dress and bearing which suggested
the wife of a provincial notary. One could see, by the way in which her girdle
Thesaurus
attired: (adj) clad, appareled, clothed, fined: (adj) penalized, penalised. lacking, unloaded, innocent,
garbed, habilimented, robed; (adj, grenadiers: (n) Macrouridae. impoverished.
prep) garmented. horn: (n) car horn, antler, klaxon, rings: (n) ornaments, necklaces, jewels,
clocks: (n) alfilaria, alfileria, storksbill, cornet, French horn, ivory, foghorn, costume jewelry, charms, bracelets.
pin clover, redstem storksbill, pin cornu, alarm, trumpet, arm. ruffs: (n) Philomachus.
grass, filaria, filaree. lend: (v) grant, give, advance, impart, striped: (adj) stripy, brindled,
desires: (n) requirements, needs. bestow, contribute, borrow, bring, variegated, lined, banded, virgated,
directing: (adj) guiding, directive, add, confer; (n) lending. zoned, paled, with stripes.
administrative, determinative, loaded: (adj) full, flush, moneyed, tawny: (n) tan, buff; (adj, n) brown,
directional, sovereign, commanding, wealthy, affluent, rich, tipsy, tight, auburn; (adj) luteous, golden, sallow,
controlling; (n) administration, intoxicated, charged; (adj, prep) russet, chestnut, creamy, moderately
conducting, conservation. burdened. ANTONYMS: (adj) empty, black.
rose above her hips, that she had not been long in Paris.-- Add to this a plaited
tucker, knots of ribbon on her shoes-- and that the stripes of her petticoat ran
horizontally instead of vertically, and a thousand other enormities which
shocked good taste.%
The two first walked with that step peculiar to Parisian ladies, showing Paris
to women from the country. The provincial held by the hand a big boy, who
held in his a large, flat cake.
We regret to be obliged to add, that, owing to the rigor of the season, he was
using his tongue as a handkerchief.
The child was making them drag him along, non passibus Cequis, as Virgil
says, and stumbling at every moment, to the great indignation of his mother. It
is true that he was looking at his cake more than at the pavement. Some serious
motive, no doubt, prevented his biting it (the cake), for he contented himself with
gazing tenderly at it. But the mother should have rather taken charge of the
cake. It was cruel to make a Tantalus of the chubby-checked boy.
Meanwhile, the three demoiselles (for the name of dames was then reserved
for noble women) were all talking at once.
"Let us make haste, Demoiselle Mahiette," said the youngest of the three, who
was also the largest, to the provincial, "I greatly fear that we shall arrive too late;
they told us at the Châtelet that they were going to take him directly to the
pillory."
"Ah, bah! what are you saying, Demoiselle Oudarde Musnier?" interposed
the other Parisienne. "There are two hours yet to the pillory. We have time
enough. Have you ever seen any one pilloried, my dear Mahiette?"
"Yes," said the provincial, "at Reims."
"Ah, bah! What is your pillory at Reims? A miserable cage into which only
peasants are turned. A great affair, truly!"
"Only peasants!" said Mahiette, "at the cloth market in Reims! We have seen
very fine criminals there, who have killed their father and mother! Peasants! For
what do you take us, Gervaise?"
Thesaurus
horizontally: (adv) evenly, flatly, undischarged, indebted, fulfilling stumbling: (adj) lurching, astounding,
planely, straightly, frigidly, dully, obligation, lawful. ANTONYM: (adj) hesitant, halting, awkward,
barwise, smoothly, recumbently, settled. astonishing, maladroit, clumsy,
prostrately; (adj) crosswise. plaited: (adj) woven, folded, plicated. weaving; (adv) stumblingly; (n)
indignation: (n) anger, resentment, rigor: (n) harshness, austerity, hesitation. ANTONYM: (adj) firm.
displeasure, grudge, umbrage, rage, grimness, exactness, cruelty, tucker: (v) weary, beat, tire, fatigue,
outrage, exasperation, choler, hardness, asperity, inclemency, frazzle, eat, ticktock, tick, thump,
dudgeon; (adj, n) wrath. hardship, precision, strictness. thrum; (n) bib.
ANTONYMS: (n) contentment, ANTONYMS: (n) laxness, flexibility. vertically: (adv) uprightly, erectly,
pleasure. stripes: (n) stripe, chevron, grade straightly, upright, standingly,
owing: (adj) due, unpaid, unsettled, insignia, streak, banding, badge, normally, sheerly, steeply; (adj)
outstanding, overdue, owed, payable, band, uniform. crosswise.
Victor Hugo 251
It is certain that the provincial was on the point of taking offence, for the
honor of her pillory. Fortunately, that discreet damoiselle, Oudarde Musnier,
turned the conversation in time.%
"By the way, Damoiselle Mahiette, what say you to our Flemish
Ambassadors? Have you as fine ones at Reims?"
"I admit," replied Mahiette, "that it is only in Paris that such Flemings can be
seen."
"Did you see among the embassy, that big ambassador who is a hosier?"
asked Oudarde.
"Yes," said Mahiette. "He has the eye of a Saturn."
"And the big fellow whose face resembles a bare belly?" resumed Gervaise.
"And the little one, with small eyes framed in red eyelids, pared down and
slashed up like a thistle head?"
"'Tis their horses that are worth seeing," said Oudarde, "caparisoned as they
are after the fashion of their country!"
"Ah my dear," interrupted provincial Mahiette, assuming in her turn an air of
superiority, "what would you say then, if you had seen in '61, at the consecration
at Reims, eighteen years ago, the horses of the princes and of the king's
company? Housings and caparisons of all sorts; some of damask cloth, of fine
cloth of gold, furred with sables; others of velvet, furred with ermine; others all
embellished with goldsmith's work and large bells of gold and silver! And what
money that had cost! And what handsome boy pages rode upon them!"
"That," replied Oudarde dryly, "does not prevent the Flemings having very
fine horses, and having had a superb supper yesterday with monsieur, the
provost of the merchants, at the Hôtel-de-Ville, where they were served with
comfits and hippocras, and spices, and other singularities."
"What are you saying, neighbor!" exclaimed Gervaise. "It was with monsieur
the cardinal, at the Petit Bourbon that they supped."
"Not at all. At the Hôtel-de-Ville.
Thesaurus
cardinal: (adj) capital, fundamental, thoughtless, insensitive, loud, precedence, preference, distinction,
central, main, key, chief, primal; (adj, obvious. supremacy, domination, eminence;
n) paramount, essential, vital, radical. embellished: (adj) ornamented, (adj, n) odds. ANTONYMS: (n)
ANTONYMS: (adj) secondary, rhetorical, decorated, fancy, florid, humility, weakness, friendliness,
inessential, insignificant, minor, tall, rich, embroidered, elaborate, mediocrity, simplicity.
ordinal, unimportant. baroque; (prep) beautied. thistle: (adj) porcupine, beard,
discreet: (adj) circumspect, prudent, framed: (adj) counterfeit, prepared, hedgehog, feather, mote, chevaux de
careful, cautious, chary, discerning, orderly, methodical, spurious. frise, dust, down, brier; (n) nodding
tactful, diplomatic, sensible, politic; ANTONYM: (adj) unframed. thistle, carline thistle.
(adj, v) wise. ANTONYMS: (adj) hippocras: (n) ypocras, ipocras. velvet: (adj) velvety, down; (n) profit,
elaborate, tactless, careless, superiority: (n) predominance, gain, velour, velours, revenue,
indiscreet, reckless, bold, incautious, priority, excellence, mastery, prosperity, receipts, satin, wealth.
"Yes, indeed. At the Petit Bourbon!"%

"It was at the Hôtel-de-Ville," retorted Oudarde sharply, "and Dr. Scourable
addressed them a harangue in Latin, which pleased them greatly. My husband,
who is sworn bookseller told me."
"It was at the Petit Bourbon," replied Gervaise, with no less spirit, "and this is
what monsieur the cardinal's procurator presented to them: twelve double
quarts of hippocras, white, claret, and red; twenty-four boxes of double Lyons
marchpane, gilded; as many torches, worth two livres a piece; and six demi-
queues of Beaune wine, white and claret, the best that could be found. I have it
from my husband, who is a cinquantenier, at the Parloir-aux Bourgeois, and who
was this morning comparing the Flemish ambassadors with those of Prester John
and the Emperor of Trebizond, who came from Mesopotamia to Paris, under the
last king, and who wore rings in their ears."
"So true is it that they supped at the Hôtel-de-Ville," replied Oudarde but
little affected by this catalogue, "that such a triumph of viands and comfits has
never been seen."
"I tell you that they were served by Le Sec, sergeant of the city, at the Hôtel
du Petit-Bourbon, and that that is where you are mistaken."
"At the Hôtel-de-Ville, I tell you!"
"At the Petit-Bourbon, my dear! and they had illuminated with magic glasses
the word hope, which is written on the grand portal."
"At the Hôtel-de-Ville! At the Hôtel-de-Ville! And Husson-le-Voir played
the flute!"
"I tell you, no!"
"I tell you, yes!"
"I say, no!"
Plump and worthy Oudarde was preparing to retort, and the quarrel might,
perhaps, have proceeded to a pulling of caps, had not Mahiette suddenly
Thesaurus
claret: (v) cider, Brazil tea, ice water; sworn: (adj) extreme, mortal, viands: (n) provender, victuals,
(n) blood, red wine, Bordeaux, red; implacable, engaged, dedicated, provisions, food, sustenance,
(adj) dark red, burgundy, cherry, committed, betrothed, bespoken, commissariat, larder, cates, diet,
crimson. affianced, inveterate. nourishment, edible.
marchpane: (n) candy. triumph: (v) exult, prevail, crow, worthy: (adj) noble, good, meritorious,
plump: (adj) chubby, corpulent, stout, rejoice, succeed; (n, v) glory, win, joy; valuable, estimable, respectable,
round, obese, overweight, gross, (n) victory, conquest, exultation. deserving, worthwhile, virtuous,
buxom, pudgy; (adj, n) fleshy; (v) ANTONYMS: (n) failure, defeat, honorable; (adj, n) celebrity.
fatten. ANTONYMS: (adj) thin, sorrow, unhappiness, dud, sadness, ANTONYMS: (adj) bad, unrespected,
emaciated, skinny, slim, slender. loss, flop; (v) fail, lose, forfeit. disreputable, mediocre, petty, poor,
proceeded: (v) proceed, yode. twelve: (adj, n) dozen, XII; (n) boxcars, unimpressive, insignificant,
quarts: (n) quart. large integer. dishonorable, despicable; (n) nobody.
Victor Hugo 253
exclaimed,-- "Look at those people assembled yonder at the end of the bridge!
There is something in their midst that they are looking at!"
"In sooth," said Gervaise, "I hear the sounds of a tambourine. I believe 'tis the
little Esmeralda, who plays her mummeries with her goat. Eh, be quick,
Mahiette! redouble your pace and drag along your boy. You are come hither to
visit the curiosities of Paris. You saw the Flemings yesterday; you must see the
gypsy to-day."
"The gypsy!" said Mahiette, suddenly retracing her steps, and clasping her
son's arm forcibly. "God preserve me from it! She would steal my child from
me! Come, Eustache!"
And she set out on a run along the quay towards the Grève, until she had left
the bridge far behind her. In the meanwhile, the child whom she was dragging
after her fell upon his knees; she halted breathless. Oudarde and Gervaise
rejoined her.%
"That gypsy steal your child from you!" said Gervaise. "That's a singular
freak of yours!"
Mahiette shook her head with a pensive air.
"The singular point is," observed Oudarde, "that la sachette has the same idea
about the Egyptian woman."
"What is la sachette?" asked Mahiette.
"Hé!" said Oudarde, "Sister Gudule."
"And who is Sister Gudule?" persisted Mahiette.
"You are certainly ignorant of all but your Reims, not to know that!" replied
Oudarde. "'Tis the recluse of the Rat-Hole."
"What!" demanded Mahiette, "that poor woman to whom we are carrying this
cake?"
Oudarde nodded affirmatively.
"Precisely. You will see her presently at her window on the Grève. She has
the same opinion as yourself of these vagabonds of Egypt, who play the
Thesaurus
affirmatively: (adv) optimistically, haulage; (adj) slow, sickly, slack, ignorant: (adj) unconscious, unwitting,
confirmatively, confirmatorily, unfit, sluggish, tardy, tedious; (v) rude, illiterate, uneducated, blind,
confirmingly, assertively, agreeably, involve. ANTONYMS: (adj) energetic, dull, unaware, uninformed,
concurringly, declaratorily, energizing, exciting, prompt, short. unlearned, innocent. ANTONYMS:
favoringly. forcibly: (adv) forcefully, emphatically, (adj) conscious, versed, cultured,
breathless: (adj, adv) out of breath; powerfully, by force, mightily, under educated, informed, wary, literate,
(adj) panting, inanimate, protest, cogently, hard, strongly, aware, polite.
breathtaking, winded, choking, convincingly, clearly. ANTONYMS: knees: (n) knee.
puffing; (v) all agog, aghast; (adj, n) (adv) voluntarily, weakly, gently. steal: (v) purloin, abstract, sneak, filch,
eager; (n) in hysterics. ANTONYMS: freak: (n, v) crotchet, caprice; (adj, n) pinch, creep, misappropriate, rob,
(adj) dull, expected, boring. eccentric; (n) oddity, crank, fanatic, pilfer; (n) bargain; (n, v) snatch.
dragging: (n) pulled wire, stemming, nut, monster, fit, whim, fad.
tambourine and tell fortunes to the public. No one knows whence comes her
horror of the gypsies and Egyptians. But you, Mahiette-- why do you run so at
the mere sight of them?"
"Oh!" said Mahiette, seizing her child's round head in both hands, "I don't
want that to happen to me which happened to Paquette la Chantefleurie."
"Oh! you must tell us that story, my good Mahiette," said Gervaise, taking her
arm.%
"Gladly," replied Mahiette, "but you must be ignorant of all but your Paris not
to know that! I will tell you then (but 'tis not necessary for us to halt that I may
tell you the tale), that Paquette la Chantefleurie was a pretty maid of eighteen
when I was one myself, that is to say, eighteen years ago, and 'tis her own fault if
she is not to-day, like me, a good, plump, fresh mother of six and thirty, with a
husband and a son. However, after the age of fourteen, it was too late! Well, she
was the daughter of Guybertant, minstrel of the barges at Reims, the same who
had played before King Charles VII., at his coronation, when he descended our
river Vesle from Sillery to Muison, when Madame the Maid of Orleans was also
in the boat. The old father died when Paquette was still a mere child; she had
then no one but her mother, the sister of M. Pradon, master-brazier and
coppersmith in Paris, Rue Farm- Garlin, who died last year. You see she was of
good family. The mother was a good simple woman, unfortunately, and she
taught Paquette nothing but a bit of embroidery and toy-making which did not
prevent the little one from growing very large and remaining very poor. They
both dwelt at Reims, on the river front, Rue de Folle-Peine. Mark this: For I
believe it was this which brought misfortune to Paquette. In '61, the year of the
coronation of our King Louis XI. whom God preserve! Paquette was so gay and
so pretty that she was called everywhere by no other name than "la
Chantefleurie"-- blossoming song. Poor girl! She had handsome teeth, she was
fond of laughing and displaying them. Now, a maid who loves to laugh is on
the road to weeping; handsome teeth ruin handsome eyes. So she was la
Chantefleurie. She and her mother earned a precarious living; they had been
very destitute since the death of the minstrel; their embroidery did not bring
Thesaurus
blossoming: (n) bloom, florescence, solvent. middleman, interlocutor, vocalist,
flowering, anthesis, blossom, displaying: (n) advertising. poet, corner man; (v) sing.
efflorescence, inflorescence, dwelt: (v) dwell, inhabit. precarious: (adj) dangerous, insecure,
ontogeny, ontogenesis; (adj) budding, embroidery: (n) needlework, hazardous, doubtful, unstable,
growing. ANTONYM: (adj) failing. ornamentation, fancywork, sewing, unsafe, uncertain, delicate,
coppersmith: (n) journeyman, drawnwork, crewelwork, cutwork, disputable, tricky, risky.
artificer, artisan. decoration, adornment, ornament, ANTONYMS: (adj) stable, secure,
destitute: (adj) impoverished, needy, stitchery. ANTONYM: (n) certain.
bankrupt, broke, poor, helpless, understatement. seizing: (v) seize; (n) seizure, clutches,
impecunious, penniless, necessitous; fourteen: (adj, n) XIV. prehension, taking, apprehension,
(adj, v) forlorn, devoid. ANTONYMS: minstrel: (n) singer, musician, capture, infection; (adj) catching,
(adj) wealthy, privileged, prosperous, troubadour, artiste, folk singer, galling, controlling.
Victor Hugo 255
them in more than six farthings a week, which does not amount to quite two
eagle liards. Where were the days when Father Guybertant had earned twelve
sous parisian, in a single coronation, with a song? One winter (it was in that
same year of '61), when the two women had neither fagots nor firewood, it was
very cold, which gave la Chantefleurie such a fine color that the men called her
Paquette! and many called her Pàquerette! and she was ruined.-- Eustache, just
let me see you bite that cake if you dare!-- We immediately perceived that she
was ruined, one Sunday when she came to church with a gold cross about her
neck. At fourteen years of age! do you see? First it was the young Vicomte de
Cormontreuil, who has his bell tower three leagues distant from Reims; then
Messire Henri de Triancourt, equerry to the King; then less than that, Chiart de
Beaulion, sergeant-at-arms; then, still descending, Guery Aubergeon, carver to
the King; then, Mace de Frépus, barber to monsieur the dauphin; then, Thévenin
le Moine, King's cook; then, the men growing continually younger and less
noble, she fell to Guillaume Racine, minstrel of the hurdy gurdy and to Thierry
de Mer, lamplighter. Then, poor Chantefleurie, she belonged to every one: she
had reached the last sou of her gold piece. What shall I say to you, my
damoiselles? At the coronation, in the same year, '61, 'twas she who made the
bed of the king of the debauchees! In the same year!"
Mahiette sighed, and wiped away a tear which trickled from her eyes.%
"This is no very extraordinary history," said Gervaise, "and in the whole of it I
see nothing of any Egyptian women or children."
"Patience!" resumed Mahiette, "you will see one child.-- In '66, 'twill be
sixteen years ago this month, at Sainte- Paule's day, Paquette was brought to bed
of a little girl. The unhappy creature! it was a great joy to her; she had long
wished for a child. Her mother, good woman, who had never known what to do
except to shut her eyes, her mother was dead. Paquette had no longer any one to
love in the world or any one to love her. La Chantefleurie had been a poor
creature during the five years since her fall. She was alone, alone in this life,
fingers were pointed at her, she was hooted at in the streets, beaten by the
sergeants, jeered at by the little boys in rags. And then, twenty had arrived: and
Thesaurus
bite: (n, v) nip, cut, taste, hurt, pain; (v) enthronisation. firebrand, fuelwood, lumber,
pinch, chew, erode, gnaw, eat; (n) descending: (v) descend; (adj) brushwood, wood, kindling, fuel,
morsel. ANTONYMS: (n) lot, whole, downhill, down, descendent, cordwood, bobbing.
mildness. decreasing, dropping, falling, ruined: (adj, v) lost; (adj) dilapidated,
carver: (n) sculpturer, sculptress, sloping, degressive, occasive; (adv) desolate, broke, broken, bankrupt,
cutter, modeler, figuriste, woodman, downward. ANTONYM: (adj) finished, devastated, desolated,
woodsman, woodworker, diner, upward. insolvent, spoiled. ANTONYMS: (adj)
statuary, chaser. eagle: (n) bird of Jove, colors, double solvent, pure, rich, whole.
coronation: (n) accession, eagle, oriflamme, oriflamb, raptor, tear: (n, v) rip, break, split, rupture,
enthronement, induction, initiation, labarum, emblem, flag, dibs, crack, run, slit; (v) pull, rend, lacerate;
crowning, enthronization, streamer. (adj, v) rush. ANTONYMS: (v) wait,
investiture, installation, firewood: (n) backlog, brand, mend, idle, fix, amble, dawdle.
twenty is an old age for amorous women. Folly began to bring her in no more
than her trade of embroidery in former days; for every wrinkle that came, a
crown fled; winter became hard to her once more, wood became rare again in her
brazier, and bread in her cupboard. She could no longer work because, in
becoming voluptuous, she had grown lazy; and she suffered much more
because, in growing lazy, she had become voluptuous. At least, that is the way in
which monsieur the cure of Saint-Remy explains why these women are colder
and hungrier than other poor women, when they are old."
"Yes," remarked Gervaise, "but the gypsies?"
"One moment, Gervaise!" said Oudarde, whose attention was less impatient.
"What would be left for the end if all were in the beginning? Continue, Mahiette,
I entreat you. That poor Chantefleurie!"
Mahiette went on.%
"So she was very sad, very miserable, and furrowed her cheeks with tears.
But in the midst of her shame, her folly, her debauchery, it seemed to her that she
should be less wild, less shameful, less dissipated, if there were something or
some one in the world whom she could love, and who could love her. It was
necessary that it should be a child, because only a child could be sufficiently
innocent for that. She had recognized this fact after having tried to love a thief,
the only man who wanted her; but after a short time, she perceived that the thief
despised her. Those women of love require either a lover or a child to fill their
hearts. Otherwise, they are very unhappy. As she could not have a lover, she
turned wholly towards a desire for a child, and as she had not ceased to be pious,
she made her constant prayer to the good God for it. So the good God took pity
on her, and gave her a little daughter. I will not speak to you of her joy; it was a
fury of tears, and caresses, and kisses. She nursed her child herself, made
swaddling-bands for it out of her coverlet, the only one which she had on her
bed, and no longer felt either cold or hunger. She became beautiful once more, in
consequence of it. An old maid makes a young mother. Gallantry claimed her
once more; men came to see la Chantefleurie; she found customers again for her
merchandise, and out of all these horrors she made baby clothes, caps and bibs,
Thesaurus
coverlet: (n) blanket, bedspread, cover, reject. ignominious, disreputable,
bedcover, bed cover, tarpaulin, hearts: (n) Black Maria, spades. despicable; (adj, v) foul, base, gross,
drugget, coverlid, spread, mantle, horrors: (adj) pessimism, vapors, black. ANTONYMS: (adj) honorable,
quilt. spleen, megrims; (n) delirium noble, dignified, admirable, faultless,
customers: (n) trade. tremens. reputable, glorious, compassionate,
despised: (adj) scorned, despicable, merchandise: (v) market, deal; (n) praiseworthy, commendable,
hated, abject, disparaged, mean, freight, cargo, product, commodity, excellent.
attaching disgrace, unpopular, goods, consignment, wares; (adj) voluptuous: (adj) luscious, voluptuary,
unloved, reviled, opprobrious. commodities, ware. sensual, carnal, sybaritic, epicurean,
entreat: (v) beg, beseech, ask, implore, nursed: (adj) care, suckled. buxom, sexy, sensuous, lascivious,
pray, adjure, appeal, request, conjure, shameful: (adj) scandalous, erotic. ANTONYM: (adj)
crave, bid. ANTONYMS: (v) demand, dishonorable, opprobrious, shocking, underdeveloped.
Victor Hugo 257
bodices with shoulder-straps of lace, and tiny bonnets of satin, without even
thinking of buying herself another coverlet.-- Master Eustache, I have already
told you not to eat that cake.-- It is certain that little Agnes, that was the child's
name, a baptismal name, for it was a long time since la Chantefleurie had had
any surname-- it is certain that that little one was more swathed in ribbons and
embroideries than a dauphiness of Dauphiny! Among other things, she had a
pair of little shoes, the like of which King Louis XI. certainly never had! Her
mother had stitched and embroidered them herself; she had lavished on them all
the delicacies of her art of embroideress, and all the embellishments of a robe
for the good Virgin. They certainly were the two prettiest little pink shoes that
could be seen. They were no longer than my thumb, and one had to see the
child's little feet come out of them, in order to believe that they had been able to
get into them. 'Tis true that those little feet were so small, so pretty, so rosy!
rosier than the satin of the shoes! When you have children, Oudarde, you will
find that there is nothing prettier than those little hands and feet."%
"I ask no better," said Oudarde with a sigh, "but I am waiting until it shall suit
the good pleasure of M. Andry Musnier."
"However, Paquette's child had more that was pretty about it besides its feet.
I saw her when she was only four months old; she was a love! She had eyes
larger than her mouth, and the most charming black hair, which already curled.
She would have been a magnificent brunette at the age of sixteen! Her mother
became more crazy over her every day. She kissed her, caressed her, tickled her,
washed her, decked her out, devoured her! She lost her head over her, she
thanked God for her. Her pretty, little rosy feet above all were an endless source
of wonderment, they were a delirium of joy! She was always pressing her lips to
them, and she could never recover from her amazement at their smallness. She
put them into the tiny shoes, took them out, admired them, marvelled at them,
looked at the light through them, was curious to see them try to walk on her bed,
and would gladly have passed her life on her knees, putting on and taking off
the shoes from those feet, as though they had been those of an Infant Jesus."
Thesaurus
baptismal: (adj) eucharistical, rage, distraction. ANTONYMS: (n) stitched: (adj) sewed, bound in paper
Baptistic; (n) baptism. indifference, dejection. covers, seamed.
brunette: (adj) dark, brown, swarthy, embellishments: (n) trimmings, tickled: (adj) tickled pink, overjoyed,
tan, russet, chocolate; (n) tanned, arrangements, added extras, fixing, delighted, detective novel, ecstatic,
person, somebody, soul, someone. trappings. elated, jubilant, happy, glad, excited.
ANTONYM: (n) blonde. rosier: (n) rosebush. ANTONYM: (adj) disappointed.
dauphiness: (n) dauphine. smallness: (n) diminutiveness, washed: (adj) wash, cleaner, colored,
delicacies: (n) food, delices, cates, minuteness, slightness, puniness, refined, wet, watery.
regalia. insignificance, scantiness, delicacy, wonderment: (n) wonder, admiration,
delirium: (n) craze, insanity, mania, scantness, narrowness; (adj) amazement, astonishment, surprise,
disturbance, fever, ecstasy, meagerness, slenderness. awe, bewilderment, marvel,
derangement; (adj, n) fury; (adj) furor, ANTONYM: (n) tallness. curiosity, annus Mirabilis, esteem.
"The tale is fair and good," said Gervaise in a low tone; "but where do gypsies
come into all that?"%
"Here," replied Mahiette. "One day there arrived in Reims a very queer sort
of people. They were beggars and vagabonds who were roaming over the
country, led by their duke and their counts. They were browned by exposure to
the sun, they had closely curling hair, and silver rings in their ears. The women
were still uglier than the men. They had blacker faces, which were always
uncovered, a miserable frock on their bodies, an old cloth woven of cords bound
upon their shoulder, and their hair hanging like the tail of a horse. The children
who scrambled between their legs would have frightened as many monkeys. A
band of excommunicates. All these persons came direct from lower Egypt to
Reims through Poland. The Pope had confessed them, it was said, and had
prescribed to them as penance to roam through the world for seven years,
without sleeping in a bed; and so they were called penancers, and smelt horribly.
It appears that they had formerly been Saracens, which was why they believed in
Jupiter, and claimed ten livres of Tournay from all archbishops, bishops, and
mitred abbots with croziers. A bull from the Pope empowered them to do that.
They came to Reims to tell fortunes in the name of the King of Algiers, and the
Emperor of Germany. You can readily imagine that no more was needed to
cause the entrance to the town to be forbidden them. Then the whole band
camped with good grace outside the gate of Braine, on that hill where stands a
mill, beside the cavities of the ancient chalk pits. And everybody in Reims vied
with his neighbor in going to see them. They looked at your hand, and told you
marvellous prophecies; they were equal to predicting to Judas that he would
become Pope. Nevertheless, ugly rumors were in circulation in regard to them;
about children stolen, purses cut, and human flesh devoured. The wise people
said to the foolish: "Don't go there!" and then went themselves on the sly. It was
an infatuation. The fact is, that they said things fit to astonish a cardinal.
Mothers triumphed greatly over their little ones after the Egyptians had read in
their hands all sorts of marvels written in pagan and in Turkish. One had an
emperor; another, a pope; another, a captain. Poor Chantefleurie was seized
with curiosity; she wished to know about herself, and whether her pretty little
Thesaurus
astonish: (adj, v) astound; (adj, n, v) edge. queer: (adj) fantastic, odd, eccentric,
surprise; (adj) astonishing, surprised; empowered: (adj) authorised, funny, curious, gay, peculiar, strange,
(v) flabbergast, daze, confound, accredited, entitled, privileged, quaint, fishy, outlandish.
dazzle, stun, alarm, nonplus. sceptered, sceptred. ANTONYMS: (adj) conventional,
ANTONYMS: (v) expect, bore. frock: (n) dress, gown, clothing, attire, normal, well.
browned: (adj) brunet, tanned, robe, kirtle, habit, clothes, coat, roam: (adj, v) stray; (v) wander,
suntanned, brunette, done. chemise, caftan. gallivant, meander, range, gad, walk,
cords: (n) trousers, bands, line, strings, infatuation: (adj) devotion, drift, tramp, journey, stroll.
corduroys, raised bands. fascination, enchantment, gross ANTONYMS: (v) rush, settle.
curling: (adj) curled, curly, moving, credulity; (adj, n) passion, fervor, smelt: (v) fuse, temper, anneal, to
curled up; (adv) curlingly; (n) croquet, fanaticism; (n) crush, idolatry, love, smelt, distill, refine, heat; (n)
pallone, polo, tipcat, golf, curling hobby. ANTONYM: (n) indifference. sparling, capelan, caplin, capelin.
Victor Hugo 259
Agnes would not become some day Empress of Armenia, or something else. So
she carried her to the Egyptians; and the Egyptian women fell to admiring the
child, and to caressing it, and to kissing it with their black mouths, and to
marvelling over its little band, alas! to the great joy of the mother. They were
especially enthusiastic over her pretty feet and shoes. The child was not yet a
year old. She already lisped a little, laughed at her mother like a little mad thing,
was plump and quite round, and possessed a thousand charming little gestures
of the angels of paradise.%
She was very much frightened by the Egyptians, and wept. But her mother
kissed her more warmly and went away enchanted with the good fortune which
the soothsayers had foretold for her Agnes. She was to be a beauty, virtuous, a
queen. So she returned to her attic in the Rue Folle-Peine, very proud of bearing
with her a queen. The next day she took advantage of a moment when the child
was asleep on her bed, (for they always slept together), gently left the door a
little way open, and ran to tell a neighbor in the Rue de la Séchesserie, that the
day would come when her daughter Agnes would be served at table by the King
of England and the Archduke of Ethiopia, and a hundred other marvels. On her
return, hearing no cries on the staircase, she said to herself: 'Good! the child is
still asleep!' She found her door wider open than she had left it, but she entered,
poor mother, and ran to the bed.-- -The child was no longer there, the place was
empty. Nothing remained of the child, but one of her pretty little shoes. She
flew out of the room, dashed down the stairs, and began to beat her head against
the wall, crying: 'My child! who has my child? Who has taken my child?' The
street was deserted, the house isolated; no one could tell her anything about it.
She went about the town, searched all the streets, ran hither and thither the
whole day long, wild, beside herself, terrible, snuffing at doors and windows like
a wild beast which has lost its young. She was breathless, dishevelled, frightful
to see, and there was a fire in her eyes which dried her tears. She stopped the
passers-by and cried: 'My daughter! my daughter! my pretty little daughter! If
any one will give me back my daughter, I will he his servant, the servant of his
dog, and he shall eat my heart if he will.' She met M. le Curé of Saint- Remy, and
said to him: 'Monsieur, I will till the earth with my finger-nails, but give me back
Thesaurus
admiring: (adj) admire, admiringly, frowzy, unkempt, sloppy, slovenly; (adj) embracing, adhering closely,
loving, respectful, glowing, (v) bedraggled. billing, clinging, interosculant.
affectionate, amatory, appreciative, foretold: (adj) foreseen; (v) annunciate. shoes: (n) footwear, shoe, place,
enthusiastic, flattering, approving. frightful: (adj, v) fearful; (adj) position, situation, post, plaza,
ANTONYMS: (adj) defamatory, formidable, awful, fearsome, property, lieu, home, blank space.
critical, disdainful, disapproving, appalling, gruesome, horrible, virtuous: (adj) upright, pure,
disrespectful, uncomplimentary. terrible, dread, frightening, grim. righteous, good, moral, just,
dashed: (v) ashamed, cut up, sunk; ANTONYMS: (adj) wonderful, honorable, honest, respectable,
(adj) broken, done for, dejected, calming, soothing, pleasant, lovely, decent, pious. ANTONYMS: (adj)
discouraged, dotted. fair. bad, sinful, corrupt, impure,
dishevelled: (adj) untidy, tousled, kissing: (n) hugging, cuddling, unethical, decadent, degenerate,
messy, blowzy, rough, frowsy, fondling, arousal, foreplay, necking; irreverent.
my %child!' It was heartrending, Oudarde; and IL saw a very hard man, Master
Ponce Lacabre, the procurator, weep. Ah! poor mother! In the evening she
returned home. During her absence, a neighbor had seen two gypsies ascend up
to it with a bundle in their arms, then descend again, after closing the door.
After their departure, something like the cries of a child were heard in Paquette's
room. The mother, burst into shrieks of laughter, ascended the stairs as though
on wings, and entered.-- A frightful thing to tell, Oudarde! Instead of her pretty
little Agnes, so rosy and so fresh, who was a gift of the good God, a sort of
hideous little monster, lame, one-eyed, deformed, was crawling and squalling
over the floor. She hid her eyes in horror. 'Oh!' said she, 'have the witches
transformed my daughter into this horrible animal?' They hastened to carry
away the little club-foot; he would have driven her mad. It was the monstrous
child of some gypsy woman, who had given herself to the devil. He appeared to
be about four years old, and talked a language which was no human tongue;
there were words in it which were impossible. La Chantefleurie flung herself
upon the little shoe, all that remained to her of all that she loved. She remained
so long motionless over it, mute, and without breath, that they thought she was
dead. Suddenly she trembled all over, covered her relic with furious kisses, and
burst out sobbing as though her heart were broken. I assure you that we were all
weeping also. She said: 'Oh, my little daughter! my pretty little daughter! where
art thou?'-- and it wrung your very heart. I weep still when I think of it. Our
children are the marrow of our bones, you see.-- My poor Eustache! thou art so
fair!-- If you only knew how nice he is! yesterday he said to me: 'I want to be a
gendarme, that I do.' Oh! my Eustache! if I were to lose thee!-- All at once la
Chantefleurie rose, and set out to run through Reims, screaming: 'To the gypsies'
camp! to the gypsies' camp! Police, to burn the witches!' The gypsies were gone.
It was pitch dark. They could not be followed. On the morrow, two leagues from
Reims, on a heath between Gueux and Tilloy, the remains of a large fire were
found, some ribbons which had belonged to Paquette's child, drops of blood, and
the dung of a ram. The night just past had been a Saturday. There was no longer
any doubt that the Egyptians had held their Sabbath on that heath, and that they
had devoured the child in company with Beelzebub, as the practice is among the
Thesaurus
ascend: (n, v) mount; (v) arise, scale, moving, miserable, affecting. relic: (n, v) memento, souvenir,
uprise, climb, go up, come up, ANTONYMS: (adj) cheerful, keepsake; (n) token, trace, remainder,
increase, elevate; (n) ascending, unemotional, joyous, happy. remains, antique, relict, vestige,
ascent. ANTONYMS: (v) descend, lame: (adj) crippled, disabled, halting, remnant.
drop, decline, fall, lower, set, sink. feeble, halt, weak, paralytic; (adj, n) sobbing: (adj) crying, weeping, weepy,
dung: (adj, n) ordure, excrement; (n) game; (adj, v) paralyze, maim, tearful; (n) lamentation, shortness of
compost, filth, muck, soil, dejection; becripple. breath, shit, prick, motherfucker, tear,
(v) defecate, fertilise; (adj) feces, mute: (adj) dumb, silent, inarticulate, lament.
faeces. dummy, tongueless; (v) muffle, squalling: (adj) unquiet.
heartrending: (adj) grievous, dampen, deaden, hush; (adj, v) quiet, weep: (v) wail, bawl, lament, sob,
deplorable, pitiful, distressing, dull. ANTONYMS: (adj) talkative, blubber, moan, howl, drip, greet,
catastrophic, woeful, tragic, pathetic, speaking, spoken; (v) amplify. whimper; (n) tear.
Victor Hugo 261
Mahometans. When La Chantefleurie learned these horrible things, she did not
weep, she moved her lips as though to speak, but could not. On the morrow, her
hair was gray. On the second day, she had disappeared.%
"'Tis in truth, a frightful tale," said Oudarde, "and one which would make
even a Burgundian weep."
"I am no longer surprised," added Gervaise, "that fear of the gypsies should
spur you on so sharply."
"And you did all the better," resumed Oudarde, "to flee with your Eustache
just now, since these also are gypsies from Poland."
"No," said Gervais, "'tis said that they come from Spain and Catalonia."
"Catalonia? 'tis possible," replied Oudarde. "Pologne, Catalogue, Valogne, I
always confound those three provinces, One thing is certain, that they are
gypsies."
"Who certainly," added Gervaise, "have teeth long enough to eat little
children. I should not be surprised if la Sméralda ate a little of them also, though
she pretends to be dainty. Her white goat knows tricks that are too malicious for
there not to be some impiety underneath it all."
Mahiette walked on in silence. She was absorbed in that revery which is, in
some sort, the continuation of a mournful tale, and which ends only after having
communicated the emotion, from vibration to vibration, even to the very last
fibres of the heart. Nevertheless, Gervaise addressed her, "And did they ever
learn what became of la Chantefleurie?" Mahiette made no reply. Gervaise
repeated her question, and shook her arm, calling her by name. Mahiette
appeared to awaken from her thoughts.
"What became of la Chantefleurie?" she said, repeating mechanically the
words whose impression was still fresh in her ear; then, ma king an effort to
recall her attention to the meaning of her words, "Ah!" she continued briskly, "no
one ever found out."
She added, after a pause,
Thesaurus
briskly: (adv) busily, energetically, poisonous, mean, mischievous, mournful: (adj) sad, miserable,
vigorously, quickly, freshly, actively, pernicious, nasty. ANTONYMS: (adj) melancholy, funereal, dolorous, dark,
sharply, rapidly, vividly, brightly, kind, harmless, kindhearted, loving, pensive, gloomy, lugubrious,
merrily. ANTONYMS: (adv) unmalicious, compassionate, good, lamentable; (adj, n) plaintive.
seriously, laboriously, civilly, merciful, pleasant, provoked. ANTONYMS: (adj) joyful, happy,
pleasantly, languorously. mechanically: (adv) mechanistically, emotionless.
flee: (v) bolt, break out, fly, desert, instinctively, routinely, involuntarily, spur: (n) inducement, incentive,
break, abscond, elope, elude, run industrially, unconsciously, impulse, stimulus; (n, v) prod, prick,
away, run, leave. ANTONYMS: (v) automaticly, intuitively, impulsively, incite, prompt; (v) provoke, impel,
appear, advance. technically, technologically. animate. ANTONYMS: (n)
malicious: (adj) evil, vicious, ANTONYMS: (adv) manually, discouragement, disincentive,
venomous, spiteful, unkind, cruel, consciously. deterrent; (v) calm, delay, inhibit.
"Some said that she had been seen to quit Reims at nightfall by the
Fléchembault gate; others, at daybreak, by the old Basée gate. A poor man found
her gold cross hanging on the stone cross in the field where the fair is held. It
was that ornament which had wrought her ruin, in '61. It was a gift from the
handsome Vicomte de Cormontreuil, her first lover. Paquette had never been
willing to part with it, wretched as she had been. She had clung to it as to life
itself. So, when we saw that cross abandoned, we all thought that she was dead.
Nevertheless, there were people of the Cabaret les Vantes, who said that they
had seen her pass along the road to Paris, walking on the pebbles with her bare
feet. But, in that case, she must have gone out through the Porte de Vesle, and all
this does not agree. Or, to speak more truly, I believe that she actually did
depart by the Porte de Vesle, but departed from this world."
"I do not understand you," said Gervaise.%
"La Vesle," replied Mahiette, with a melancholy smile, "is the river."
"Poor Chantefleurie!" said Oudarde, with a shiver,-- "drowned!"
"Drowned!" resumed Mahiette, "who could have told good Father
Guybertant, when he passed under the bridge of Tingueux with the current,
singing in his barge, that one day his dear little Paquette would also pass
beneath that bridge, but without song or boat.
"And the little shoe?" asked Gervaise.
"Disappeared with the mother," replied Mahiette.
"Poor little shoe!" said Oudarde.
Oudarde, a big and tender woman, would have been well pleased to sigh in
company with Mahiette. But Gervaise, more curious, had not finished her
questions.
"And the monster?" she said suddenly, to Mahiette.
"What monster?" inquired the latter.
Thesaurus
barge: (n) lighter, pontoon, boat, hoy, ANTONYMS: (adj) remaining, alive. discontinue; (adj, v) discharge; (n, v)
wherry, houseboat, scow, craft, nightfall: (n) dusk, evening, twilight, part. ANTONYMS: (v) stay, occupy,
flatboat, buss; (v) obtrude. sunset, gloaming, evenfall, dark, enter, maintain, start, come, arrive.
depart: (v) go, deviate, decease, eventide, sundown, darkness, fall. wretched: (adj) unfortunate, pitiful,
diverge, start, stray, wander, leave, ANTONYMS: (n) daybreak, sunrise. sad, pitiable, woeful, pathetic,
die, vary, part. ANTONYMS: (v) stay, ornament: (n) decoration, adornment, piteous, lamentable; (adj, v) poor,
arrive, enter, come, abide, conform, embellishment, decor; (v) beautify, unhappy, forlorn. ANTONYMS: (adj)
continue, remain, appear, converge, decorate, deck, embellish, adorn; (n, fine, strong, fortunate, overjoyed,
return. v) garnish, dress. ANTONYM: (v) nice, admirable, good, cheery, joyous,
departed: (adj) dead, bygone, late, strip. lucky, comfortable.
former, bypast, defunct, past, left; quit: (adj, n, v) leave; (v) go, drop, wrought: (adj) shaped, done, worked,
(adj, v) gone, extinct; (n) decedent. break, cease, give up, depart, end, worked up, formed.
Victor Hugo 263
"The little gypsy monster left by the sorceresses in Chantefleurie's chamber,

in exchange for her daughter. What did you do with it? I hope you drowned it
also."
"No." replied Mahiette.%
"What? You burned it then? In sooth, that is more just. A witch child!"
"Neither the one nor the other, Gervaise. Monseigneur the archbishop
interested himself in the child of Egypt, exorcised it, blessed it, removed the devil
carefully from its body, and sent it to Paris, to be exposed on the wooden bed at
Notre- Dame, as a foundling."
"Those bishops!" grumbled Gervaise, "because they are learned, they do
nothing like anybody else. I just put it to you, Oudarde, the idea of placing the
devil among the foundlings! For that little monster was assuredly the devil.
Well, Mahiette, what did they do with it in Paris? I am quite sure that no
charitable person wanted it."
"I do not know," replied the Rémoise, "'twas just at that time that my husband
bought the office of notary, at Bern, two leagues from the town, and we were no
longer occupied with that story; besides, in front of Bern, stand the two hills of
Cernay, which hide the towers of the cathedral in Reims from view."
While chatting thus, the three worthy bourgeoises had arrived at the Place de
Grève. In their absorption, they had passed the public breviary of the Tour-
Roland without stopping, and took their way mechanically towards the pillory
around which the throng was growing more dense with every moment. It is
probable that the spectacle which at that moment attracted all looks in that
direction, would have made them forget completely the Rat-Hole, and the halt
which they intended to make there, if big Eustache, six years of age, whom
Mahiette was dragging along by the hand, had not abruptly recalled the object to
them: "Mother," said he, as though some instinct warned him that the Rat-Hole
was behind him, "can I eat the cake now?"
If Eustache had been more adroit, that is to say, less greedy, he would have
continued to wait, and would only have hazarded that simple question, "Mother,
Thesaurus
adroit: (adj) dexterous, ingenious, charitable: (adj) kind, clement, gentle, (adj, v) avaricious, covetous.
slick, intelligent, expert, artful, able, benevolent, liberal, bountiful, ANTONYMS: (adj) temperate,
clever, adept, politic, sharp. philanthropic, generous, humane, ascetic, unconcerned, abstemious,
ANTONYMS: (adj) awkward, kindly, lenient. ANTONYMS: (adj) moderate.
maladroit, dim, inept, bumbling, uncharitable, mean, nasty, tightfisted, spectacle: (n) scene, pageant, display,
stupid, unskilled, dense, fumbling, inhumane, selfish, miserly, hard, exhibition, phenomenon, appearance,
naive, incompetent. cruel, commercial, cheap. spectacles, view, wonder; (n, v) sight,
bought: (n) crook, hook. drowned: (adj) prostrate, sunken; (v) parade. ANTONYM: (n)
burned: (adj) baked, scorched, drenched, drent. understatement.
tempered, sore, hurt, heated, greedy: (adj) avid, gluttonous, witch: (n) hag, pythoness, sorceress,
hardened, destroyed, bleak, parched, desirous, grasping, acquisitive, enchantress, magician, lamia; (v)
adust. glutton, piggish, voracious, selfish; charm, bewitch, glamour, hex, jinx.
can I eat the cake, now?" on their return to the University, to Master Andry
Musnier's, Rue Madame la Valence, when he had the two arms of the Seine and
the five bridges of the city between the Rat-Hole and the cake.%
This question, highly imprudent at the moment when Eustache put it,
aroused Mahiette's attention.
"By the way," she exclaimed, "we are forgetting the recluse! Show me the
Rat-Hole, that I may carry her her cake."
"Immediately," said Oudarde, "'tis a charity."
But this did not suit Eustache.
"Stop! my cake!" said he, rubbing both ears alternatively with his shoulders,
which, in such cases, is the supreme sign of discontent.
The three women retraced their steps, and, on arriving in the vicinity of the
Tour-Roland, Oudarde said to the other two,
"We must not all three gaze into the hole at once, for fear of alarming the
recluse. Do you two pretend to read the Dominus in the breviary, while I thrust
my nose into the aperture; the recluse knows me a little. I will give you warning
when you can approach."
She proceeded alone to the window. At the moment when she looked in, a
profound pity was depicted on all her features, and her frank, gay visage altered
its expression and color as abruptly as though it had passed from a ray of
sunlight to a ray of moonlight; her eye became humid; her mouth contracted,
like that of a person on the point of weeping. A moment later, she laid her finger
on her lips, and made a sign to Mahiette to draw near and look.
Mahiette, much touched, stepped up in silence, on tiptoe, as though
approaching the bedside of a dying person.
It was, in fact, a melancholy spectacle which presented itself to the eyes of the
two women, as they gazed through the grating of the Rat-Hole, neither stirring
nor breathing.
Thesaurus
alarming: (adj) scary, alarm, awful, discontent: (n) disapproval, (adj) fresh, cool, arid, temperate.
formidable, shocking, appalling, discontentment, disaffection, moonlight: (adj, n) moonshine; (n)
awesome, dire, horrid, horrible, displeasure, disappointment, moonbeam, moonglade, occupation,
dreadful. ANTONYMS: (adj) discontentedness, unrest; (adj) lunation, lunar month, labor; (n, v)
soothing, lovely, normal. melancholy, dissatisfied, disgruntled, work; (v) pilfer, do work; (adj)
contracted: (adj) insular, contract, discontented. ANTONYMS: (n) moonshiny.
constricted, tight, bound, close, contentment, pleasure, accord, stepped: (v) advanced, gone, stopen.
narrow-minded, confined, brief; (v) happiness; (v) content; (adj, n) happy; weeping: (adj) tearful, lachrymose,
shrunk; (adj, v) selfish. ANTONYM: (adj) contented. dolourous, dolorous; (n, v) lament,
(adj) expanded. humid: (adj) wet, moist, dank, damp, lamentation; (v) wailing; (n) sobbing,
depicted: (adj) pictured, represented, sultry, steamy, watery, wettish, tears, cry; (adj, n) howling.
graphic, delineated; (v) depict. clammy, sticky, soggy. ANTONYMS: ANTONYM: (n) celebration.
Victor Hugo 265
The cell was small, broader than it was long, with an arched ceiling, and
viewed from within, it bore a considerable resemblance to the interior of a huge
bishop's mitre. On the bare flagstones which formed the floor, in one corner, a
woman was sitting, or rather, crouching. Her chin rested on her knees, which
her crossed arms pressed forcibly to her breast. Thus doubled up, clad in a
brown sack, which enveloped her entirely in large folds, her long, gray hair
pulled over in front, falling over her face and along her legs nearly to her feet,
she presented, at the first glance, only a strange form outlined against the dark
background of the cell, a sort of dusky triangle, which the ray of daylight falling
through the opening, cut roughly into two shades, the one sombre, the other
illuminated. It was one of those spectres, half light, half shadow, such as one
beholds in dreams and in the extraordinary work of Goya, pale, motionless,
sinister, crouching over a tomb, or leaning against the grating of a prison cell.%
It was neither a woman, nor a man, nor a living being, nor a definite form; it
was a figure, a sort of vision, in which the real and the fantastic intersected each
other, like darkness and day. It was with difficulty that one distinguished,
beneath her hair which spread to the ground, a gaunt and severe profile; her
dress barely allowed the extremity of a bare foot to escape, which contracted on
the hard, cold pavement. The little of human form of which one caught a sight
beneath this envelope of mourning, caused a shudder.
That figure, which one might have supposed to be riveted to the flagstones,
appeared to possess neither movement, nor thought, nor breath. Lying, in
January, in that thin, linen sack, lying on a granite floor, without fire, in the
gloom of a cell whose oblique air-hole allowed only the cold breeze, but never
the sun, to enter from without, she did not appear to suffer or even to think. One
would have said that she had turned to stone with the cell, ice with the season.
Her hands were clasped, her eyes fixed. At first sight one took her for a spectre;
at the second, for a statue.
Nevertheless, at intervals, her blue lips half opened to admit a breath, and
trembled, but as dead and as mechanical as the leaves which the wind sweeps
aside.
Thesaurus
dusky: (adj) dark, cloudy, gloomy, ANTONYMS: (adj) fresh, rounded, nominative.
black, swarthy, dull, murky, obscure, obese. resemblance: (n) affinity, parallel,
dingy, sooty, somber. ANTONYMS: granite: (n) firmness, pluton, similarity, comparison,
(adj) light, bright, sunny, radiant, steadiness, batholite, limestone, correspondence, likeness, conformity,
clear. stonework, batholith; (adj) flint, appearance, analogy, semblance,
enveloped: (adj) convoluted, enclosed, crystal, fossil, crag. resemble. ANTONYMS: (n)
cover, bounded, Byzantine, clothed, oblique: (adj) circuitous, devious, dissimilarity, contrast.
involved, misty, swallowed, lateral, side, roundabout, slanting, sweeps: (n) sweep period.
vestured, emotionally involved. evasive, collateral, sloping, inclined, tomb: (n) sepulchre, sepulcher, crypt,
gaunt: (adj) lean, thin, cadaverous, tortuous. ANTONYMS: (adj) direct, pit, sepulture, vault, monument,
desolate, bleak, dreary, meager, level, perpendicular, parallel, overt, entomb, mausoleum; (n, v) bury; (v)
bony, angular, lanky, sullen. explicit, straight, clear, upright; (n) inter.
Nevertheless, from her dull eyes there escaped a look, an ineffable look, a
profound, lugubrious, imperturbable look, incessantly fixed upon a corner of the
cell which could not be seen from without; a gaze which seemed to fix all the
sombre thoughts of that soul in distress upon some mysterious object.%
Such was the creature who had received, from her habitation, the name of
the "recluse"; and, from her garment, the name of "the sacked nun."
The three women, for Gervaise had rejoined Mahiette and Oudarde, gazed
through the window. Their heads intercepted the feeble light in the cell, without
the wretched being whom they thus deprived of it seeming to pay any attention
to them. "Do not let us trouble her," said Oudarde, in a low voice, "she is in her
ecstasy; she is praying."
Meanwhile, Mahiette was gazing with ever-increasing anxiety at that wan,
withered, dishevelled head, and her eyes filled with tears. "This is very
singular," she murmured.
She thrust her head through the bars, and succeeded in casting a glance at the
corner where the gaze of the unhappy woman was immovably riveted.
When she withdrew her head from the window, her countenance was
inundated with tears.
"What do you call that woman?" she asked Oudarde.
Oudarde replied,
"We call her Sister Gudule."
"And I," returned Mahiette, "call her Paquette la Chantefleurie."
Then, laying her finger on her lips, she motioned to the astounded Oudarde
to thrust her head through the window and look.
Oudarde looked and beheld, in the corner where the eyes of the recluse were
fixed in that sombre ecstasy, a tiny shoe of pink satin, embroidered with a
thousand fanciful designs in gold and silver.
Gervaise looked after Oudarde, and then the three women, gazing upon the
unhappy mother, began to weep.
Thesaurus
astounded: (adj) amazed, stunned, romantic, ideal, chimerical, notional, unmovably, unbendingly,
flabbergasted, bewildered, visionary; (adj, v) fancy. unalterably, obstinately, obdurately,
dumbfounded, surprised, staggered, ANTONYMS: (adj) prosaic, real, inflexibly.
astonied, dazed, astound, aghast. realistic, plausible, normal. lugubrious: (adj) dismal, gloomy,
countenance: (n) aspect, expression, habitation: (adj, n) abode; (n) domicile, doleful, dark, funereal, melancholy,
brow, complexion; (n, v) face, residence, house, home, habitat, grievous, somber, dolorous,
sanction, support, favor; (v) allow, lodging, place, occupancy, plaintive, miserable. ANTONYM:
tolerate, uphold. ANTONYMS: (v) inhabitation, inhabitancy. (adj) cheerful.
reject, oppose, discourage, ANTONYM: (n) vacancy. withered: (adj) wizened, sear,
disapprove, prohibit. immovably: (adj) firmly, shriveled, thin, shrunken, dry, dried
fanciful: (adj) mythical, fantastic, extravagantly; (adv) unyieldingly, up, wilted, faded, wizen; (v) lame.
capricious, unreal, arbitrary, stubbornly, unwaveringly, ANTONYM: (adj) plump.
Victor Hugo 267
But neither their looks nor their tears disturbed the recluse. Her hands
remained clasped; her lips mute; her eyes fixed; and that little shoe, thus gazed
at, broke the heart of any one who knew her history.%
The three women had not yet uttered a single word; they dared not speak,
even in a low voice. This deep silence, this deep grief, this profound oblivion in
which everything had disappeared except one thing, produced upon them the
effect of the grand altar at Christmas or Easter. They remained silent, they
meditated, they were ready to kneel. It seemed to them that they were ready to
enter a church on the day of Tenebrae.
At length Gervaise, the most curious of the three, and consequently the least
sensitive, tried to make the recluse speak:
"Sister! Sister Gudule!"
She repeated this call three times, raising her voice each time. The recluse did
not move; not a word, not a glance, not a sigh, not a sign of life.
Oudarde, in her turn, in a sweeter, more caressing voice,--"Sister!" said she,
"Sister Sainte-Gudule!"
The same silence; the same immobility.
"A singular woman!" exclaimed Gervaise, "and one not to be moved by a
catapult!"
"Perchance she is deaf," said Oudarde.
"Perhaps she is blind," added Gervaise.
"Dead, perchance," returned Mahiette.
It is certain that if the soul had not already quitted this inert, sluggish,
lethargic body, it had at least retreated and concealed itself in depths whither the
perceptions of the exterior organs no longer penetrated.
"Then we must leave the cake on the window," said Oudarde; "some scamp
will take it. What shall we do to rouse her?"
Eustache, who, up to that moment had been diverted by a little carriage
drawn by a large dog, which had just passed, suddenly perceived that his three
Thesaurus
diverted: (adj) abstracted, entertained, lively, agitated, vigorous, awake, rouse: (v) provoke, excite, arouse,
pleased, inattentive, sidetracked, enthusiastic, industrious, spirited. kindle, awaken, instigate, actuate,
unfocused, preoccupied. oblivion: (n) limbo, Lethe, void, disturb, move, agitate, incite.
kneel: (v) genuflect, cringe, stoop, bob, absolution, forgiveness, ANTONYMS: (v) dampen,
cry for quarter, dip, duck, humble obliviousness, silence, remission, dishearten, suppress, douse, inhibit,
oneself; (n) kneeling, knee, pardon; (n, v) amnesty; (adj) stifle, quench.
movement. nonbeing. ANTONYMS: (n) sluggish: (adj) inert, indolent, inactive,
knew: (adj) known; (v) recognize, wist. consciousness, fame. idle, slow, torpid, slack, languid; (adj,
lethargic: (adj, v) drowsy, dozy; (adj) perchance: (adv) maybe, possibly, by n) lazy, drowsy, heavy.
languid, indolent, comatose, dull, chance, peradventure, accidentally, ANTONYMS: (adj) energetic, fast,
sleepy, torpid, slow, listless, lazy. incidentally, mayhap, chance, brisk, lively, alert, speedy,
ANTONYMS: (adj) alert, playful, haphazard, probably, haply. industrious.
conductresses were gazing at something through the window, and, curiosity

taking possession of him in his turn, he climbed upon a stone post, elevated
himself on tiptoe, and applied his fat, red face to the opening, shouting, "Mother,
let me see too!"
At the sound of this clear, fresh, ringing child's voice, the recluse trembled;
she turned her head with the sharp, abrupt movement of a steel spring, her long,
fleshless hands cast aside the hair from her brow, and she fixed upon the child,
bitter, astonished, desperate eyes. This glance was but a lightning flash.%
"Oh my God!" she suddenly exclaimed, hiding her head on her knees, and it
seemed as though her hoarse voice tore her chest as it passed from it, "do not
show me those of others!"
"Good day, madam," said the child, gravely.
Nevertheless, this shock had, so to speak, awakened the recluse. A long
shiver traversed her frame from head to foot; her teeth chattered; she half raised
her head and said, pressing her elbows against her hips, and clasping her feet in
her hands as though to warm them,
"Oh, how cold it is!"
"Poor woman!" said Oudarde, with great compassion, "would you like a little
fire?"
She shook her head in token of refusal.
"Well," resumed Oudarde, presenting her with a flagon; "here is some
hippocras which will warm you; drink it."
Again she shook her head, looked at Oudarde fixedly and replied, "Water."
Oudarde persisted,-- "No, sister, that is no beverage for January. You must
drink a little hippocras and eat this leavened cake of maize, which we have
baked for you."
She refused the cake which Mahiette offered to her, and said, "Black bread."
Thesaurus
baked: (adj) adust, parched, scorched, decreased, humble, inferior, lessened, maize: (n) Indian corn, Zea Mays,
baken, heated, driest, tempered, low, sunken, undignified, lowered. lemon, gamboge, lemon yellow,
sunbaked, seared, arid, drier. flagon: (n) jar, flask, bottle, pitcher, cereal, cereal grass, grain, yellowness,
ANTONYMS: (adj) unbaked, humid. ewer, cruse, vessel, decanter, carboy, mealies; (adj) maize yellow.
beverage: (n) potable, alcohol, mug, carafe. shiver: (n, v) shake, tremble, shudder,
refresher, potion, drinkable, potation, fleshless: (adj) scraggy, weedy, lean, fragment, thrill, splinter, tingle; (v)
draught, draft, libation; (v) broth, chapless. quake, shatter, palpitate; (adj, v)
soup. ANTONYM: (n) solid. hoarse: (adj) gruff, husky, raucous, break.
elevated: (adj) exalted, towering, grating, strident, guttural, rough, token: (n) memento, souvenir, note,
noble, lofty, grand, great, majestic, throaty; (v) coarse; (adj, v) hollow, keepsake, sign, relic, stamp, signal,
tall, elated, magnanimous; (adj, v) sepulchral. ANTONYMS: (adj) indication; (adj) nominal; (n, v) trace.
steep. ANTONYMS: (adj) base, lowly, smooth, mellow, velvety, high. ANTONYM: (adj) great.
Victor Hugo 269
"Come," said Gervaise, seized in her turn with an impulse of charity, and
unfastening her woolen cloak, "here is a cloak which is a little warmer than
yours."%
She refused the cloak as she had refused the flagon and the cake, and replied,
"A sack."
"But," resumed the good Oudarde, "you must have perceived to some extent,
that yesterday was a festival."
"I do perceive it," said the recluse; "'tis two days now since I have had any
water in my crock."
She added, after a silence, "'Tis a festival, I am forgotten. People do well.
Why should the world think of me, when I do not think of it? Cold charcoal
makes cold ashes."
And as though fatigued with having said so much, she dropped her head on
her knees again. The simple and charitable Oudarde, who fancied that she
understood from her last words that she was complaining of the cold, replied
innocently, "Then you would like a little fire?"
"Fire!" said the sacked nun, with a strange accent; "and will you also make a
little for the poor little one who has been beneath the sod for these fifteen years?"
Every limb was trembling, her voice quivered, her eyes flashed, she had
raised herself upon her knees; suddenly she extended her thin, white hand
towards the child, who was regarding her with a look of astonishment. "Take
away that child!" she cried. "The Egyptian woman is about to pass by."
Then she fell face downward on the earth, and her forehead struck the stone,
with the sound of one stone against another stone. The three women thought her
dead. A moment later, however, she moved, and they beheld her drag herself,
on her knees and elbows, to the corner where the little shoe was. Then they
dared not look; they no longer saw her; but they heard a thousand kisses and a
thousand sighs, mingled with heartrending cries, and dull blows like those of a
head in contact with a wall. Then, after one of these blows, so violent that all
three of them staggered, they heard no more.
Thesaurus
charcoal: (n, v) coke; (n) coal, fusain, fatigued: (adj) tired, weary, beat, intentionally, knowingly, unkindly,
wood coal, anthracite, greyness; (adj) worn, tired out, jaded, spent, worn suspiciously, offensively,
soot, smut, sloe; (v) black lead, pastel. out, done in, fagged, run-down. deliberately.
downward: (adv) underneath, under, ANTONYMS: (adj) refreshed, alert, limb: (n) arm, branch, member, bough,
below, downwards, downwardly, lively, energized, energetic. extremity, offshoot, part, leg, wing,
beneath, down below; (adj) downcast, innocently: (adv) innocuously, appendage, edge.
sloping, depressed, downright. ingenuously, inoffensively, naively, unfastening: (n) loosening, untying.
ANTONYMS: (adv) up; (adj) rising. purely, simplely, artlessly, warmer: (n) stove, oilstove, deicer,
fancied: (adj) unreal, chimerical, unsophisticatedly, blamelessly, defroster, brasier, radiator, brazier,
fictional, fanciful, fictitious, spotlessly, cleanly. ANTONYMS: warming, warmed, demister, gas
fabricated, preferred, assumed, (adv) artfully, meaningfully, heater.
illusory, imagined, ideal. indecently, immorally, illicitly,
"Can she have killed herself?" said Gervaise, venturing to pass her head
through the air-hole. "Sister! Sister Gudule!"
"Sister Gudule!" repeated Oudarde.%
"Ah! good heavens! she no longer moves!" resumed Gervaise; "is she dead?
Gudule! Gudule!"
Mahiette, choked to such a point that she could not speak, made an effort.
"Wait," said she. Then bending towards the window, "Paquette!" she said,
"Paquette le Chantefleurie!"
A child who innocently blows upon the badly ignited fuse of a bomb, and
makes it explode in his face, is no more terrified than was Mahiette at the effect
of that name, abruptly launched into the cell of Sister Gudule.
The recluse trembled all over, rose erect on her bare feet, and leaped at the
window with eyes so glaring that Mahiette and Oudarde, and the other woman
and the child recoiled even to the parapet of the quay.
Meanwhile, the sinister face of the recluse appeared pressed to the grating of
the air-hole. "Oh! oh!" she cried, with an appalling laugh; "'tis the Egyptian who
is calling me!"
At that moment, a scene which was passing at the pillory caught her wild
eye. Her brow contracted with horror, she stretched her two skeleton arms from
her cell, and shrieked in a voice which resembled a death-rattle, "So 'tis thou once
more, daughter of Egypt! 'Tis thou who callest me, stealer of children! Well! Be
thou accursed! accursed! accursed! accursed!"
Thesaurus
bending: (n) bow, bend, deflection, fizzle, confirm, defuse, collapse. ignited: (adj) kindled, enkindled,
deflexion, refraction, flexure, crook; feet: (v) legs, pegs, pins, trotters; (n) flaming, ablaze, fiery; (adj, v)
(adj) flexible, supple, winding, pliant. foots, ft, fete, meter, rescue. burning; (v) having life, flowing,
ANTONYM: (adj) stiff. fuse: (v) amalgamate, blend, melt, active, being alive, laving.
choked: (adj) clogged, smothered, coalesce, merge, compound, mix, parapet: (n) bulwark, breastwork,
congested, annoyed, high-strung, unite, thaw, dissolve; (adj, v) run. fortification, railing, bastion,
strained, neurotic, tense, angry, ANTONYMS: (v) defuse, disconnect. battlement, wall, banister, handrail,
anxious, insecure. glaring: (adj) conspicuous, bright, earthwork; (v) sunk fence.
explode: (v) erupt, detonate, blatant, egregious, obvious, plain, stealer: (n) thief, robber, burglar,
discharge, blow up, crack, fulminate, flaming, garish, crying, gross, glary. cracksman, larcener, larcenist, crook,
break, burst forth, disprove, blast; (n, ANTONYMS: (adj) soft, plagiarist, embezzler, ghoul, lifter.
v) burst. ANTONYMS: (v) implode, inconspicuous, dull, minor.
Victor Hugo 271
CHAPTER IV
A TEAR FOR A DROP OF WATER
These words were, so to speak, the point of union of two scenes, which had,
up to that time, been developed in parallel lines at the same moment, each on its
particular theatre; one, that which the reader has just perused, in the Rat-Hole;
the other, which he is about to read, on the ladder of the pillory. The first had for
witnesses only the three women with whom the reader has just made
acquaintance; the second had for spectators all the public which we have seen
above, collecting on the Place de Grève, around the pillory and the gibbet.%
That crowd which the four sergeants posted at nine o'clock in the morning at
the four corners of the pillory had inspired with the hope of some sort of an
execution, no doubt, not a hanging, but a whipping, a cropping of ears,
something, in short,-- that crowd had increased so rapidly that the four
policemen, too closely besieged, had had occasion to "press" it, as the expression
then ran, more than once, by sound blows of their whips, and the haunches of
their horses.
This populace, disciplined to waiting for public executions, did not manifest
very much impatience. It amused itself with watching the pillory, a very simple
sort of monument, composed of a cube of masonry about six feet high and
hollow in the interior. A very steep staircase, of unhewn stone, which was called
Thesaurus
acquaintance: (n) connection, friend, disciplined: (adj) corrected, regular, monument: (n) headstone, cenotaph,
acquaintanceship, mate, awareness, orderly, under control, chastised, tombstone, tablet, shrine, slab,
associate, buddy, friendship, tidy, gentle, tamed, methodical, gravestone, landmark, statue; (adj, n)
intercourse, companion; (n, v) cultivated, qualified. ANTONYMS: column; (n, v) record.
knowledge. ANTONYMS: (n) (adj) undisciplined, disordered, unhewn: (adj) unwrought, unlabored,
ignorance, inexperience, haphazard, defiant. unpolished, rude, rough, shapen,
unfamiliarity, animosity, enemy. impatience: (n) annoyance, eagerness, unblown, unboiled, unconcocted,
besieged: (adj) enclosed, under anger, intolerance, restlessness, uncooked, unfashioned.
pressure, under attack, targeted, fidget, nervousness, fidgetiness, whipping: (n) flagellation, beating,
struggling, stressed, under fire, enthusiasm, edginess; (adj) thrashing, licking, lashing, flogging,
fraught, embattled, careworn, nonendurance. ANTONYMS: (n) overcasting, debacle, slaughter,
harassed. calmness, endurance, apathy. overlocking; (adj) snappy.
by distinction "the ladder," led to the upper platform, upon which was visible a
horizontal wheel of solid oak. The victim was bound upon this wheel, on his
knees, with his hands behind his back. A wooden shaft, which set in motion a
capstan concealed in the interior of the little edifice, imparted a rotatory motion
to the wheel, which always maintained its horizontal position, and in this
manner presented the face of the condemned man to all quarters of the square in
succession. This was what was called "turning" a criminal.%
As the reader perceives, the pillory of the Grève was far from presenting all
the recreations of the pillory of the Halles. Nothing architectural, nothing
monumental. No roof to the iron cross, no octagonal lantern, no frail, slender
columns spreading out on the edge of the roof into capitals of acanthus leaves
and flowers, no waterspouts of chimeras and monsters, on carved woodwork, no
fine sculpture, deeply sunk in the stone.
They were forced to content themselves with those four stretches of rubble
work, backed with sandstone, and a wretched stone gibbet, meagre and bare, on
one side.
The entertainment would have been but a poor one for lovers of Gothic
architecture. It is true that nothing was ever less curious on the score of
architecture than the worthy gapers of the Middle Ages, and that they cared very
little for the beauty of a pillory.
The victim finally arrived, bound to the tail of a cart, and when he had been
hoisted upon the platform, where he could be seen from all points of the Place,
bound with cords and straps upon the wheel of the pillory, a prodigious hoot,
mingled with laughter and acclamations, burst forth upon the Place. They had
recognized Quasimodo.
It was he, in fact. The change was singular. Pilloried on the very place
where, on the day before, he had been saluted, acclaimed, and proclaimed Pope
and Prince of Fools, in the cortege of the Duke of Egypt, the King of Thunes, and
the Emperor of Galilee! One thing is certain, and that is, that there was not a soul
in the crowd, not even himself, though in turn triumphant and the sufferer, who
Thesaurus
acclaimed: (adj) celebrated, well- meagre: (adj) exiguous, paltry, rotatory: (adj) revolving, rotational,
known, reputable, renowned, noted, necessitous, miserable, marginal, peritropal, peristrephic, circuitous,
famous, established, distinguished. meagerly, gaunt, emaciated, revoluble; (n) turning.
capstan: (v) windlass, derrick; (n) inadequate, deficient, beggarly. rubble: (n) junk, detritus, rubbish,
turret, cathead. ANTONYM: (adj) ample. wreckage, garbage, dust; (adj, n)
frail: (adj, v) weak, feeble; (adj) fragile, monumental: (adj) monstrous, waste, trash; (adj) refuse,
flimsy, delicate, breakable, rickety, immense, great, majestic, grand, offscourings, orts.
slender, light, slim; (v) faint. tremendous, large, enormous, sandstone: (n) gritstone, bluestone,
ANTONYMS: (adj) substantial, monolithic, mammoth, vast. firestone, gritrock, greensand,
robust, tough, fit, healthy, hearty, ANTONYMS: (adj) small, minor, tiny. brownstone, holystone, arenaceous
perfect, weighty, well, capable, proclaimed: (adj) announced, rock, stonework, building material,
sturdy. indictive, declared publicly. brickwork.
Victor Hugo 273
set forth this combination clearly in his thought. Gringoire and his philosophy
were missing at this spectacle.%
Soon Michel Noiret, sworn trumpeter to the king, our lord, imposed silence
on the louts, and proclaimed the sentence, in accordance with the order and
command of monsieur the provost. Then he withdrew behind the cart, with his
men in livery surcoats.
Quasimodo, impassible, did not wince. All resistance had been rendered
impossible to him by what was then called, in the style of the criminal
chancellery, "the vehemence and firmness of the bonds" which means that the
thongs and chains probably cut into his flesh; moreover, it is a tradition of jail
and wardens, which has not been lost, and which the handcuffs still preciously
preserve among us, a civilized, gentle, humane people (the galleys and the
guillotine in parentheses).
He had allowed himself to be led, pushed, carried, lifted, bound, and bound
again. Nothing was to be seen upon his countenance but the astonishment of a
savage or an idiot. He was known to be deaf; one might have pronounced him to
be blind.
They placed him on his knees on the circular plank; he made no resistance.
They removed his shirt and doublet as far as his girdle; he allowed them to have
their way. They entangled him under a fresh system of thongs and buckles; he
allowed them to bind and buckle him. Only from time to time he snorted noisily,
like a calf whose head is hanging and bumping over the edge of a butcher's cart.
"The dolt," said Jehan Frollo of the Mill, to his friend Robin Poussepain (for
the two students had followed the culprit, as was to have been expected), "he
understands no more than a cockchafer shut up in a box!"
There was wild laughter among the crowd when they beheld Quasimodo's
hump, his camel's breast, his callous and hairy shoulders laid bare. During this
gayety, a man in the livery of the city, short of stature and robust of mien,
mounted the platform and placed himself near the victim. His name speedily
circulated among the spectators. It was Master Pierrat Torterue, official torturer
to the Châtelet.
Thesaurus
cockchafer: (n) May bug, chafer, impassible: (adj) impassive, dull, trumpeter: (n) bugler, harper, marshal,
beetle, summer chafer, May beetle, apathetic, rocky, bloodless, crier, flag bearer, cornetist, fifer,
common cockchafer, bug. unmoved, impatible. fiddler, Cygnus buccinator, wader;
culprit: (adj, n) convict; (n) delinquent, preciously: (adv) expensively, (v) charlatan.
accused, malefactor, perpetrator, precious, rarely, pricelessly, vehemence: (n) force, violence, fury,
transgressor, prisoner, sinner, belovedly, goldenly, finely, richly, passion, eagerness, strength,
offender; (adj) guilty, felon. darlingly, petly, artificially. impetuosity, enthusiasm, fierceness,
galleys: (n) crank, treadmill, stature: (n) height, altitude, standing, heat, fervor. ANTONYMS: (n)
punishment. tallness, prestige, figure, growth, indifference, meekness, serenity.
handcuffs: (n) fetters, cuffs, cuff, status, quality, rank, greatness. wince: (v) shrink, cringe, quail, cower,
chains, handcuff, manacles, manacle, torturer: (n) flogger, oppressor, jump, contract; (n, v) flinch, start,
bonds, bond, darbies, iron. scourger. winch; (adj) bear ill; (n) sit on thorns.
He began by depositing on an angle of the pillory a black hour-glass, the

upper lobe of which was filled with red sand, which it allowed to glide into the
lower receptacle; then he removed his parti-colored surtout, and there became
visible, suspended from his right hand, a thin and tapering whip of long, white,
shining, knotted, plaited thongs, armed with metal nails. With his left hand, he
negligently folded back his shirt around his right arm, to the very armpit.%
In the meantime, Jehan Frollo, elevating his curly blonde head above the
crowd (he had mounted upon the shoulders of Robin Poussepain for the
purpose), shouted: "Come and look, gentle ladies and men! they are going to
peremptorily flagellate Master Quasimodo, the bellringer of my brother,
monsieur the archdeacon of Josas, a knave of oriental architecture, who has a
back like a dome, and legs like twisted columns!"
And the crowd burst into a laugh, especially the boys and young girls.
At length the torturer stamped his foot. The wheel began to turn.
Quasimodo wavered beneath his bonds. The amazement which was suddenly
depicted upon his deformed face caused the bursts of laughter to redouble
around him.
All at once, at the moment when the wheel in its revolution presented to
Master Pierrat, the humped back of Quasimodo, Master Pierrat raised his arm;
the fine thongs whistled sharply through the air, like a handful of adders, and
fell with fury upon the wretch's shoulders.
Quasimodo leaped as though awakened with a start. He began to
understand. He writhed in his bonds; a violent contraction of surprise and pain
distorted the muscles of his face, but he uttered not a single sigh. He merely
turned his head backward, to the right, then to the left, balancing it as a bull does
who has been stung in the flanks by a gadfly.
A second blow followed the first, then a third, and another and another, and
still others. The wheel did not cease to turn, nor the blows to rain down.
Thesaurus
elevating: (adj) inspiring, exhilarating. Olfactory lobe, mesolobe, division, positively, imperatively, flatly,
flagellate: (v) lash, flog, whip, thrash, flap, projection, branch, wing, dogmatically, magisterially,
lick, cane, beat, trounce, cob; (n) lobular, loma. commandingly, imperiously,
dinoflagellate, protozoon. muscles: (n) sinew, strength. authoritatively, decidedly, decisively.
gadfly: (n) botfly, horsefly, pest, cuss, negligently: (adv) inattentively, receptacle: (n) box, holder, case, torus,
blighter, tormentor, persecutor, neglectfully, carelessly, can, outlet, pocket, pyx, beehive,
nuisance, chap, pesterer, clegg. thoughtlessly, remissly, cuspidor, pix.
glide: (adj, n, v) slide; (n, v) coast, slip; nonchalantly, slackly, recklessly, tapering: (adj) narrow, narrowing,
(v) float, run, fly, flow, drift, lapse, unmindfully, sloppily, unthinkingly. pointed, angustation, coarctation,
slink, skid. ANTONYMS: (v) lurch, ANTONYMS: (adv) thoroughly, conical, dwindling, constricting,
hurtle, flounder, sink. attentively, responsibly, seriously. constrictive, decreasing; (n)
lobe: (n) lobule, Ventral lobe, peremptorily: (adv) absolutely, crowning.
Victor Hugo 275
Soon the blood burst forth, and could be seen trickling in a thousand threads
down the hunchback's black shoulders; and the slender thongs, in their rotatory
motion which rent the air, sprinkled drops of it upon the crowd.%
Quasimodo had resumed, to all appearance, his first imperturbability. He
had at first tried, in a quiet way and without much outward movement, to break
his bonds. His eye had been seen to light up, his muscles to stiffen, his members
to concentrate their force, and the straps to stretch. The effort was powerful,
prodigious, desperate; but the provost's seasoned bonds resisted. They cracked,
and that was all. Quasimodo fell back exhausted. Amazement gave way, on his
features, to a sentiment of profound and bitter discouragement. He closed his
single eye, allowed his head to droop upon his breast, and feigned death.
From that moment forth, he stirred no more. Nothing could force a
movement from him. Neither his blood, which did not cease to flow, nor the
blows which redoubled in fury, nor the wrath of the torturer, who grew excited
himself and intoxicated with the execution, nor the sound of the horrible thongs,
more sharp and whistling than the claws of scorpions.
At length a bailiff from the Châtelet clad in black, mounted on a black horse,
who had been stationed beside the ladder since the beginning of the execution,
extended his ebony wand towards the hour-glass. The torturer stopped. The
wheel stopped. Quasimodo's eye opened slowly.
The scourging was finished. Two lackeys of the official torturer bathed the
bleeding shoulders of the patient, anointed them with some unguent which
immediately closed all the wounds, and threw upon his back a sort of yellow
vestment, in cut like a chasuble. In the meanwhile, Pierrat Torterue allowed the
thongs, red and gorged with blood, to drip upon the pavement.
All was not over for Quasimodo. He had still to undergo that hour of pillory
which Master Florian Barbedienne had so judiciously added to the sentence of
Messire Robert d'Estouteville; all to the greater glory of the old physiological and
psychological play upon words of Jean de Cumène, Surdus absurdus: a deaf man
is absurd.
Thesaurus
chasuble: (n) Geneva gown frock, coolness, self-possession, serenity, logically, rationally, sensibly,
robe, cassock, dalmatic, gown, calmness, imperturbableness, soundly. ANTONYMS: (adv)
pallium, scapulary, scarf, surplice, tranquility, aplomb, imperturbation, foolishly, injudiciously, unwisely,
tunicle, cope. composedness, inirritability. illogically, imprudently.
droop: (adj, v) decline; (v) dangle, wilt, intoxicated: (adj) drunken, drunk, scourging: (n) flagellation.
hang, flag, sink, slump, loll, collapse; inebriate, tipsy, elated, stimulated, unguent: (n) balm, salve, cream,
(n, v) sag, pine. ANTONYMS: (v) rise, intoxicate, infatuated, fuddled, unction, balsam, cerate, arnica,
bloom. loaded, plastered. ANTONYM: (adj) chrisom, emollient, chrism, liniment.
gorged: (adj) sated, full, stuffed, sober. vestment: (n, v) dress, vesture,
congested, replete, satisfied, bursting, judiciously: (adv) prudently, clothing, apparel; (n) chasuble,
surfeited; (v) ready to burst. sagaciously, shrewdly, discreetly, garment, alb, cassock, surplice, garb,
imperturbability: (n) composure, discerningly, politically, cautiously, attire.
So the hour-glass was turned over once more, and they left the hunchback
fastened to the plank, in order that justice might be accomplished to the very
end.%
The populace, especially in the Middle Ages, is in society what the child is in
the family. As long as it remains in its state of primitive ignorance, of moral and
intellectual minority, it can be said of it as of the child,
'Tis the pitiless age.
We have already shown that Quasimodo was generally hated, for more than
one good reason, it is true. There was hardly a spectator in that crowd who had
not or who did not believe that he had reason to complain of the malevolent
hunchback of Notre-Dame. The joy at seeing him appear thus in the pillory had
been universal; and the harsh punishment which he had just suffered, and the
pitiful condition in which it had left him, far from softening the populace had
rendered its hatred more malicious by arming it with a touch of mirth.
Hence, the "public prosecution" satisfied, as the bigwigs of the law still
express it in their jargon, the turn came of a thousand private vengeances. Here,
as in the Grand Hall, the women rendered themselves particularly prominent.
All cherished some rancor against him, some for his malice, others for his
ugliness. The latter were the most furious.
"Oh! mask of Antichrist!" said one.
"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?"
"But 'tis the devil who rings the Angelus!"
"Oh! the deaf man! the one-eyed creature! the hunchback! the monster!"
Thesaurus
arming: (n) arms, militarisation, loving, good, benign. impressive.
mobilization, militarization, malice: (n) spite, animosity, enmity, softening: (adj) emollient, salving,
mobilisation, armed, outfitting, venom, ill will, hatred, malevolence, relaxing; (v) soften; (adj, n) soothing;
equipping. cruelty, envy, hate, spleen. (n) maceration, mitigation, easement,
hunch: (n, v) hump; (n) intuition, ANTONYMS: (n) goodwill, mollification, inteneration,
suspicion, foreboding, feeling, benevolence, affection, goodness. encouragement.
premonition, presentiment, bunch, pitiful: (adj, n) abject; (adj) pathetic, spectator: (n) eyewitness, observer,
inkling; (v) bend, crouch. lamentable, piteous, contemptible, onlooker, witness, audience,
malevolent: (adj) malicious, malign, miserable, distressing, mean, beholder, viewer, watcher,
hateful, bitter, malefic, nasty, spiteful, wretched, poor, sad. ANTONYMS: spectators, looker, ogler.
vicious, virulent, baleful, unkind. (adj) generous, heartwarming, ANTONYM: (n) player.
ANTONYMS: (adj) kind, merciful, admirable, cheerful, fine, happy,
Victor Hugo 277
"A face to make a woman miscarry better than all the drugs and medicines!"
And the two scholars, Jehan du Moulin, and Robin Poussepain, sang at the
top of their lungs, the ancient refrain,
"Une hart
Pour le pendard!
Un fagot
Pour le magot!"
A thousand other insults rained down upon him, and hoots and
imprecations, and laughter, and now and then, stones.%
Quasimodo was deaf but his sight was clear, and the public fury was no less
energetically depicted on their visages than in their words. Moreover, the blows
from the stones explained the bursts of laughter.
At first he held his ground. But little by little that patience which had borne
up under the lash of the torturer, yielded and gave way before all these stings of
insects. The bull of the Asturias who has been but little moved by the attacks of
the picador grows irritated with the dogs and banderilleras.
He first cast around a slow glance of hatred upon the crowd. But bound as he
was, his glance was powerless to drive away those flies which were stinging his
wound. Then he moved in his bonds, and his furious exertions made the ancient
wheel of the pillory shriek on its axle. All this only increased the derision and
hooting.
Then the wretched man, unable to break his collar, like that of a chained wild
beast, became tranquil once more; only at intervals a sigh of rage heaved the
hollows of his chest. There was neither shame nor redness on his face. He was
too far from the state of society, and too near the state of nature to know what
shame was. Moreover, with such a degree of deformity, is infamy a thing that
can be felt? But wrath, hatred, despair, slowly lowered over that hideous visage
a cloud which grew ever more and more sombre, ever more and more charged
Thesaurus
axle: (n) pole, arbor, hinge, shaft, sluggishly, passively. flop, break down, go wrong, backfire,
pivot, bobbin, mandrel, swivel, infamy: (n) dishonor, disrepute, fall through, miss, lose.
axletree, spindle, journal. ignominy, notoriety, shame, picador: (n) equestrian, horseman,
chained: (adj) in chains, enchained, opprobrium, reproach, stain, horseback rider, bullfighter.
bound. discredit, baseness; (adj, n) pollution. redness: (n) red, blush, glow, crimson,
energetically: (adv) vigorously, ANTONYMS: (n) fame, virtue, honor, carmine, catarrh, cellulitis, cerise,
strongly, actively, briskly, lustily, obscurity, pride. mastoiditis, colitis, enteritis.
forcefully, lively, forcibly, lash: (n, v) beat, chastise, scourge, shriek: (n, v) screech, cry, shout, call,
powerfully, spiritedly, strenuously. goad; (v) flog, bind, batter; (adj, v) howl, yell, yowl, screak; (v) bellow,
ANTONYMS: (adv) idly, quietly, strap, tie, lace; (n) hit. ANTONYMS: caterwaul, shrill. ANTONYM: (v)
lifelessly, resignedly, indifferently, (v) unlash, untie. sigh.
feebly, wearily, languorously, lazily, miscarry: (v) fail, founder, abort, fall, stings: (adj) stung.
with electricity, which burst forth in a thousand lightning flashes from the eye of
the cyclops.%
Nevertheless, that cloud cleared away for a moment, at the passage of a mule
which traversed the crowd, bearing a priest. As far away as he could see that
mule and that priest, the poor victim's visage grew gentler. The fury which had
contracted it was followed by a strange smile full of ineffable sweetness,
gentleness, and tenderness. In proportion as the priest approached, that smile
became more clear, more distinct, more radiant. It was like the arrival of a
Saviour, which the unhappy man was greeting. But as soon as the mule was
near enough to the pillory to allow of its rider recognizing the victim, the priest
dropped his eyes, beat a hasty retreat, spurred on rigorously, as though in haste
to rid himself of humiliating appeals, and not at all desirous of being saluted and
recognized by a poor fellow in such a predicament.
This priest was Archdeacon Dom Claude Frollo.
The cloud descended more blackly than ever upon Quasimodo's brow. The
smile was still mingled with it for a time, but was bitter, discouraged, profoundly
sad.
Time passed on. He had been there at least an hour and a half, lacerated,
maltreated, mocked incessantly, and almost stoned.
All at once he moved again in his chains with redoubled despair, which made
the whole framework that bore him tremble, and, breaking the silence which he
had obstinately preserved hitherto, he cried in a hoarse and furious voice, which
resembled a bark rather than a human cry, and which was drowned in the noise
of the hoots-- "Drink!"
This exclamation of distress, far from exciting compassion, only added
amusement to the good Parisian populace who surrounded the ladder, and who,
it must be confessed, taken in the mass and as a multitude, was then no less cruel
and brutal than that horrible tribe of robbers among whom we have already
conducted the reader, and which was simply the lower stratum of the populace.
Not a voice was raised around the unhappy victim, except to jeer at his thirst. It
is certain that at that moment he was more grotesque and repulsive than pitiable,
Thesaurus
blackly: (adv) darkly, threateningly, acknowledgment, accost, hello, hullo, harmed, molested, persecuted,
somberly, dismally, murkily, bleakly, nod; (v) salute. ANTONYM: (n) injured.
shamefully, obscurely, dingily, goodbye. recognizing: (v) recognize,
wickedly, sinisterly. jeer: (n, v) gibe, flout, deride, mock, acknowledge, recognise; (adj)
desirous: (adj) wistful, avid, ridicule, hiss, taunt, scoff, laugh at, conscious, respectful; (n) observation.
ambitious, greedy, longing, eager, barrack; (n) mockery. ANTONYMS: stoned: (adj) intoxicated, drugged,
hungry, covetous, envious, agog; (adj, (v) cheer, applaud. tight, zonked, drunken, inebriate,
v) willing. ANTONYMS: (adj) lacerated: (adj) torn, blasted, mangled, inebriated, ecstatic, rabid, high,
undesirous, reluctant, undesiring, hurt; (adj, prep) rent. unconscious.
unconcerned. maltreated: (adj) mistreated, battered, stratum: (n) layer, bed, level, seam,
greeting: (n) welcome, salutation, aggrieved, assaulted, physically floor, ply, stage, story, horizon, class,
address, greet, compliments, abused, beaten, downtrodden, plane.
Victor Hugo 279
with his face purple and dripping, his eye wild, his mouth foaming with rage
and pain, and his tongue lolling half out. It must also be stated that if a
charitable soul of a bourgeois or bourgeoise, in the rabble, had attempted to carry
a glass of water to that wretched creature in torment, there reigned around the
infamous steps of the pillory such a prejudice of shame and ignominy, that it
would have sufficed to repulse the good Samaritan.%
At the expiration of a few moments, Quasimodo cast a desperate glance
upon the crowd, and repeated in a voice still more heartrending: "Drink!"
And all began to laugh.
"Drink this!" cried Robin Poussepain, throwing in his face a sponge which
had been soaked in the gutter. "There, you deaf villain, I'm your debtor."
A woman hurled a stone at his head,
"That will teach you to wake us up at night with your peal of a dammed
soul."
"He, good, my son!" howled a cripple, making an effort to reach him with his
crutch, "will you cast any more spells on us from the top of the towers of Notre-
Dame?"
"Here's a drinking cup!" chimed in a man, flinging a broken jug at his breast.
"'Twas you that made my wife, simply because she passed near you, give birth to
a child with two heads!"
"And my cat bring forth a kitten with six paws!" yelped an old crone,
launching a brick at him.
"Drink!" repeated Quasimodo panting, and for the third time.
At that moment he beheld the crowd give way. A young girl, fantastically
dressed, emerged from the throng. She was accompanied by a little white goat
with gilded horns, and carried a tambourine in her hand.
Quasimodo's eyes sparkled. It was the gypsy whom he had attempted to
carry off on the preceding night, a misdeed for which he was dimly conscious
that he was being punished at that very moment; which was not in the least the
Thesaurus
crone: (n) beldam, beldame, hag, marvelously, extraordinarily, (v) teem, flower, fructify, bear fruit,
grandmother, old woman, crony, strangely, queerly, magnificently, farrow, EAN.
witch. grotesquely, whimsically, peculiarly. misdeed: (n) misbehavior,
crutch: (n, v) support; (n) staff, groin, ANTONYMS: (adv) plausibly, transgression, misconduct, crime,
stick, prop, ankle, stilt, crutches, abysmally. fault, offense, devilry, trespass,
zigzag, sickle, scythe. ignominy: (n) disgrace, dishonor, misdemeanor, sin, wrong.
expiration: (n) ending, end, shame, reproach, contempt, repulse: (n, v) rebuff, defeat; (v) repel,
conclusion, finish, close, exhalation, disrepute, degradation, discredit, nauseate, disgust, drive back, revolt,
termination, exit, death, lapse, expiry. scandal; (adj, n) odium; (adj) reject, refuse, beat back; (n) refusal.
ANTONYM: (n) beginning. opprobrium. ANTONYMS: (n) ANTONYMS: (v) attract, accept,
fantastically: (adv) wonderfully, success, glorification, pride. delight, yield, please; (n, v) welcome.
fabulously, tremendously, kitten: (n) cat, foal, kitty, colt, foetus;
case, since he was being chastised only for the misfortune of being deaf, and of
having been judged by a deaf man. He doubted not that she had come to wreak
her vengeance also, and to deal her blow like the rest.%
He beheld her, in fact, mount the ladder rapidly. Wrath and spite suffocate
him. He would have liked to make the pillory crumble into ruins, and if the
lightning of his eye could have dealt death, the gypsy would have been reduced
to powder before she reached the platform.
She approached, without uttering a syllable, the victim who writhed in a vain
effort to escape her, and detaching a gourd from her girdle, she raised it gently
to the parched lips of the miserable man.
Then, from that eye which had been, up to that moment, so dry and burning,
a big tear was seen to fall, and roll slowly down that deformed visage so long
contracted with despair. It was the first, in all probability, that the unfortunate
man had ever shed.
Meanwhile, be had forgotten to drink. The gypsy made her little pout, from
impatience, and pressed the spout to the tusked month of Quasimodo, with a
smile.
He drank with deep draughts. His thirst was burning.
When he had finished, the wretch protruded his black lips, no doubt, with
the object of kissing the beautiful hand which had just succoured him. But the
young girl, who was, perhaps, somewhat distrustful, and who remembered the
violent attempt of the night, withdrew her hand with the frightened gesture of a
child who is afraid of being bitten by a beast.
Then the poor deaf man fixed on her a look full of reproach and
inexpressible sadness.
It would have been a touching spectacle anywhere,-- this beautiful, fresh,
pure, and charming girl, who was at the same time so weak, thus hastening to
the relief of so much misery, deformity, and malevolence. On the pillory, the
spectacle was sublime.
Thesaurus
chastised: (adj) corrected. stepping up. (adj) quenched, humid.
detaching: (adj) peeling, disengaging, inexpressible: (adj, v) indescribable; protruded: (adj) extant, outstanding.
shedding; (n) division. (adj) ineffable, unspeakable, suffocate: (v) strangle, stifle, smother,
draughts: (n) solitaire, go bang, unutterable, indefinable, asphyxiate, throttle, gag, extinguish,
backgammon, misere chess, chess, incommunicable, nameless, untold, drown, die, quench; (adj) suffocating.
dominos, board game. beyond description, unexpressible, thirst: (n, v) hunger, lust, wish; (n)
gourd: (n) bottle gourd, pumpkin, undefinable. ANTONYM: (adj) longing, yen, craving, hankering,
melon, Lagenaria, gord, vine, noddle, definite. dryness, appetite; (v) starve, crave.
exploding cucumber, fruit, flask, parched: (adj, n) thirsty; (adj) arid, ANTONYM: (n) dislike.
calabash tree. adust, torrid, barren, desiccated, wreak: (v) bring, work, avenge,
hastening: (n) quickening, speed, dehydrated, scorched, baked, impose, make, make for, play, cause,
hurrying, speeding up, faster, fast, withered, shriveled. ANTONYMS: fetch; (n) wretch; (adj) tyrannize.
Victor Hugo 281
The very populace were captivated by it, and began to clap their hands,
crying,
"Noel! Noel!"%
It was at that moment that the recluse caught sight, from the window of her
bole, of the gypsy on the pillory, and hurled at her her sinister imprecation,
"Accursed be thou, daughter of Egypt! Accursed! accursed!"
Thesaurus
bole: (adj, n) trunk; (n) tree trunk, interested, exposed, defenseless, execration, cuss, blasphemy, bane,
shaft, body, clay; (adj) main part, culpable; (v) seize, get. ANTONYM: ban, oath, prayer, malison,
major part, skeleton greater part, (adj) loose. denunciation.
hull, hulk, principal part. crying: (adj, v) exigent, instant, sight: (n, v) vision, glimpse, show,
captivated: (adj) spellbound, charmed, pressing, urgent; (adj) insistent, aspect, appearance; (v) aim, spot, see;
enchanted, absorbed, enthralled, clamant, imperative, blatant; (n) (n) view, prospect, scene.
engrossed, rapt, enamored, weeping; (v) weep; (adj, n) sniveling. sinister: (adj) dark, forbidding, black,
delighted, beguiled, infatuated. daughter: (n) child, son, maiden, menacing, wicked, baleful,
ANTONYMS: (adj) unenthusiastic, young woman, daughterly, lass, threatening, malevolent, malign,
bored. unmarried woman, damsel, miss, inauspicious, vicious. ANTONYMS:
caught: (adj) fixed, guilty, missy, virgin. (adj) innocent, hospitable, good,
accomplished, wedged, trapped, imprecation: (n) curse, anathema, normal, favorable.
Victor Hugo 283
CHAPTER V
END OF THE STORY OF THE CAKE
La Esmeralda turned pale and descended from the pillory, staggering as she
went. The voice of the recluse still pursued her,--
"Descend! descend! Thief of Egypt! thou shalt ascend it once more!"
"The sacked nun is in one of her tantrums," muttered the populace; and that
was the end of it. For that sort of woman was feared; which rendered them
sacred. People did not then willingly attack one who prayed day and night.
The hour had arrived for removing Quasimodo. He was unbound, the
crowd dispersed.
Near the Grand Pont, Mahiette, who was returning with her two
companions, suddenly halted,
"By the way, Eustache! what did you do with that cake?"
"Mother," said the child, "while you were talking with that lady in the bole, a
big dog took a bite of my cake, and then I bit it also."
"What, sir, did you eat the whole of it?" she went on.
"Mother, it was the dog. I told him, but he would not listen to me. Then I bit
into it, also."
Thesaurus
companions: (n) circle, entourage, sacked: (adj) pillaged, raped, unconstrained, open, untied,
people. despoiled, desolate, devastated, untrammeled, exempt, unchained,
descend: (v) settle, condescend, down, desolated, blasted, plundered, released, unfettered, unobstructed;
drop, deign, subside, go down, ransacked, molested, made (v) unencumbered. ANTONYMS:
dismount, derive, get off, come uninhabitable. (adj) bound, restricted.
down. ANTONYMS: (v) ascend, staggering: (adj) astounding, amazing, willingly: (adv) readily, voluntarily,
climb, float, scale, increase, level, incredible, inconceivable, prodigious, cheerfully, spontaneously, helpfully,
mount. marvelous, startling, ghastly, disposedly, actively, openly,
dispersed: (adj) sparse, spread, shocking, remarkable, extraordinary. obligingly, eagerly; (adj, adv) freely.
distributed, scattered, diffused, ANTONYMS: (adj) unremarkable, ANTONYMS: (adv) grudgingly,
scatter, outspread, disseminated, normal, lovely, comforting. reluctantly, uncooperatively,
split, dissipated, separate. unbound: (adj) uncontrolled, unenthusiastically.
"'Tis a terrible child!" said the mother, smiling and scolding at one and the
same time. "Do you see, Oudarde? He already eats all the fruit from the cherry-
tree in our orchard of Charlerange. So his grandfather says that be will be a
captain. Just let me catch you at it again, Master Eustache. Come along, you
greedy fellow!" %
Thesaurus
catch: (n, v) capture, hook, haul, hitch, return. copse.
trick, grab, snatch; (v) get, grandfather: (n) gramps, grandad, smiling: (adv) smilingly; (adj) bright,
apprehend, intercept; (n) pawl. grandpapa, grandpa, grandsire, cheerful, jolly, joyful, of good cheer,
ANTONYMS: (n, v) release; (v) granddaddy, ancestor, father's father, twinkly, fair, sunny; (n) grinning,
misunderstand, unhitch, mistake, paternal grandfather, father, grin. ANTONYMS: (adj) sad, gloomy.
Miss, misinterpret, free, give, lose; (n) forefather. terrible: (adj) horrible, dreadful,
advantage, boon. mother: (n) mamma, mommy, origin, horrid, monstrous, abominable,
eats: (n) grub, chuck, food, meat, meal, mama, ma, mammy, mummy; (n, v) ghastly, dire, appalling, fearful,
diet, nurture, eat, dinner, board, feed. father; (v) engender, generate, beget. awful, hideous. ANTONYMS: (adj)
fruit: (n) crop, outgrowth, product, orchard: (n) park, garden, plantation, lovely, pleasant, great, laudable,
fruitage, progeny, acorn, production, arboretum, avenue, pinetum, excellent, superb, mild, slight, minor,
yield, aftermath; (n, v) result; (v) shrubbery, woodlet, parterre, pinery, brilliant, insignificant.
Victor Hugo 285
BOOK VII
Victor Hugo 287
CHAPTER I
THE DANGER OF CONFIDING ONE'S SECRET

TO A GOAT
Many weeks had elapsed.%

The first of March had arrived. The sun, which Dubartas, that classic
ancestor of periphrase, had not yet dubbed the "Grand-duke of Candles," was
none the less radiant and joyous on that account. It was one of those spring days
which possesses so much sweetness and beauty, that all Paris turns out into the
squares and promenades and celebrates them as though they were Sundays. In
those days of brilliancy, warmth, and serenity, there is a certain hour above all
others, when the façade of Notre-Dame should be admired. It is the moment
when the sun, already declining towards the west, looks the cathedral almost
full in the face. Its rays, growing more and more horizontal, withdraw slowly
from the pavement of the square, and mount up the perpendicular façade, whose
thousand bosses in high relief they cause to start out from the shadows, while
the great central rose window flames like the eye of a cyclops, inflamed with the
reflections of the forge.
This was the hour.
Opposite the lofty cathedral, reddened by the setting sun, on the stone
balcony built above the porch of a rich Gothic house, which formed the angle of
Thesaurus
bosses: (n) management. hellhole. radiant: (adj, v) bright, glittering,
brilliancy: (n, v) brightness; (n) forge: (adj, v) falsify; (v) fake, devise, lustrous, beamy, glorious; (adj)
brilliance, lustre, luster, splendor, fabricate, fashion, contrive, coin, beaming, luminous, effulgent, lucid,
glitter, glory, radiance, splendour; invent, construct, mould; (n, v) mint. glowing, beautiful. ANTONYMS:
(adj, n) gorgeousness; (v) gloss. joyous: (adj) happy, gleeful, elated, (adj) gloomy, dark, pale, unhappy.
declining: (adj) deteriorating, jolly, glad, gay, jovial, merry, festive, sweetness: (n) sugariness, sweet,
decreasing, waning, falling, down, cheerful, jocund. ANTONYMS: (adj) redolence, pleasantness, fragrance,
decadent, fading, lessening, despairing, joyless, miserable. aroma, charm, perfume, amenity,
diminishing, sloping; (n) decrease. periphrase: (n) periphrasis, verbiage. niceness, kindness. ANTONYMS: (n)
ANTONYMS: (adj) thriving, porch: (n) lobby, hall, vestibule, sourness, sharpness, unpleasantness,
burgeoning, growing. veranda, door, entrance, deck, harshness, tastelessness, unkindness.
flames: (n) fire, blaze, firestorm, gallery, portico, balcony, inlet.
the square and the Rue du Parvis, several young girls were laughing and
chatting with every sort of grace and mirth. From the length of the veil which
fell from their pointed coif, twined with pearls, to their heels, from the fineness
of the embroidered chemisette which covered their shoulders and allowed a
glimpse, according to the pleasing custom of the time, of the swell of their fair
virgin bosoms, from the opulence of their under-petticoats still more precious
than their overdress (marvellous refinement), from the gauze, the silk, the velvet,
with which all this was composed, and, above all, from the whiteness of their
hands, which certified to their leisure and idleness, it was easy to divine they
were noble and wealthy heiresses. They were, in fact, Damoiselle Fleur-de-Lys
de Gondelaurier and her companions, Diane de Christeuil, Amelotte de
Montmichel, Colombe de Gaillefontaine, and the little de Champchevrier
maiden; all damsels of good birth, assembled at that moment at the house of the
dame widow de Gondelaurier, on account of Monseigneur de Beaujeu and
Madame his wife, who were to come to Paris in the month of April, there to
choose maids of honor for the Dauphiness Marguerite, who was to be received in
Picardy from the hands of the Flemings. Now, all the squires for twenty leagues
around were intriguing for this favor for their daughters, and a goodly number
of the latter had been already brought or sent to Paris. These four maidens had
been confided to the discreet and venerable charge of Madame Aloise de
Gondelaurier, widow of a former commander of the king's cross-bowmen, who
had retired with her only daughter to her house in the Place du Parvis, Notre-
Dame, in Paris.%
The balcony on which these young girls stood opened from a chamber richly
tapestried in fawn-colored Flanders leather, stamped with golden foliage. The
beams, which cut the ceiling in parallel lines, diverted the eye with a thousand
eccentric painted and gilded carvings. Splendid enamels gleamed here and there
on carved chests; a boar's head in faience crowned a magnificent dresser, whose
two shelves announced that the mistress of the house was the wife or widow of a
knight banneret. At the end of the room, by the side of a lofty chimney blazoned
with arms from top to bottom, in a rich red velvet arm-chair, sat Dame de
Thesaurus
banneret: (n) knight banneret, banner, Laocoon. activity, bustle, liveliness,
knight, bannerol, baron, viscount, fineness: (n) refinement, elegance, responsibility.
thane, earl. daintiness, thinness, choiceness, overdress: (v) dress up, dress, attire,
coif: (v) groom, arrange, neaten, beauty, superiority, subtlety, overclothe, bedizen, bone, grind
become gelatinous, set, act, adjust; (n) slimness, slenderness, narrowness. away, get up, deck out, fig out, fancy
cap, hood, kerchief, skullcap. ANTONYMS: (n) stoutness, up.
dresser: (n) cabinet, chest of drawers, thickness, vulgarity, inaccuracy, twined: (adj) bent, coiled, contorted,
bureau, commode, chest, sideboard, coarseness, width. distorted, misrepresented, perverted.
chiffonier, toilet table, assistant, idleness: (n) lethargy, laziness, torpor, whiteness: (n) paleness, ivory, chalk,
dressing table, table. inactivity, idling, unemployment, pearl, bone, bleach, alabaster,
faience: (v) enamel, satsuma; (n) sloth, inaction, inertia, faineance, frostiness, hoariness, pallor,
glazed earthenware, earthenware, idlesse. ANTONYMS: (n) energy, innocence. ANTONYM: (n) black.
Victor Hugo 289
Gondelaurier, whose five and fifty years were written upon her garments no less
distinctly than upon her face.%
Beside her stood a young man of imposing mien, although partaking
somewhat of vanity and bravado-- one of those handsome fellows whom all
women agree to admire, although grave men learned in physiognomy shrug
their shoulders at them. This young man wore the garb of a captain of the king's
unattached archers, which bears far too much resemblance to the costume of
Jupiter, which the reader has already been enabled to admire in the first book of
this history, for us to inflict upon him a second description.
The damoiselles were seated, a part in the chamber, a part in the balcony,
some on square cushions of Utrecht velvet with golden corners, others on stools
of oak carved in flowers and figures. Each of them held on her knee a section of
a great needlework tapestry, on which they were working in company, while
one end of it lay upon the rush mat which covered the floor.
They were chatting together in that whispering tone and with the half-stifled
laughs peculiar to an assembly of young girls in whose midst there is a young
man. The young man whose presence served to set in play all these feminine
self- conceits, appeared to pay very little heed to the matter, and, while these
pretty damsels were vying with one another to attract his attention, he seemed to
be chiefly absorbed in polishing the buckle of his sword belt with his doeskin
glove. From time to time, the old lady addressed him in a very low tone, and he
replied as well as he was able, with a sort of awkward and constrained
politeness.
From the smiles and significant gestures of Dame Aloise, from the glances
which she threw towards her daughter, Fleur-de-Lys, as she spoke low to the
captain, it was easy to see that there was here a question of some betrothal
concluded, some marriage near at hand no doubt, between the young man and
Fleur-de-Lys. From the embarrassed coldness of the officer, it was easy to see
that on his side, at least, love had no longer any part in the matter. His whole air
was expressive of constraint and weariness, which our lieutenants of the garrison
would to-day translate admirably as, "What a beastly bore!"
Thesaurus
beastly: (adj) animal, disgusting, buckskin, cloth. polishing: (n) shining, brightening,
horrid, bestial, brute; (adj, v) nasty, garb: (n, v) dress, apparel, array, print polishing, brushing, mechanical
abominable, offensive; (adv) ugly, garment; (n) attire, clothing, costume, polishing, bobbing; (adj) cultural,
brutally, brutely. ANTONYMS: (adv) frock, outfit, clothes; (v) clothe. abrasive.
civilized, cultured, kind, good, inflict: (v) impose, cause, wreak, force, unattached: (adj) single, uncommitted,
refined, humane, inoffensive; (adj) enforce, deal, deliver, administer, unconnected, unmarried, separate,
lovely, pleasant. foist, put, obtrude. independent, loose, discrete, distinct,
betrothal: (n) troth, espousal, needlework: (n) stitchery, sewing, uninterested, individual.
betrothment, affiance, betroth, battle, needlecraft, stitching, knitwork, ANTONYMS: (adj) married,
alliance, ritual, betrothing, conflict, crochet, crocheting, knit, knitting, committed, involved, connected.
employment. fancywork, creation. vying: (adj) rival, comparative; (n)
doeskin: (n) material, fabric, leather, partaking: (n) input, contribution. rivalry.
The poor dame, very much infatuated with her daughter, like any other silly
mother, did not perceive the officer's lack of enthusiasm, and strove in low tones
to call his attention to the infinite grace with which Fleur-de-Lys used her needle
or wound her skein.%
"Come, little cousin," she said to him, plucking him by the sleeve, in order to
speak in his ear, "Look at her, do! see her stoop."
"Yes, truly," replied the young man, and fell back into his glacial and absent-
minded silence.
A moment later, he was obliged to bend down again, and Dame Aloise said
to him,
"Have you ever beheld a more gay and charming face than that of your
betrothed? Can one be more white and blonde? are not her hands perfect? and
that neck-- does it not assume all the curves of the swan in ravishing fashion?
How I envy you at times! and how happy you are to be a man, naughty libertine
that you are! Is not my Fleur-de-Lys adorably beautiful, and are you not
desperately in love with her?"
"Of course," he replied, still thinking of something else.
"But do say something," said Madame Aloise, suddenly giving his shoulder a
push; "you have grown very timid."
We can assure our readers that timidity was neither the captain's virtue nor
his defect. But he made an effort to do what was demanded of him.
"Fair cousin," he said, approaching Fleur-de-Lys, "what is the subject of this
tapestry work which you are fashioning?' "Fair cousin," responded Fleur-de-Lys,
in an offended tone, "I have already told you three times. 'Tis the grotto of
Neptune."
It was evident that Fleur-de-Lys saw much more clearly than her mother
through the captain's cold and absent-minded manner. He felt the necessity of
making some conversation.
"And for whom is this Neptunerie destined?"
Thesaurus
absent-minded: (adj) forgetful, summerhouse, crypt. (adj) beautiful, gorgeous, charming,
oblivious, inattentive, preoccupied, infatuated: (adj, n) fanatical; (adj, v) fascinating, enchanting, delightful,
abstracted. besotted; (adj) gaga, crazy, mad, stunning, irresistible, heavenly.
adorably: (adv) delightfully. dotty, in love, obsessed, smitten, strove: (v) strive.
glacial: (adj) arctic, frigid, freezing, taken with; (v) illiberal. timidity: (n) shyness, fear,
frosty, frozen, gelid, polar, chilly, offended: (adj) angry, affronted, bashfulness, nervousness, reserve,
wintry, chilling; (adj, v) icy. aggrieved, pained, wronged, cowardice, fearfulness, timidness,
ANTONYMS: (adj) warm, friendly, annoyed, insulted, shocked, vexed, modesty, humility, coyness.
tropical, torrid. resentful, injured. ANTONYMS: (adj) ANTONYMS: (n) confidence,
grotto: (n) cavern, cave, alcove, indifferent, proud, unconcerned. boastfulness, swagger, brashness,
conservatory, arbor, greenhouse, plucking: (n) harvesting, rip out. security.
bower, hermitage, Grote, ravishing: (adj, n) rapturous, ecstatic;
Victor Hugo 291
"For the Abbey of Saint-Antoine des Champs," answered Fleur-de-Lys,

without raising her eyes.%
The captain took up a corner of the tapestry.
"Who, my fair cousin, is this big gendarme, who is puffing out his cheeks to
their full extent and blowing a trumpet?"
"'Tis Triton," she replied.
There was a rather pettish intonation in Fleur-de-Lys's-- laconic words. The
young man understood that it was indispensable that he should whisper
something in her ear, a commonplace, a gallant compliment, no matter what.
Accordingly he bent down, but he could find nothing in his imagination more
tender and personal than this,
"Why does your mother always wear that surcoat with armorial designs, like
our grandmothers of the time of Charles VII.? Tell her, fair cousin, that 'tis no
longer the fashion, and that the hinge (gond) and the laurel (laurier)
embroidered on her robe give her the air of a walking mantlepiece. In truth,
people no longer sit thus on their banners, I assure you."
Fleur-de-Lys raised her beautiful eyes, full of reproach, "Is that all of which
you can assure me?" she said, in a low voice.
In the meantime, Dame Aloise, delighted to see them thus bending towards
each other and whispering, said as she toyed with the clasps of her prayer-book,
"Touching picture of love!"
The captain, more and more embarrassed, fell back upon the subject of the
tapestry,-- "'Tis, in sooth, a charming work!" he exclaimed.
Whereupon Colombe de Gaillefontaine, another beautiful blonde, with a
white skin, dressed to the neck in blue damask, ventured a timid remark which
she addressed to Fleur-de-Lys, in the hope that the handsome captain would
reply to it, "My dear Gondelaurier, have you seen the tapestries of the Hôtel de la
Roche-Guyon?"
Thesaurus
gallant: (adj) fearless, brave, daring, summary, short. ANTONYM: (adj) panting, bloated, bouffant, breathing
courageous, chivalrous, bold, manly, voluble. heavily, out of breath, distended,
heroic, dashing, courteous, fine. laurel: (n) bays, honor, rose-laurel, puffed; (n) expansion, snorting.
ANTONYMS: (adj) boorish, rude, cassia, cinnamon, sweet bay, Daphne, whereupon: (adv) thereupon,
selfish. bay tree, palm, garland, fame. hereupon, upon which, at what, at
hinge: (n, v) joint; (n) axis, axle, mantlepiece: (n) mantel, mantle, which.
articulation, spindle, crux, fulcrum, chimneypiece, shelf, drape, drapery, whispering: (n) whisper, murmur,
arbor, flexible joint; (v) depend, cape, blanket, curtain. susurration, rustle, report, stage
juncture. pettish: (adj) peevish, irritable, cross, whisper; (adj, n) rustling; (adj)
laconic: (adj) curt, brief, terse, nettlesome, cranky, huffy, touchy, susurrant, tranquil, hoarse,
compendious, succinct, pithy, fretful, techy, petulant, tetchy. susurrous.
compact, taciturn, laconical, puffing: (adj) gasping, breathless,
"Is not that the hotel in which is enclosed the garden of the Lingère du
Louvre?" asked Diane de Christeuil with a laugh; for she had handsome teeth,
and consequently laughed on every occasion.%
"And where there is that big, old tower of the ancient wall of Paris," added
Amelotte de Montmichel, a pretty fresh and curly-headed brunette, who had a
habit of sighing just as the other laughed, without knowing why.
"My dear Colombe," interpolated Dame Aloise, "do you not mean the hotel
which belonged to Monsieur de Bacqueville, in the reign of King Charles VI.?
there are indeed many superb high warp tapestries there."
"Charles VI.! Charles VI.!" muttered the young captain, twirling his
moustache. "Good heavens! what old things the good dame does remember!"
Madame de Gondelaurier continued, "Fine tapestries, in truth. A work so
esteemed that it passes as unrivalled."
At that moment Bérangère de Champchevrier, a slender little maid of seven
years, who was peering into the square through the trefoils of the balcony,
exclaimed, "Oh! look, fair Godmother Fleur-de-Lys, at that pretty dancer who is
dancing on the pavement and playing the tambourine in the midst of the loutish
bourgeois!"
The sonorous vibration of a tambourine was, in fact, audible. "Some gypsy
from Bohemia," said Fleur-de-Lys, turning carelessly toward the square.
"Look! look!" exclaimed her lively companions; and they all ran to the edge of
the balcony, while Fleur-de-Lys, rendered thoughtful by the coldness of her
betrothed, followed them slowly, and the latter, relieved by this incident, which
put an end to an embarrassing conversation, retreated to the farther end of the
room, with the satisfied air of a soldier released from duty. Nevertheless, the fair
Fleur-de-Lys's was a charming and noble service, and such it had formerly
appeared to him; but the captain had gradually become blase'; the prospect of a
speedy marriage cooled him more every day. Moreover, he was of a fickle
disposition, and, must we say it, rather vulgar in taste. Although of very noble
birth, he had contracted in his official harness more than one habit of the
Thesaurus
carelessly: (adv) incautiously, hastily, respected, honorable, noble, honored, loutish: (adj) coarse, churlish, crude,
recklessly, heedlessly, casually, prestigious, important, distinguished, oafish, rough, rude, uncouth,
sloppily, imprudently, August, respect. ANTONYM: (adj) graceless, brutish, clownish, rustic.
inconsiderately, rashly, negligently, disreputable. ANTONYMS: (adj) civilized, polite,
unwarily. ANTONYMS: (adv) fickle: (adj, v) erratic, skittish; (adj) refined, genteel.
thoroughly, diligently, carefully, volatile, capricious, mercurial, peering: (adj) nosy, prying, snoopy.
warily, laboriously, thoughtfully, mobile, variable, inconsistent, warp: (v) distort, deform, contort,
attentively, daintily, methodically, shifting, giddy, inconstant. falsify, garble, misrepresent; (n, v)
discreetly, economically. ANTONYMS: (adj) untiring, stable, bend, buckle, turn, bias; (n)
cooled: (adj) refrigerated, frozen; (n) unchanging, consistent, constant, distortion. ANTONYM: (v) clarify.
cooler. dependable, predictable, placid,
esteemed: (adj) dear, reputable, loyal, faithful.
Victor Hugo 293
common trooper. The tavern and its accompaniments pleased him. He was
only at his ease amid gross language, military gallantries, facile beauties, and
successes yet more easy. He had, nevertheless, received from his family some
education and some politeness of manner; but he had been thrown on the world
too young, he had been in garrison at too early an age, and every day the polish
of a gentleman became more and more effaced by the rough friction of his
gendarme's cross-belt. While still continuing to visit her from time to time, from
a remnant of common respect, he felt doubly embarrassed with Fleur-de-Lys; in
the first place, because, in consequence of having scattered his love in all sorts of
places, he had reserved very little for her; in the next place, because, amid so
many stiff, formal, and decent ladies, he was in constant fear lest his mouth,
habituated to oaths, should suddenly take the bit in its teeth, and break out into
the language of the tavern. The effect can be imagined!
Moreover, all this was mingled in him, with great pretentions to elegance,
toilet, and a fine appearance. Let the reader reconcile these things as best he can.
I am simply the historian.%
He had remained, therefore, for several minutes, leaning in silence against
the carved jamb of the chimney, and thinking or not thinking, when Fleur-de-
Lys suddenly turned and addressed him. After all, the poor young girl was
pouting against the dictates of her heart.
"Fair cousin, did you not speak to us of a little Bohemian whom you saved a
couple of months ago, while making the patrol with the watch at night, from the
hands of a dozen robbers?"
"I believe so, fair cousin,." said the captain.
"Well," she resumed, "perchance 'tis that same gypsy girl who is dancing
yonder, on the church square. Come and see if you recognize her, fair Cousin
Phoebus."
A secret desire for reconciliation was apparent in this gentle invitation which
she gave him to approach her, and in the care which she took to call him by
name. Captain Phoebus de Châteaupers (for it is he whom the reader has had
before his eyes since the beginning of this chapter) slowly approached the
Thesaurus
accompaniments: (n) equipment, complicated, hard, difficult, original. gentility, good manners, niceness,
trimmings, fixing. garrison: (n) fortification, fortress, refinement, gallantry, decency.
chimney: (n) fireplace, smokestack, stronghold, troops, presidio, defense, ANTONYMS: (n) vulgarity,
shaft, flue, hearth, vent, lamp base, citadel, soldiery; (n, v) defend; rudeness, incivility, neglect.
chimney, chimneys, nostril, throat, (v) send. pouting: (adj) sullen.
weasand. jamb: (n) doorpost, abutment, tavern: (n) hotel, saloon, bar, inn, pub,
doubly: (adv) twice, twofold, two mullion, vertical, cheek, upright, public house, pothouse, taphouse,
times, in two ways, dualistically. doorjamb, coaming, currant jam, cabaret, khan, hostelry.
facile: (adj, v) easy, comfortable; (adj) door jamb, beam. trooper: (n) cavalryman, soldier,
effortless, cushy, dexterous, fluent, places: (n) chairs, seating, spaces. officer, policeman, rank and file,
expert, indulgent, light, deft, glib. politeness: (n) civility, courteousness, police officer, peon, warrior,
ANTONYMS: (adj) laborious, courtliness, manners, decorum, dragoon, Tommy Atkins, sepoy.
balcony. "Stay," said Fleur-de-Lys, laying her hand tenderly on Phoebus's arm;
"look at that little girl yonder, dancing in that circle. Is she your Bohemian?"
Phoebus looked, and said,
"Yes, I recognize her by her goat."
"Oh! in fact, what a pretty little goat!" said Amelotte, clasping her hands in
admiration.%
"Are his horns of real gold?" inquired Bérangère.
Without moving from her arm-chair, Dame Aloise interposed, "Is she not one
of those gypsy girls who arrived last year by the Gibard gate?"
"Madame my mother," said Fleur-de-Lys gently, "that gate is now called the
Porte d'Enfer."
Mademoiselle de Gondelaurier knew how her mother's antiquated mode of
speech shocked the captain. In fact, he began to sneer, and muttered between his
teeth: "Porte Gibard! Porte Gibard! 'Tis enough to make King Charles VI. pass
by."
"Godmother!" exclaimed Bérangère, whose eyes, incessantly in motion, had
suddenly been raised to the summit of the towers of Notre-Dame, "who is that
black man up yonder?"
All the young girls raised their eyes. A man was, in truth, leaning on the
balustrade which surmounted the northern tower, looking on the Grève. He was
a priest. His costume could be plainly discerned, and his face resting on both his
hands. But he stirred no more than if he had been a statue. His eyes, intently
fixed, gazed into the Place.
It was something like the immobility of a bird of prey, who has just
discovered a nest of sparrows, and is gazing at it.
"'Tis monsieur the archdeacon of Josas," said Fleur-de-Lys.
"You have good eyes if you can recognize him from here," said the
Gaillefontaine.
"How he is staring at the little dancer!" went on Diane de Christeuil.
Thesaurus
antiquated: (adj) old, aged, garb, suit, outfit, uniform, garments, sneer: (n, v) deride, jeer, scorn, flout,
antediluvian, archaic, obsolete, drapery; (n, v) dress; (v) clothe. ridicule, scoff, mock, leer, grimace,
musty, old-fashioned, outdated, phoebus: (n) sun, Phoebus Apollo, orb gird; (n) smirk.
dowdy, outmoded, antique. of day, aurora. sparrows: (n) sparrow, finches, order
ANTONYMS: (adj) new, plainly: (adv) evidently, manifestly, Passeriformes, Passeriformes, robins,
contemporary, fresh, modernistic, clearly, distinctly, openly, obviously, rooks, etc.
recent, current. patently, overtly, definitely; (adj, adv) statue: (n) figure, monument,
balcony: (n) verandah, veranda, frankly, honestly. ANTONYMS: (adv) statuette, effigy, idol, sculpture,
loggia, gallery, porch, arch, terrace, imperceptibly, vaguely, obscurely, carving, bust, sphinx, icon,
construction, eaves, portico, figuratively, unclearly, politely, representation.
structure. incoherently, implicitly, finely, surmounted: (adj) beaten.
costume: (n) clothing, clothes, apparel, ambiguously, covertly.
Victor Hugo 295
"Let the gypsy beware!" said Fleur-de-Lys, "for he loves not Egypt."
"'Tis a great shame for that man to look upon her thus," added Amelotte de
Montmichel, "for she dances delightfully."
"Fair cousin Phoebus," said Fleur-de-Lys suddenly, "Since you know this little
gypsy, make her a sign to come up here. It will amuse us."
"Oh, yes!" exclaimed all the young girls, clapping their hands.%
"Why! 'tis not worth while," replied Phoebus. "She has forgotten me, no
doubt, and I know not so much as her name. Nevertheless, as you wish it, young
ladies, I will make the trial." And leaning over the balustrade of the balcony, he
began to shout, "Little one!"
The dancer was not beating her tambourine at the moment. She turned her
head towards the point whence this call proceeded, her brilliant eyes rested on
Phoebus, and she stopped short.
"Little one!" repeated the captain; and he beckoned her to approach.
The young girl looked at him again, then she blushed as though a flame had
mounted into her cheeks, and, taking her tambourine under her arm, she made
her way through the astonished spectators towards the door of the house where
Phoebus was calling her, with slow, tottering steps, and with the troubled look
of a bird which is yielding to the fascination of a serpent.
A moment later, the tapestry portière was raised, and the gypsy appeared on
the threshold of the chamber, blushing, confused, breathless, her large eyes
drooping, and not daring to advance another step.
Bérangère clapped her hands.
Meanwhile, the dancer remained motionless upon the threshold. Her
appearance had produced a singular effect upon these young girls. It is certain
that a vague and indistinct desire to please the handsome officer animated them
all, that his splendid uniform was the target of all their coquetries, and that from
the moment he presented himself, there existed among them a secret, suppressed
rivalry, which they hardly acknowledged even to themselves, but which broke
forth, none the less, every instant, in their gestures and remarks. Nevertheless, as
Thesaurus
animated: (adj) alive, lively, animate, adventurous; (adj) audacious, tottering: (adj) unsteady, ramshackle,
perky, spirited, sprightly, brisk, venturesome, intrepid; (n) bravery, easily shaken, tottery, sick, rocky,
cheerful, quick, vivacious, airy. audacity, boldness, courage, broken, trembling, cracked; (v)
ANTONYMS: (adj) lethargic, dull, adventurousness. ANTONYMS: (n) drooping; (n) convulsion.
blank, lifeless, spiritless, stiff, cowardice, timidity; (adj) timid, yielding: (adj, v) flexible, pliable,
unanimated, bored, impassive, cautious, dull, afraid, chicken, fearful, supple, tractable, pliant; (adj)
unexciting, dead. unadventurous, wimpy. compliant, submissive, soft, obedient,
dancer: (n) dancerly, ballerina, tap rivalry: (n) contest, contention, docile; (n) submission. ANTONYMS:
dancer, taxi dancer, acrobat, actor, opposition, antagonism, race, (adj) hard, firm, inflexible, solid,
artist, artiste, ballet dancer, belly emulation, match, conflict, rigid, obstinate, stiff, stubborn,
dancer, chorus girl. contestation, envy, rivalship. unyielding, rebellious.
daring: (adj, n) bold, courageous, ANTONYM: (n) friendship.
they were all very nearly equal in beauty, they contended with equal arms, and
each could hope for the victory.-- The arrival of the gypsy suddenly destroyed
this equilibrium. Her beauty was so rare, that, at the moment when she
appeared at the entrance of the apartment, it seemed as though she diffused a
sort of light which was peculiar to herself. In that narrow chamber, surrounded
by that sombre frame of hangings and woodwork, she was incomparably more
beautiful and more radiant than on the public square. She was like a torch which
has suddenly been brought from broad daylight into the dark. The noble
damsels were dazzled by her in spite of themselves. Each one felt herself, in
some sort, wounded in her beauty. Hence, their battle front (may we be allowed
the expression,) was immediately altered, although they exchanged not a single
word. But they understood each other perfectly. Women's instincts comprehend
and respond to each other more quickly than the intelligences of men. An enemy
had just arrived; all felt it-- all rallied together. One drop of wine is sufficient to
tinge a glass of water red; to diffuse a certain degree of ill temper throughout a
whole assembly of pretty women, the arrival of a prettier woman suffices,
especially when there is but one man present.%
Hence the welcome accorded to the gypsy was marvellously glacial. They
surveyed her from head to foot, then exchanged glances, and all was said; they
understood each other. Meanwhile, the young girl was waiting to be spoken to,
in such emotion that she dared not raise her eyelids.
The captain was the first to break the silence. "Upon my word," said he, in
his tone of intrepid fatuity, "here is a charming creature! What think you of her,
fair cousin?"
This remark, which a more delicate admirer would have uttered in a lower
tone, at least was not of a nature to dissipate the feminine jealousies which were
on the alert before the gypsy.
Fleur-de-Lys replied to the captain with a bland affectation of disdain;-- "Not
bad."
The others whispered.
Thesaurus
affectation: (n) pretension, feint, pose, save, conserve, appear, collect, hoard, greatly, beyond compare.
display, airs, affectedness, absorb, gather. ANTONYM: (adv) comparably.
ostentation, show, pretense, exchanged: (adj) counterchanged, intrepid: (adj) daring, fearless, bold,
mannerism, sham. ANTONYMS: (n) bartered, substituted. brave, dauntless, gallant, audacious,
artlessness, honesty, modesty. fatuity: (n) absurdity, silliness, hardy, adventurous, heroic,
contended: (adj) controversial. fatuousness, folly, idiocy, nonsense, confident. ANTONYMS: (adj) fearful,
diffused: (adj) spread, dispersed, dim, asininity, crassitude, inanity; (adj, n) timid, cautious, feeble.
distributed, softened. dotage; (adj) anility. marvellously: (adv) wondrously,
dissipate: (adj, v) waste; (v) disperse, incomparably: (adv) superlatively, wonderfully, terrifically, superbly,
squander, disappear, diffuse, matchlessly, uniquely, exceptionally, fantastically, miraculously, terrificly,
consume, scatter, disseminate, break, outstandingly, unbeatably, phenomenally, gloriously,
evaporate, spend. ANTONYMS: (v) uncomparably, excellently, very, tremendously, tally.
Victor Hugo 297
At length, Madame Aloise, who was not the less jealous because she was so
for her daughter, addressed the dancer,--"Approach, little one."
"Approach, little one!" repeated, with comical dignity, little Bérangère, who
would have reached about as high as her hips.%
The gypsy advanced towards the noble dame.
"Fair child," said Phoebus, with emphasis, taking several steps towards her, "I
do not know whether I have the supreme honor of being recognized by you."
She interrupted him, with a smile and a look full of infinite sweetness,
"Oh! yes," said she.
"She has a good memory," remarked Fleur-de-Lys.
"Come, now," resumed Phoebus, "you escaped nimbly the other evening.
Did I frighten you!"
"Oh! no," said the gypsy.
There was in the intonation of that "Oh! no," uttered after that "Oh! yes," an
ineffable something which wounded Fleur-de-Lys.
"You left me in your stead, my beauty," pursued the captain, whose tongue
was unloosed when speaking to a girl out of the street, "a crabbed knave, one-
eyed and hunchbacked, the bishop's bellringer, I believe. I have been told that by
birth he is the bastard of an archdeacon and a devil. He has a pleasant name: he
is called Quatre-Temps (Ember Days), Paques-Fleuries (Palm Sunday), Mardi-Gras
(Shrove Tuesday), I know not what! The name of some festival when the bells
are pealed! So he took the liberty of carrying you off, as though you were made
for beadles! 'Tis too much. What the devil did that screech-owl want with you?
Hey, tell me!"
"I do not know," she replied.
"The inconceivable impudence! A bellringer carrying off a wench, like a
vicomte! a lout poaching on the game of gentlemen! that is a rare piece of
assurance. However, he paid dearly for it. Master Pierrat Torterue is the
harshest groom that ever curried a knave; and I can tell you, if it will be
Thesaurus
called: (adj) named, titled, chosen, stableman, hostler; (v) prepare, dress, inscrutable, fabulous. ANTONYMS:
known as; (v) nempt, ycleped. arrange, train, coach, tidy, curry. (adj) conceivable, believable, likely,
comical: (adj) funny, comic, laughable, impudence: (adj, n) boldness, brass; (n) understandable, credible.
absurd, humorous, ridiculous, zany, cheek, gall, audacity, impertinence, lout: (adj, n) gawk, goon, klutz; (n) oaf,
droll, jocose, grotesque, jocular. insolence, face, cheekiness, clown, boor, loon, rube, lump,
ANTONYMS: (adj) tragic, sad, grave, effrontery, assurance. ANTONYMS: lubber, hoodlum.
solemn, unfunny, dull, sensible. (n) cowardice, reticence. poaching: (n) trespass, illicit fishing,
dearly: (adv) affectionately, preciously, inconceivable: (adj, v) unbelievable, cooking, cookery, contraband; (adj)
darlingly, sweetly, petly, hard to believe; (adj) impossible, raiding.
expensively, belovedly, intimately, implausible, incomprehensible, stead: (n) behalf, room, lieu, spot,
highly, heartfeltly, lovely. unimaginable, unthinkable, location, station, space, seat, position,
groom: (n) equerry, bridegroom, improbable, unintelligible, office, locality.
agreeable to you, that your bellringer's hide got a thorough dressing at his
hands."
"Poor man!" said the gypsy, in whom these words revived the memory of the
pillory.%
The captain burst out laughing.
"Corne-de-boeuf! here's pity as well placed as a feather in a pig's tail! May I
have as big a belly as a pope, if--"
He stopped short. "Pardon me, ladies; I believe that I was on the point of
saying something foolish."
"Fie, sir" said la Gaillefontaine.
"He talks to that creature in her own tongue!" added Fleur-de-Lys, in a low
tone, her irritation increasing every moment. This irritation was not diminished
when she beheld the captain, enchanted with the gypsy, and, most of all, with
himself, execute a pirouette on his heel, repeating with coarse, naïve, and
soldierly gallantry,
"A handsome wench, upon my soul!"
"Rather savagely dressed," said Diane de Christeuil, laughing to show her
fine teeth.
This remark was a flash of light to the others. Not being able to impugn her
beauty, they attacked her costume.
"That is true," said la Montmichel; "what makes you run about the streets
thus, without guimpe or ruff?"
"That petticoat is so short that it makes one tremble," added la Gaillefontaine.
"My dear," continued Fleur-de-Lys, with decided sharpness, "You will get
yourself taken up by the sumptuary police for your gilded girdle."
"Little one, little one;" resumed la Christeuil, with an implacable smile, "if
you were to put respectable sleeves upon your arms they would get less
sunburned."
Thesaurus
gallantry: (adj, n) prowess, daring, assail, challenge, question, gainsay, poignancy, pungency, quickness,
spirit, fearlessness; (n) heroism, doubt, contradict, contest, impeach. perspicacity; (adj, n) roughness.
bravery, valor, courage, chivalry, ANTONYMS: (v) support, accept. ANTONYMS: (n) dullness, haziness,
courtesy, courageousness. nave: (adj) naive, credulous, immature, softness, slowness, indistinctness,
ANTONYMS: (n) cowardice, artless, gullible, inexperienced, gentleness, evenness, courtesy,
cowardliness, rudeness. jejune; (n) fall guy. blandness, stupidity, kindness.
implacable: (adj) cruel, remorseless, savagely: (adv) brutally, ferociously, soldierly: (adj) soldierlike, military,
irreconcilable, pitiless, merciless, barbarously, wildly, barbarianly, courageous, valiant, warlike, manful,
grim, unappeasable, deadly, mortal, viciously, uncivilizedly, violently, hostile, warriorlike.
relentless, unforgiving. ANTONYMS: felly, untamedly, roughly. sumptuary: (adj) monetary, crumenal,
(adj) placable, unrelenting. sharpness: (n, v) keenness, edge; (n) fiscal, financial, restrictive,
impugn: (v) censure, dispute, charge, severity, bitterness, asperity, acumen, numismatical.
Victor Hugo 299
It was, in truth, a spectacle worthy of a more intelligent spectator than

Phoebus, to see how these beautiful maidens, with their envenomed and angry
tongues, wound, serpent-like, and glided and writhed around the street dancer.
They were cruel and graceful; they searched and rummaged maliciously in her
poor and silly toilet of spangles and tinsel. There was no end to their laughter,
irony, and humiliation. Sarcasms rained down upon the gypsy, and haughty
condescension and malevolent looks. One would have thought they were
young Roman dames thrusting golden pins into the breast of a beautiful slave.
One would have pronounced them elegant grayhounds, circling, with inflated
nostrils, round a poor woodland fawn, whom the glance of their master forbade
them to devour.%
After all, what was a miserable dancer on the public squares in the presence
of these high-born maidens? They seemed to take no heed of her presence, and
talked of her aloud, to her face, as of something unclean, abject, and yet, at the
same time, passably pretty.
The gypsy was not insensible to these pin-pricks. From time to time a flush
of shame, a flash of anger inflamed her eyes or her cheeks; with disdain she
made that little grimace with which the reader is already familiar, but she
remained motionless; she fixed on Phoebus a sad, sweet, resigned look. There
was also happiness and tenderness in that gaze. One would have said that she
endured for fear of being expelled.
Phoebus laughed, and took the gypsy's part with a mixture of impertinence
and pity.
"Let them talk, little one!" he repeated, jingling his golden spurs. "No doubt
your toilet is a little extravagant and wild, but what difference does that make
with such a charming damsel as yourself?"
"Good gracious!" exclaimed the blonde Gaillefontaine, drawing up her swan-
like throat, with a bitter smile. "I see that messieurs the archers of the king's
police easily take fire at the handsome eyes of gypsies!"
"Why not?" said Phoebus.
Thesaurus
condescension: (n) arrogance, ignore, domineer. awake, alive, compassionate,
lordliness, disparagement, patronage, impertinence: (n) audacity, gall, concerned, aware.
affability, disdain, pride, impudence, insolence, disrespect, jingling: (adj) reverberant, clinking,
superciliousness, contempt, stoop, effrontery, brass, boldness, jingly.
depreciation. ANTONYMS: (n) impertinency, sauciness, freshness. passably: (adv) reasonably, middling,
respect, acceptance, admiration. ANTONYMS: (n) politeness, moderately, tolerably, adequately,
eyes: (n) sight, eye, vision, view, baby seriousness, reticence. enough, well enough, okay,
blues, guard, propensity, eyen. insensible: (adj) imperceptible, numb, impartially, indifferent; (adj) pretty
fawn: (v) crawl, creep, grovel, cringe, unconscious, callous, dull, unaware, well. ANTONYMS: (adv)
cower, crouch, bootlick, kowtow, apathetic, impassive, indiscernible, insufficiently, intolerably,
blandish, flatter; (n) deer. comatose, impassible. ANTONYMS: unsatisfactorily, inadequately.
ANTONYMS: (v) insult, despise, (adj) sensible, conscious, sensitive, pins: (v) feet, legs, pegs, trotters.
At this reply uttered carelessly by the captain, like a stray stone, whose fall
one does not even watch, Colombe began to laugh, as well as Diane, Amelotte,
and Fleur-de-Lys, into whose eyes at the same time a tear started.%
The gypsy, who had dropped her eyes on the floor at the words of Colombe
de Gaillefontaine, raised them beaming with joy and pride and fixed them once
more on Phoebus. She was very beautiful at that moment.
The old dame, who was watching this scene, felt offended, without
understanding why.
"Holy Virgin!" she suddenly exclaimed, "what is it moving about my legs?
Ah! the villanous beast!"
It was the goat, who had just arrived, in search of his mistress, and who, in
dashing towards the latter, had begun by entangling his horns in the pile of
stuffs which the noble dame's garments heaped up on her feet when she was
seated.
This created a diversion. The gypsy disentangled his horns without uttering
a word.
"Oh! here's the little goat with golden hoofs!" exclaimed Bérangère, dancing
with joy.
The gypsy crouched down on her knees and leaned her cheek against the
fondling head of the goat. One would have said that she was asking pardon for
having quitted it thus.
Meanwhile, Diane had bent down to Colombe's ear.
"Ah! good heavens! why did not I think of that sooner? 'Tis the gypsy with
the goat. They say she is a sorceress, and that her goat executes very miraculous
tricks."
"Well!" said Colombe, "the goat must now amuse us in its turn, and perform a
miracle for us."
Diane and Colombe eagerly addressed the gypsy.
"Little one, make your goat perform a miracle."
Thesaurus
crouched: (v) subjacent, squat; (adj) entertainment, pastime, deviation, leaned: (v) erudite, lettered; (adj)
crutched, hunkered down, hunkered, distraction, detour, fun, sport, tilted, inclined, educated.
low, huddled. recreation, digression, deflexion. miraculous: (adj) marvelous,
dashing: (adj) stylish, dapper, gallant, entangling: (v) entangle; (adj) snary, astonishing, marvellous, wonderful,
showy, smart, snappy, impetuous, intricable. astounding, remarkable, magical,
rakish, raffish, brave; (adj, n) spruce. garments: (n) attire, clothing, dress, incredible, wonder, stupendous,
ANTONYMS: (adj) boring, unstylish, apparel, raiment, outfit, costume, phenomenal. ANTONYMS: (adj)
dull, bumbling, bland, awkward, garb, array, gear, anything worthless. normal, mundane, unremarkable.
drab, graceless. heavens: (n) firmament, heaven, sky, stray: (v) wander, ramble, range,
disentangled: (adj) freed, free, welkin, sphere, atmosphere, celestial digress, straggle, meander, depart,
extricated, freer, loosened, unsnarled. sphere, space, skies, area, vault of deviate, rove, drift, err. ANTONYM:
diversion: (n) amusement, heaven. (v) settle.
Victor Hugo 301
"I do not know what you mean," replied the dancer.%

"A miracle, a piece of magic, a bit of sorcery, in short."
"I do not understand." And she fell to caressing the pretty animal, repeating,
"Djali! Djali!"
At that moment Fleur-de-Lys noticed a little bag of embroidered leather
suspended from the neck of the goat,-- "What is that?" she asked of the gypsy.
The gypsy raised her large eyes upon her and replied gravely,-- "That is my
secret."
"I should really like to know what your secret is," thought Fleur-de-Lys.
Meanwhile, the good dame had risen angrily,-- " Come now, gypsy, if neither
you nor your goat can dance for us, what are you doing here?"
The gypsy walked slowly towards the door, without making any reply. But
the nearer she approached it, the more her pace slackened. An irresistible
magnet seemed to hold her. Suddenly she turned her eyes, wet with tears,
towards Phoebus, and halted.
"True God!" exclaimed the captain, "that's not the way to depart. Come back
and dance something for us. By the way, my sweet love, what is your name?"
"La Esmeralda," said the dancer, never taking her eyes from him.
At this strange name, a burst of wild laughter broke from the young girls.
"Here's a terrible name for a young lady," said Diane.
"You see well enough," retorted Amelotte, "that she is an enchantress."
"My dear," exclaimed Dame Aloise solemnly, "your parents did not commit
the sin of giving you that name at the baptismal font."
In the meantime, several minutes previously, Bérangère had coaxed the goat
into a corner of the room with a marchpane cake, without any one having
noticed her. In an instant they had become good friends. The curious child had
detached the bag from the goat's neck, had opened it, and had emptied out its
contents on the rush matting; it was an alphabet, each letter of which was
separately inscribed on a tiny block of boxwood. Hardly had these playthings
Thesaurus
boxwood: (n) Turkish boxwood, irresistible: (adj) resistless, invincible, matting: (n) matt, mounting, carpet,
wood, bush, shrub, boxful, box seat. irrefragable, irrefutable, gym mat, flatness, floor covering,
detached: (adj) separate, cool, aloof, overpowering, overwhelming, matte, master of arts in teaching,
distinct, impartial, neutral, impregnable, indomitable, charming, lusterlessness.
dispassionate, objective, fascinating; (adj, v) uncontrollable. risen: (v) uprise.
unconnected, remote, unconcerned. ANTONYMS: (adj) resistible, slackened: (adj) leisurely.
ANTONYMS: (adj) involved, warm, insignificant, unappealing, weak. solemnly: (adv) earnestly, gravely,
engrossed, partial, connected, biased, magnet: (n) lodestone, magnetic, majestically, stately, sternly, staidly,
linked, united, impassioned, seduction, siderite, prestige, thoughtfully, soberly, formally,
interested, personal. permanent magnet, magnetic force, ceremoniously, importantly.
emptied: (adj) empty, void, depleted, temptation, magnets, loadstone, ANTONYMS: (adv) cheerfully,
emptier, annulled, open, vacuous. magnetism. flippantly.
been spread out on the matting, when the child, with surprise, beheld the goat
(one of whose "miracles" this was no doubt), draw out certain letters with its
golden hoof, and arrange them, with gentle pushes, in a certain order. In a
moment they constituted a word, which the goat seemed to have been trained to
write, so little hesitation did it show in forming it, and Bérangère suddenly
exclaimed, clasping her hands in admiration,
"Godmother Fleur-de-Lys, see what the goat has just done!"
Fleur-de-Lys ran up and trembled. The letters arranged upon the floor
formed this word,
PHOEBUS.%
"Was it the goat who wrote that?" she inquired in a changed voice.
"Yes, godmother," replied Bérangêre.
It was impossible to doubt it; the child did not know how to write.
"This is the secret!" thought Fleur-de-Lys.
Meanwhile, at the child's exclamation, all had hastened up, the mother, the
young girls, the gypsy, and the officer.
The gypsy beheld the piece of folly which the goat had committed. She
turned red, then pale, and began to tremble like a culprit before the captain, who
gazed at her with a smile of satisfaction and amazement.
"Phoebus!" whispered the young girls, stupefied: "'tis the captain's name!"
"You have a marvellous memory!" said Fleur-de-Lys, to the petrified gypsy.
Then, bursting into sobs: "Oh!" she stammered mournfully, hiding her face in
both her beautiful hands, "she is a magician!" And she heard another and a still
more bitter voice at the bottom of her heart, saying,-- "She is a rival!"
She fell fainting.
"My daughter! my daughter!" cried the terrified mother. "Begone, you gypsy
of hell!"
Thesaurus
begone: (int) shoo, scat, out, off, deliquium, lipothymy, prostration, drubbing, ambush.
avaunt; (v) take off, get out, clear out; stupor; (adj) lipothymic. mournfully: (adv) sadly, sorrowfully,
(adv) aside, absent. hesitation: (n, v) falter, fear; (n) glumly, woefully, unhappily,
bursting: (adj) explosive, teeming, hesitance, faltering, delay, hesitate, plaintively, grievously, funereally,
chock-full, full, complete, diffidence, hesitancy, qualm, dejectedly, dolorously, poignantly.
paroxysmal, exploding, disruptive, reluctance; (v) hesitating. ANTONYMS: (adv) cheerfully,
detonating, crowded; (n) outbreak. ANTONYMS: (n) certainty, joyfully.
ANTONYM: (adj) hungry. resolution, confidence, decisiveness, terrified: (adj) afraid, frightened,
constituted: (adj) habitual, planted, enthusiasm, inclination, willingness. fearful, panicky, panicked, aghast,
legitimate, grooved, accomplished, hiding: (n) covering, concealment, timid, timorous, apprehensive,
official. concealing, beating, screening, startled, alarmed. ANTONYMS: (adj)
fainting: (n) swoon, syncope, thrashing, flogging, rout, burial, fearless, brave.
Victor Hugo 303
In a twinkling, La Esmeralda gathered up the unlucky letters, made a sign to

Djali, and went out through one door, while Fleur-de-Lys was being carried out
through the other.%
Captain Phoebus, on being left alone, hesitated for a moment between the
two doors, then he followed the gypsy.
Thesaurus
alone: (adj) forlorn, individual, lonely, letters: (n) erudition, literature, indicate. ANTONYMS: (n) successor;
lonesome; (adj, adv) only, apart; (adv) correspondence, lore, script, (v) dismiss.
solely, entirely, exclusively, scholarship, post, print, mail, letter, unlucky: (adj) luckless, hapless,
separately, individually. polite literature. unhappy, sinister, inauspicious,
ANTONYMS: (adj) overshadowed, moment: (n, v) consequence, weight; unsuccessful, ominous, adverse,
ordinary, mobbed, equaled, crowded, (adj, n) instant; (n) flash, jiffy, minute, disastrous, unfavorable; (adj, v)
accompanied, common, grouped, import, second, time, bit, hour. untoward. ANTONYMS: (adj)
surpassed; (adv) jointly; (n) foe. ANTONYMS: (n) inconsequence, age, fortunate, happy, auspicious,
gathered: (adj) deepened, congregated, triviality. successful.
accumulated, amassed, assembled, sign: (n, v) mark, motion, gesture; (n)
concentrated, equanimous, portent, indication, manifestation,
congregate, collective. imprint, presage, brand, poster; (v)
Victor Hugo 305
CHAPTER II
A PRIEST AND A PHILOSOPHER ARE TWO

DIFFERENT THINGS
The priest whom the young girls had observed at the top of the North tower,
leaning over the Place and so attentive to the dance of the gypsy, was, in fact,
Archdeacon Claude Frollo.%
Our readers have not forgotten the mysterious cell which the archdeacon had
reserved for himself in that tower. (I do not know, by the way be it said, whether
it be not the same, the interior of which can be seen to-day through a little square
window, opening to the east at the height of a man above the platform from
which the towers spring; a bare and dilapidated den, whose badly plastered
walls are ornamented here and there, at the present day, with some wretched
yellow engravings representing the façades of cathedrals. I presume that this
hole is jointly inhabited by bats and spiders, and that, consequently, it wages a
double war of extermination on the flies).
Every day, an hour before sunset, the archdeacon ascended the staircase to
the tower, and shut himself up in this cell, where he sometimes passed whole
nights. That day, at the moment when, standing before the low door of his
retreat, he was fitting into the lock the complicated little key which he always
carried about him in the purse suspended to his side, a sound of tambourine and
Thesaurus
bats: (adj) nutty, loony, crackers, demolition, liquidation, eradication, speculate.
cracked, barmy, batty, balmy, goofy, annihilation, expiry, expiration; (v) purse: (n) bag, pouch, money,
wacky, nuts, loopy. extirpation. ANTONYMS: (n) handbag, sac, currency, pocketbook,
dilapidated: (adj, v) bedraggled, preservation, survival. pelf; (v) wrinkle, pucker, crease.
frayed; (adj) decayed, decrepit, plastered: (adj) drunk, tight, spiders: (n) horseshoe crabs, Araneida,
derelict, shabby, worn out, rickety, intoxicated, pixilated, loaded, soaked, order Araneae, order Araneida,
broken, ragged, damaged. sloshed, smashed, wet, inebriated, scorpions, Araneae.
ANTONYMS: (adj) pristine, elegant, pissed. sunset: (n) dusk, sundown, nightfall,
trim, tidy, thriving, sound, solid, presume: (v) dare, consider, believe, twilight, night, sunsetting, periodic
intact, sturdy, habitable. think, infer, guess, expect, esteem, event, crepuscule, atmospheric
extermination: (n) destruction, conclude, suppose, conjecture. phenomenon, hour, recurrent event.
devastation, death, obliteration, ANTONYMS: (v) appreciate, despair, ANTONYMS: (n) sunrise, daybreak.
castanets had reached his ear. These sounds came from the Place du Parvis. The
cell, as we have already said, had only one window opening upon the rear of the
church. Claude Frollo had hastily withdrawn the key, and an instant later, he
was on the top of the tower, in the gloomy and pensive attitude in which the
maidens had seen him.%
There he stood, grave, motionless, absorbed in one look and one thought. All
Paris lay at his feet, with the thousand spires of its edifices and its circular
horizon of gentle hills-- with its river winding under its bridges, and its people
moving to and fro through its streets,-- with the clouds of its smoke,-- with the
mountainous chain of its roofs which presses Notre-Dame in its doubled folds;
but out .of all the city, the archdeacon gazed at one corner only of the pavement,
the Place du Parvis; in all that throng at but one figure,-- the gypsy.
It would have been difficult to say what was the nature of this look, and
whence proceeded the flame that flashed from it. It was a fixed gaze, which was,
nevertheless, full of trouble and tumult. And, from the profound immobility of
his whole body, barely agitated at intervals by an involuntary shiver, as a tree is
moved by the wind; from the stiffness of his elbows, more marble than the
balustrade on which they leaned; or the sight of the petrified smile which
contracted his face,-- one would have said that nothing living was left about
Claude Frollo except his eyes.
The gypsy was dancing; she was twirling her tambourine on the tip of her
finger, and tossing it into the air as she danced Provençal sarabands; agile, light,
joyous, and unconscious of the formidable gaze which descended
perpendicularly upon her head.
The crowd was swarming around her; from time to time, a man accoutred in
red and yellow made them form into a circle, and then returned, seated himself
on a chair a few paces from the dancer, and took the goat's head on his knees.
This man seemed to be the gypsy's companion. Claude Frollo could not
distinguish his features from his elevated post.
From the moment when the archdeacon caught sight of this stranger, his
attention seemed divided between him and the dancer, and his face became more
Thesaurus
agitated: (adj) upset, excited, nervous, unconscious, unintentional, forced, firmness, awkwardness, inclemency,
restive, tumultuous, distressed, tense, mechanical, unthinking, reluctant, harshness, tension, roughness.
jumpy, overwrought, anxious, unwilling, compulsory, inadvertent, ANTONYMS: (n) softness, looseness,
alarmed. ANTONYMS: (adj) calm, accidental. ANTONYMS: (adj) suppleness, weakness, ease,
lethargic, tranquil, relaxed, assured, voluntary, intentional, intended, malleability, friendliness, relaxation,
cool, still. willing. leniency, smoothness, limpness.
castanets: (n) bones, maraca, finger mountainous: (adj) colossal, winding: (n) twist, wind, turn; (adj)
cymbals, clappers. gargantuan, huge, hilly, giant, alpine, indirect, crooked, circuitous,
doubled: (adj) twofold, multiple, enormous, large, rugged, gigantic, meandering, twisty, wandering; (adj,
doubles, folded, repeated, dual, cragged. ANTONYMS: (adj) flat, tiny. n) twisting, twisted. ANTONYMS:
bivalent, reduplicate. stiffness: (n) hardness, severity, (adj) direct, unbent.
involuntary: (adj) instinctive, inflexibility, rigor, clumsiness,
Victor Hugo 307
and more gloomy. All at once he rose upright, and a quiver ran through his
whole body: "Who is that man?" he muttered between his teeth: "I have always
seen her alone before!"
Then he plunged down beneath the tortuous vault of the spiral staircase, and
once more descended. As he passed the door of the bell chamber, which was
ajar, be saw something which struck him; he beheld Quasimodo, who, leaning
through an opening of one of those slate penthouses which resemble enormous
blinds, appeared also to be gazing at the Place. He was engaged in so profound a
contemplation, that he did not notice the passage of his adopted father. His
savage eye had a singular expression; it was a charmed, tender look. "This is
strange!" murmured Claude. "Is it the gypsy at whom he is thus gazing?" He
continued his descent. At the end of a few minutes, the anxious archdeacon
entered upon the Place from the door at the base of the tower.%
"What has become of the gypsy girl?" he said, mingling with the group of
spectators which the sound of the tambourine had collected.
"I know not," replied one of his neighbors, "I think that she has gone to make
some of her fandangoes in the house opposite, whither they have called her."
In the place of the gypsy, on the carpet, whose arabesques had seemed to
vanish but a moment previously by the capricious figures of her dance, the
archdeacon no longer beheld any one but the red and yellow man, who, in order
to earn a few testers in his turn, was walking round the circle, with his elbows on
his hips, his head thrown back, his face red, his neck outstretched, with a chair
between his teeth. To the chair he had fastened a cat, which a neighbor had lent,
and which was spitting in great affright.
"Notre-Dame!" exclaimed the archdeacon, at the moment when the juggler,
perspiring heavily, passed in front of him with his pyramid of chair and his cat,
"What is Master Pierre Gringoire doing here?"
The harsh voice of the archdeacon threw the poor fellow into such a
commotion that he lost his equilibrium, together with his whole edifice, and the
chair and the cat tumbled pell-mell upon the heads of the spectators, in the midst
of inextinguishable hootings.
Thesaurus
ajar: (v) dissentient, unclosed, cogitation, musing, introspection, perspirable, emitting perspiration,
unstopped, wide open, out of tune; speculation, animus, deliberation; (n, body process, bodily process, bodily
(adj) open, gaping, partly open, not v) study. function.
closed. dance: (v) caper, bop, to dance, cavort, spitting: (n) spiting, expectoration,
commotion: (n) tumult, ado, play, skip, to show courage, step; (n, ejection, sizzle, projection, forcing
disturbance, turmoil, stir, din, flurry, v) hop, jump, shake. out, expulsion, saliva.
fuss, bedlam, tempest; (n, v) juggler: (n) performer, magician, tumbled: (adj) disordered.
agitation. ANTONYMS: (n) peace, cheat, conjurer, prestidigitator, vanish: (n, v) disappear; (adj, v) fade;
order, calm, serenity, calmness, deceiver, trickster, jockey, (v) disperse, pass, go, die, dissipate,
stillness, quiet, tranquility, inactivity. prestigiator, conveyer. evaporate, depart, flee, melt away.
contemplation: (n) consideration, perspiring: (adj) sweaty, sweating, ANTONYMS: (v) come, arrive, wax,
reflection, thought, attention, wet, warm, activity, sudatory, stay.
It is probable that Master Pierre Gringoire (for it was indeed he) would have
had a sorry account to settle with the neighbor who owned the cat, and all the
bruised and scratched faces which surrounded him, if he had not hastened to
profit by the tumult to take refuge in the church, whither Claude Frollo had
made him a sign to follow him.%
The cathedral was already dark and deserted; the side-aisles were full of
shadows, and the lamps of the chapels began to shine out like stars, so black had
the vaulted ceiling become. Only the great rose window of the façade, whose
thousand colors were steeped in a ray of horizontal sunlight, glittered in the
gloom like a mass of diamonds, and threw its dazzling reflection to the other end
of the nave.
When they had advanced a few paces, Dom Claude placed his back against a
pillar, and gazed intently at Gringoire. The gaze was not the one which Gringoire
feared, ashamed as he was of having been caught by a grave and learned person
in the costume of a buffoon. There was nothing mocking or ironical in the
priest's glance, it was serious, tranquil, piercing. The archdeacon was the first to
break the silence.
"Come now, Master Pierre. You are to explain many things to me. And first
of all, how comes it that you have not been seen for two months, and that now
one finds you in the public squares, in a fine equipment in truth! Motley red and
yellow, like a Caudebec apple?"
"Messire," said Gringoire, piteously, "it is, in fact, an amazing accoutrement.
You see me no more comfortable in it than a cat coiffed with a calabash. 'Tis
very ill done, I am conscious, to expose messieurs the sergeants of the watch to
the liability of cudgelling beneath this cassock the humerus of a Pythagorean
philosopher. But what would you have, my reverend master? 'tis the fault of my
ancient jerkin, which abandoned me in cowardly wise, at the beginning of the
winter, under the pretext that it was falling into tatters, and that it required
repose in the basket of a rag-picker. What is one to do? Civilization has not yet
arrived at the point where one can go stark naked, as ancient Diogenes wished.
Add that a very cold wind was blowing, and 'tis not in the month of January that
Thesaurus
accoutrement: (n) accouterment, shrinking; (adj) timid, afraid, craven, respectable, honourable.
accessory, clothes, wear, clothing, gutless, sneaky, fainthearted, faint; scratched: (adj) hurt, abraded,
vesture, attachment, appointment, (adv) recreantly. ANTONYMS: (adj, sgraffito, raw, dented, spoiled,
accessary, belt, apparatus. adv) brave, daring, bold, courageous; damaged, injured.
buffoon: (n) fool, jester, clown, zany, (adj) intrepid, fearless, strong, steeped: (adj) seasoned, experienced.
merry Andrew, mimic, pantaloon, determined; (adv) dauntless, gutsy, tranquil: (adj, v) quiet, unruffled,
joker, scaramouch, droll, buffo. unafraid. smooth; (adj, n) peaceful; (adj) placid,
calabash: (n) gourd, gourd vine, diamonds: (n) hearts, ice, spades, still, serene, sedate, collected,
crucible, porringer, potager, pan, sparkler, clubs. composed, equable. ANTONYMS:
saucer, tree, calabash tree, bottle, reverend: (n) preacher, clergyman, (adj) noisy, tense, agitated, anxious,
dish. parson, rector, vicar, pastor, priest, troubled, bustling, loud, perturbed,
cowardly: (adj, adv) dastardly, scared, minister, churchman; (adj) frenetic, moving, bothered.
Victor Hugo 309
one can successfully attempt to make humanity take this new step. This garment
presented itself, I took it, and I left my ancient black smock, which, for a hermetic
like myself, was far from being hermetically closed. Behold me then, in the
garments of a stage-player, like Saint Genest. What would you have? 'tis an
eclipse. Apollo himself tended the flocks of Admetus."
"'Tis a fine profession that you are engaged in!" replied the archdeacon.%
"I agree, my master, that 'tis better to philosophize and poetize, to blow the
flame in the furnace, or to receive it from carry cats on a shield. So, when you
addressed me, I was as foolish as an ass before a turnspit. But what would you
have, messire? One must eat every day, and the finest Alexandrine verses are
not worth a bit of Brie cheese. Now, I made for Madame Marguerite of Flanders,
that famous epithalamium, as you know, and the city will not pay me, under the
pretext that it was not excellent; as though one could give a tragedy of Sophocles
for four crowns! Hence, I was on the point of dying with hunger. Happily, I
found that I was rather strong in the jaw; so I said to this jaw,-- perform some
feats of strength and of equilibrium: nourish thyself. Ale te ipsam. A pack of
beggars who have become my good friends, have taught me twenty sorts of
herculean feats, and now I give to my teeth every evening the bread which they
have earned during the day by the sweat of my brow. After all, concede, I grant
that it is a sad employment for my intellectual faculties, and that man is not
made to pass his life in beating the tambourine and biting chairs. But, reverend
master, it is not sufficient to pass one's life, one must earn the means for life.''
Dom Claude listened in silence. All at once his deep-set eye assumed so
sagacious and penetrating an expression, that Gringoire felt himself, so to speak,
searched to the bottom of the soul by that glance.
"Very good, Master Pierre; but how comes it that you are now in company
with that gypsy dancer?"
"In faith!" said Gringoire, "'tis because she is my wife and I am her husband."
The priest's gloomy eyes flashed into flame.
Thesaurus
eclipse: (v) darken, overshadow, nourish: (v) foster, keep, bring up, poetize: (v) verse, compose, elegize,
cloud, shade, outdo, surpass, dim, nurture, sustain, aliment, cherish, write, scan, sing, rhyme, make verses,
transcend, outshine, outweigh; (n) feed, maintain, cultivate; (n, v) cradle. indite, pen, poetise.
disappearance. ANTONYMS: (n) rise; ANTONYMS: (v) starve, sap. sagacious: (adj, v) judicious, prudent,
(v) fail, brighten, clear, disclose. penetrating: (adj) astute, sharp, discreet; (adj) rational, astute, acute,
herculean: (adj) cyclopean, prodigious, cutting, discerning, incisive, piercing, discerning, keen, perspicacious,
formidable, powerful, brawny, perceptive, discriminating, trenchant; intelligent, shrewd. ANTONYMS:
laborious, difficult, hard, giant, (adj, v) biting, acute. ANTONYMS: (adj) foolish, stupid, dense.
gigantic; (v) palestric. (adj) mild, soft, mellow, low, gentle, smock: (n) duster, shirt, chemise,
hermetically: (adv) chemically, tightly, dull, dense. gaberdine, sark, dust coat, overalls,
impenetrably, sealedly, philosophize: (v) think, reason, dress, blouse, smicket, coverall.
imperviously. generalize, cogitate, cerebrate. turnspit: (n) turnbroach.
"Have you done that, you wretch!" he cried, seizing Gringoire's arm with
fury; "have you been so abandoned by God as to raise your hand against that
girl?"
"On my chance of paradise, monseigneur," replied Gringoire, trembling in
every limb, "I swear to you that I have never touched her, if that is what disturbs
you."
"Then why do you talk of husband and wife?" said the priest. Gringoire made
haste to relate to him as succinctly as possible, all that the reader already knows,
his adventure in the Court of Miracles and the broken-crock marriage. It
appeared, moreover, that this marriage had led to no results whatever, and that
each evening the gypsy girl cheated him of his nuptial right as on the first day.
"'Tis a mortification," he said in conclusion, "but that is because I have had the
misfortune to wed a virgin."
"What do you mean?" demanded the archdeacon, who had been gradually
appeased by this recital.%
"'Tis very difficult to explain," replied the poet. "It is a superstition. My wife
is, according to what an old thief, who is called among us the Duke of Egypt, has
told me, a foundling or a lost child, which is the same thing. She wears on her
neck an amulet which, it is affirmed, will cause her to meet her parents some
day, but which will lose its virtue if the young girl loses hers. Hence it follows
that both of us remain very virtuous."
"So," resumed Claude, whose brow cleared more and more, "you believe,
Master Pierre, that this creature has not been approached by any man?"
"What would you have a man do, Dom Claude, as against a superstition?
She has got that in her head. I assuredly esteem as a rarity this nunlike prudery
which is preserved untamed amid those Bohemian girls who are so easily
brought into subjection. But she has three things to protect her: the Duke of
Egypt, who has taken her under his safeguard, reckoning, perchance, on selling
her to some gay abbé; all his tribe, who hold her in singular veneration, like a
Notre-Dame; and a certain tiny poignard, which the buxom dame always wears
about her, in some nook, in spite of the ordinances of the provost, and which one
Thesaurus
affirmed: (adj) acknowledged, captivity, bondage, confinement, untamed: (adj) unbroken, barbarous,
avowed, guaranteed. servitude, dependence, enslavement, fierce, feral, barbarian, wild,
buxom: (adj) bosomy, chubby, bonny, slavery, repression, subjugation. unpolished, uncivilised, uncivilized,
plump, sonsy, voluptuous, succinctly: (adv) compactly, briefly, uncombed, ferocious. ANTONYMS:
curvaceous, shapely, full, crummy, tersely, shortly, summarily, (adj) cultivated, tame.
fat. ANTONYMS: (adj) skinny, bony. compendiously, laconically, pithily, veneration: (n) respect, awe, honor,
cheated: (adj) embittered, resentful. curtly, sententiously, condensedly. devotion, esteem, adoration,
hers: (pron) she, his; (adj) own. superstition: (n) superstitious, taboo, deference, estimation, worship,
prudery: (n) primness, modesty, religion, old wives' tale, superstitious admiration, thaumatolatry.
coquetry, priggishness, prudishness, notion, lore, folklore, fanaticism, ANTONYMS: (n) contempt,
demureness; (v) sentimentalism. fallacy, belief, magic. ANTONYMS: disapproval.
subjection: (n) conquest, oppression, (n) science, truth.
Victor Hugo 311
causes to fly out into her hands by squeezing her waist. 'Tis a proud wasp, I can
tell you!"
The archdeacon pressed Gringoire with questions.%
La Esmeralda, in the judgment of Gringoire, was an inoffensive and
charming creature, pretty, with the exception of a pout which was peculiar to
her; a naïve and passionate damsel, ignorant of everything and enthusiastic
about everything; not yet aware of the difference between a man and a woman,
even in her dreams; made like that; wild especially over dancing, noise, the open
air; a sort of woman bee, with invisible wings on her feet, and living in a
whirlwind. She owed this nature to the wandering life which she had always
led. Gringoire had succeeded in learning that, while a mere child, she had
traversed Spain and Catalonia, even to Sicily; he believed that she had even been
taken by the caravan of Zingari, of which she formed a part, to the kingdom of
Algiers, a country situated in Achaia, which country adjoins, on one side Albania
and Greece; on the other, the Sicilian Sea, which is the road to Constantinople.
The Bohemians, said Gringoire, were vassals of the King of Algiers, in his quality
of chief of the White Moors. One thing is certain, that la Esmeralda had come to
France while still very young, by way of Hungary. From all these countries the
young girl had brought back fragments of queer jargons, songs, and strange
ideas, which made her language as motley as her costume, half Parisian, half
African. However, the people of the quarters which she frequented loved her for
her gayety, her daintiness, her lively manners, her dances, and her songs. She
believed herself to be hated, in all the city, by but two persons, of whom she
often spoke in terror: the sacked nun of the Tour-Roland, a villanous recluse who
cherished some secret grudge against these gypsies, and who cursed the poor
dancer every time that the latter passed before her window; and a priest, who
never met her without casting at her looks and words which frightened her.
The mention of this last circumstance disturbed the archdeacon greatly,
though Gringoire paid no attention to his perturbation; to such an extent had two
months sufficed to cause the heedless poet to forget the singular details of the
evening on which he had met the gypsy, and the presence of the archdeacon in it
Thesaurus
circumstance: (n) affair, incident, inattentive, neglectful, negligent, malicious, exciting.
matter, event, occasion, chance, thoughtless, rash, regardless, persons: (n) folk, public, society,
accident, opportunity, adventure, unwary, indifferent; (adj, v) wanton. world.
casualty, fact. ANTONYMS: (adj) heedful, attentive, squeezing: (n) constriction,
countries: (n) country. mindful, conscientious, prudent, compression, pressure, squeeze,
daintiness: (adj, n) frailty, fragility, careful, cautious. crushing, compressing, expulsion,
weakness, dainty; (n) fineness, inoffensive: (adj, n) harmless, extrusion, distress, power play; (v)
loveliness, niceness, fastidiousness, innocent; (adj) innocuous, innoxious, expression.
finesse, refinement, nicety. safe, unoffending, euphemistic, whirlwind: (n) tornado, hurricane,
ANTONYMS: (n) inelegance, hurtless, pleasant, gentle, tame. twister, gale, tempest, cyclone,
sturdiness, ugliness. ANTONYMS: (adj) rude, unsavory, typhoon, waterspout, windstorm,
heedless: (adj) careless, reckless, unpleasant, harmful, dysphemistic, flurry, dust devil.
all. Otherwise, the little dancer feared nothing; she did not tell fortunes, which
protected her against those trials for magic which were so frequently instituted
against gypsy women. And then, Gringoire held the position of her brother, if
not of her husband. After all, the philosopher endured this sort of platonic
marriage very patiently. It meant a shelter and bread at least. Every morning, he
set out from the lair of the thieves, generally with the gypsy; he helped her make
her collections of targes and little blanks in the squares; each evening he returned
to the same roof with her, allowed her to bolt herself into her little chamber, and
slept the sleep of the just. A very sweet existence, taking it all in all, he said, and
well adapted to revery. And then, on his soul and conscience, the philosopher
was not very sure that he was madly in love with the gypsy. He loved her goat
almost as dearly. It was a charming animal, gentle, intelligent, clever; a learned
goat. Nothing was more common in the Middle Ages than these learned
animals, which amazed people greatly, and often led their instructors to the
stake. But the witchcraft of the goat with the golden hoofs was a very innocent
species of magic. Gringoire explained them to the archdeacon, whom these
details seemed to interest deeply. In the majority of cases, it was sufficient to
present the tambourine to the goat in such or such a manner, in order to obtain
from him the trick desired. He had been trained to this by the gypsy, who
possessed, in these delicate arts, so rare a talent that two months had sufficed to
teach the goat to write, with movable letters, the word "Phoebus."%
"'Phoebus!'" said the priest; "why 'Phoebus'?"
"I know not," replied Gringoire. "Perhaps it is a word which she believes to
be endowed with some magic and secret virtue. She often repeats it in a low
tone when she thinks that she is alone."
"Are you sure," persisted Claude, with his penetrating glance, "that it is only
a word and not a name?"
"The name of whom?" said the poet.
"How should I know?" said the priest.
"This is what I imagine, messire. These Bohemians are something like
Guebrs, and adore the sun. Hence, Phoebus."
Thesaurus
adore: (v) worship, idolize, admire, hiding place, hideout, cell, retreat, flexible, active; (v) shifting.
glorify, cherish, appreciate; (n, v) earth, sanctum sanctorum; (adj) sty, ANTONYMS: (adj) immovable,
honor; (adj) adoring, worshipping, sink of corruption. unchangeable.
worshiping; (adv) adoringly. madly: (adv) insanely, furiously, platonic: (adj) chaste, spiritual,
ANTONYMS: (v) detest, despise, sorely, frantically, wildly, devilishly, ghostly; (v) staid, philosophical,
condemn, loathe, disrespect, abhor, deadly, dementedly, foolishly, philosophic, stayed, reflective,
scorn. distractedly; (adj, adv) rabidly. thoughtful, studious, stoical.
endowed: (adj) gifted, clever, cute, ANTONYMS: (adv) sensibly, calmly, ANTONYM: (adj) physical.
felicitous, competent, blessed, artistic, sanely, carefully; (adj) slightly. witchcraft: (n) incantation, sorcery,
brilliant, ingenious, talented, movable: (adj) portable, transferable, witchery, enchantment, spell, black
qualitied. mercurial, adjustable, ambulatory, magic, necromancy, fascination,
lair: (n) burrow, hole, hideaway, changeable, transportable, moveable, charm, black art, glamour.
Victor Hugo 313
"That does not seem so clear to me as to you, Master Pierre."

"After all, that does not concern me. Let her mumble her Phoebus at her
pleasure. One thing is certain, that Djali loves me almost as much as he does
her."
"Who is Djali?"
"The goat."
The archdeacon dropped his chin into his hand, and appeared to reflect for a
moment. All at once he turned abruptly to Gringoire once more.%
"And do you swear to me that you have not touched her?"
"Whom?" said Gringoire; "the goat?"
"No, that woman."
"My wife? I swear to you that I have not."
"You are often alone with her?"
"A good hour every evening."
Porn Claude frowned.
"Oh! oh! Solus cum sola non cogitabuntur orare Pater Noster."
"Upon my soul, I could say the Pater, and the Ave Maria, and the Credo in
Deum patrem omnipotentem without her paying any more attention to me than a
chicken to a church."
"Swear to me, by the body of your mother," repeated the archdeacon
violently, "that you have not touched that creature with even the tip of your
finger."
"I will also swear it by the head of my father, for the two things have more
affinity between them. But, my reverend master, permit me a question in my
turn."
"Speak, sir."
"What concern is it of yours?"
Thesaurus
abruptly: (adv) precipitously, rudely, (n) repulsion, dissimilarity, avow, depone, depose, aver.
brusquely, curtly, gruffly, shortly, difference, consanguinity, aversion, ANTONYMS: (v) distrust, refute,
sharply, bluntly, hastily, hatred, horror. deny, compliment.
unexpectedly, steeply. ANTONYMS: mumble: (n, v) murmur, whisper, violently: (adj, adv) vehemently, hotly,
(adv) gradually, civilly, attentively, hum, rumble; (v) grumble, chew, madly, ardently; (adv) wildly,
kindly, politely, verbosely, mutter, jabber, talk, utter, verbalize. passionately, strongly, hard,
eventually, pleasantly, slowly, porn: (n) pornography, porno, erotica, furiously, turbulently; (adv, n)
indirectly. obscenity; (adj) pornographic, vigorously. ANTONYMS: (adv)
affinity: (n) analogy, alliance, naughty. gently, nonviolently, feebly,
propinquity, rapport, bond, relation, sola: (n) shola. impassively, peacefully, tamely.
relationship, kindred, semblance, swear: (v) declare, assure, assert,
penchant, similarity. ANTONYMS: affirm, curse, pledge; (n, v) promise,
The archdeacon's pale face became as crimson as the cheek of a young girl.
He remained for a moment without answering; then, with visible
embarrassment,
"Listen, Master Pierre Gringoire. You are not yet damned, so far as I know. I
take an interest in you, and wish you well. Now the least contact with that
Egyptian of the demon would make you the vassal of Satan. You know that 'tis
always the body which ruins the soul. Woe to you if you approach that woman!
That is all."
"I tried once," said Gringoire, scratching his ear; "it was the first day: but I got
stung."
"You were so audacious, Master Pierre?" and the priest's brow clouded over
again.%
"On another occasion," continued the poet, with a smile, "I peeped through
the keyhole, before going to bed, and I beheld the most delicious dame in her
shift that ever made a bed creak under her bare foot."
"Go to the devil!" cried the priest, with a terrible look; and, giving the amazed
Gringoire a push on the shoulders, he plunged, with long strides, under the
gloomiest arcades of the cathedral.
Thesaurus
amazed: (adj) astounded, astonished, creak: (v) pipe, screech, twang, keyhole: (n) hole, mousehole,
stunned, dumbfounded, skreigh, resound, jangle, gnash, pigeonhole, porthole, loophole, free
flabbergasted, shocked, staggered, confess; (n) creaking; (adv) throw line, peephole, knothole,
bewildered, surprised, creakingly; (adj) ancient. pinhole, small hole.
thunderstruck, aghast. dame: (n) lady, female, queen, girl, ruins: (n) debris, wreck, remains,
answering: (adj) respondent, gentlewoman, wench, skirt, matron, remainder, carcass, wreckage, relics,
responsive, according, agreeing, madam, ma'am, woman. rubbish, shell, remnants, hulk.
responsory; (n) respondency. damned: (adj) accursed, doomed, scratching: (n) scrape, scraping,
cathedral: (n) church, temple, place of blasted, condemned, damn, cussed, abrasion, mark, scar, poor
worship, house of worship; (adj) wretched, infernal, hateful, handwriting, incision, excoriation,
authoritative, parochial, official, goddamned; (adv) damnably. chicken feed; (adj) hoarse, abrasive.
cathedralic. ANTONYM: (adj) saved.
Victor Hugo 315
CHAPTER %III
THE BELLS
After the morning in the pillory, the neighbors of Notre- Dame thought they
noticed that Quasimodo's ardor for ringing had grown cool. Formerly, there had
been peals for every occasion, long morning serenades, which lasted from prime
to compline; peals from the belfry for a high mass, rich scales drawn over the
smaller bells for a wedding, for a christening, and mingling in the air like a rich
embroidery of all sorts of charming sounds. The old church, all vibrating and
sonorous, was in a perpetual joy of bells. One was constantly conscious of the
presence of a spirit of noise and caprice, who sang through all those mouths of
brass. Now that spirit seemed to have departed; the cathedral seemed gloomy,
and gladly remained silent; festivals and funerals had the simple peal, dry and
bare, demanded by the ritual, nothing more. Of the double noise which
constitutes a church, the organ within, the bell without, the organ alone
remained. One would have said that there was no longer a musician in the
belfry. Quasimodo was always there, nevertheless; what, then, had happened to
him? Was it that the shame and despair of the pillory still lingered in the bottom
of his heart, that the lashes of his tormentor's whip reverberated unendingly in
his soul, and that the sadness of such treatment had wholly extinguished in him
even his passion for the bells? or was it that Marie had a rival in the heart of the
Thesaurus
ardor: (adj, n) eagerness, zeal; (n) extinguished: (adj) extinct, out, dead, continuous, perennial. ANTONYMS:
fervor, fervency, fire, flame, passion, quenched, allayed, destroyed; (n) (adj) temporary, intermittent,
enthusiasm, ardency, heat, avidity. defunctness, complete annihilation, transitory, mortal, unstable, finite,
ANTONYMS: (n) apathy, coolness, experimental extinction, inconstant, occasional, sporadic.
coldness, hatred. extermination, extinction. reverberated: (adj) rebounding,
bells: (n) addition, approval, musician: (n) singer, composer, repellent, driven back.
matrimony, marriage, approbation, instrumentalist, minstrel, clarinettist, unendingly: (adv) continuously,
wedding. lutenist, director, choirmaster, unceasingly, incessantly, ceaselessly,
christening: (n) naming, accompanist, harpsichordist, harpist. perpetually, everlastingly, eternally,
denomination, chrism, designation, perpetual: (adj) incessant, continual, unremittingly, infinitely, constantly,
identification. constant, endless, eternal, everlasting, continually. ANTONYM: (adv)
compline: (n) complin, evensong. lasting, ceaseless, immortal, sporadically.
bellringer of Notre-Dame, and that the great bell and her fourteen sisters were
neglected for something more amiable and more beautiful?
It chanced that, in the year of grace 1482, Annunciation Day fell on Tuesday,
the twenty-fifth of March. That day the air was so pure and light that
Quasimodo felt some returning affection for his bells. He therefore ascended the
northern tower while the beadle below was opening wide the doors of the
church, which were then enormous panels of stout wood, covered with leather,
bordered with nails of gilded iron, and framed in carvings "very artistically
elaborated."
On arriving in the lofty bell chamber, Quasimodo gazed for some time at the
six bells and shook his head sadly, as though groaning over some foreign
element which had interposed itself in his heart between them and him. But
when he had set them to swinging, when he felt that cluster of bells moving
under his hand, when he saw, for he did not hear it, the palpitating octave
ascend and descend that sonorous scale, like a bird hopping from branch to
branch; when the demon Music, that demon who shakes a sparkling bundle of
strette, trills and arpeggios, had taken possession of the poor deaf man, he
became happy once more, he forgot everything, and his heart expanding, made
his face beam.%
He went and came, he beat his hands together, he ran from rope to rope, he
animated the six singers with voice and gesture, like the leader of an orchestra
who is urging on intelligent musicians.
"Go on," said he, "go on, go on, Gabrielle, pour out all thy noise into the Place,
'tis a festival to-day. No laziness, Thibauld; thou art relaxing; go on, go on, then,
art thou rusted, thou sluggard? That is well! quick! quick! let not thy clapper be
seen! Make them all deaf like me. That's it, Thibauld, bravely done! Guillaume!
Guillaume! thou art the largest, and Pasquier is the smallest, and Pasquier does
best. Let us wager that those who hear him will understand him better than they
understand thee. Good! good! my Gabrielle, stoutly, more stoutly! Eli! what are
you doing up aloft there, you two Moineaux (sparrows)? I do not see you
making the least little shred of noise. What is the meaning of those beaks of
Thesaurus
artistically: (adv) ingeniously, laziness: (n) indolence, acedia, (v) rip, tear.
pleasingly, inventively, inactivity, inertia, sloth, slowness, sluggard: (n) loafer, idler, slugabed,
imaginatively, creatively, elegantly, lethargy, inactiveness, faineance, slacker, layabout, lazybones; (n, v)
originally, resourcefully, lassitude, dreaminess. ANTONYMS: drone; (v) loiterer, lingerer, lag; (adj)
productively, innovatively, (n) diligence, willingness, vigor, sluggish.
harmoniously. liveliness, interest. stoutly: (adv) sturdily, robustly,
beadle: (n) verger, catchpoll, almoner, musicians: (n) musical group. strongly, solidly, lustily, vigorously,
functionary, sacristan, sexton, janitor, palpitating: (adj) fluttering, throbbing, toughly, resolutely, stockily, portly,
Suisse, tipstaff, officer, George Wells aflare, flittering, flying, unsteady, obstinately. ANTONYM: (adv) feebly.
beadle. vibrant, flaring. wager: (n, v) stake, hazard, risk,
groaning: (adj) moaning, groaningly, shred: (n) rag, piece, scintilla, iota, bit, venture, gamble, chance; (v) lay,
inarticulate. strip, remnant, sliver; (adj, n) scrap; pledge, pawn, play; (n) stakes.
Victor Hugo 317
copper which seem to be gaping when they should sing? Come, work now, 'tis
the Feast of the Annunciation. The sun is fine, the chime must be fine also. Poor
Guillaume! thou art all out of breath, my big fellow!"
He was wholly absorbed in spurring on his bells, all six of which vied with
each other in leaping and shaking their shining haunches, like a noisy team of
Spanish mules, pricked on here and there by the apostrophes of the muleteer.%
All at once, on letting his glance fall between the large slate scales which
cover the perpendicular wall of the bell tower at a certain height, he beheld on
the square a young girl, fantastically dressed, stop, spread out on the ground a
carpet, on which a small goat took up its post, and a group of spectators collect
around her. This sight suddenly changed the course of his ideas, and congealed
his enthusiasm as a breath of air congeals melted rosin. He halted, turned his
back to the bells, and crouched down behind the projecting roof of slate, fixing
upon the dancer that dreamy, sweet, and tender look which had already
astonished the archdeacon on one occasion. Meanwhile, the forgotten bells died
away abruptly and all together, to the great disappointment of the lovers of bell
ringing, who were listening in good faith to the peal from above the Pont du
Change, and who went away dumbfounded, like a dog who has been offered a
bone and given a stone.
Thesaurus
astonished: (adj) astonish, yawning, cavernous, discontinuous, glowing; (adj, n) lucid, resplendent,
dumbfounded, flabbergasted, wide, ajar, drowsy, hollow, wide clear; (v) shine. ANTONYMS: (adj)
stunned, aghast, bewildered, open; (adj, v) oscitant. ANTONYMS: dull, pale, blemished.
astounded, taken aback, (adj) cramped, narrow. slate: (n) list, platform, plank; (v)
thunderstruck, astonied; (v) amaze. leaping: (n) jump, bounce, bound, condemn, paper, papyrus,
congealed: (adj) firm, solidify, frozen, leap, spring, saltation, bouncing; (v) parchment, foolscap, chide, lambaste,
jelled, jellied, stiff, thick, concrete. jumping; (adj, v) bounding; (adj) intend.
fixing: (n) fixation, fix, adjustment, springing; (adv) leapingly. spurring: (n) spur, goad, prodding,
repair, mending, altering, rosin: (n) colophony, gum, kino gum, prod, goading, gad, encouragement,
emasculation, castration, furniture, organic compound, natural resin. branch line, acceleration, urging,
fastener, fitting. shining: (adj, v) brilliant; (adj) lustrous, spine.
gaping: (adj, n) agape; (adj) vast, radiant, glossy, luminous, glorious,
Victor Hugo 319
CHAPTER IV
ANARKH
It chanced that upon a fine morning in this same month of March, I think it
was on Saturday the 29th, Saint Eustache's day, our young friend the student,
Jehan Frollo du Moulin, perceived, as he was dressing himself, that his breeches,
which contained his purse, gave out no metallic ring. "Poor purse," he said,
drawing it from his fob, "what! not the smallest parisis! how cruelly the dice,
beer-pots, and Venus have depleted thee! How empty, wrinkled, limp, thou art!
Thou resemblest the throat of a fury! I ask you, Messer Cicero, and Messer
Seneca, copies of whom, all dog's-eared, I behold scattered on the floor, what
profits it me to know, better than any governor of the mint, or any Jew on the
Pont aux Changeurs, that a golden crown stamped with a crown is worth thirty-
five unzains of twenty-five sous, and eight deniers parisis apiece, and that a
crown stamped with a crescent is worth thirty-six unzains of twenty-six sous, six
deniers tournois apiece, if I have not a single wretched black liard to risk on the
double-six! Oh! Consul Cicero! this is no calamity from which one extricates
one's self with periphrases, quemadmodum, and verum enim vero!"%
He dressed himself sadly. An idea had occurred to him as he laced his boots,
but he rejected it at first; nevertheless, it returned, and he put on his waistcoat
wrong side out, an evident sign of violent internal combat. At last he dashed his
Thesaurus
apiece: (adj, adv) each; (adj) one by one; distress; (n, v) trouble. ANTONYMS: depleted: (adj) low, wasted, spent,
(pron) all, both, each one; (adv) (n) blessing, boon, luck, joy, drained, tired, consumed, poor,
individually, singly, for each, for opportunity. infertile, impoverished, useless,
each one, from each one, to each one. cruelly: (adv) harshly, ferociously, empty. ANTONYMS: (adj) refilled,
ANTONYM: (adv) together. fiercely, viciously, inhumanly, renewed, replaced, replenished,
breeches: (n) knickers, inexpressibles, mercilessly, pitilessly, heartlessly, restocked, increased.
knickerbockers, brogues, short, roughly, unkindly; (adj, adv) bitterly. laced: (adj) even, fastened, spiked,
smalls, overalls, small clothes, pants, ANTONYMS: (adv) kindly, drunk, decorated, alcoholic.
trousers, pantaloons. mercifully, sympathetically, tamely, waistcoat: (n) CHUDDER, barbe,
calamity: (n) disaster, adversity, peacefully, humanely, garment, jerkin, jubbah, oilskins,
affliction, misfortune, plague, compassionately, sensitively, pilot jacket, pajamas, cardigan,
catastrophe, tragedy, blow, bale, respectfully, innocently, genially. singlet, talma jacket.
cap roughly on the floor, and exclaimed: "So much the worse! Let come of it what
may. I am going to my brother! I shall catch a sermon, but I shall catch a
crown."
Then be hastily donned his long jacket with furred half- sleeves, picked up
his cap, and went out like a man driven to desperation.%
He descended the Rue de la Harpe toward the City. As he passed the Rue de
la Huchette, the odor of those admirable spits, which were incessantly turning,
tickled his olfactory apparatus, and he bestowed a loving glance toward the
Cyclopean roast, which one day drew from the Franciscan friar, Calatagirone,
this pathetic exclamation: Veramente, queste rotisserie sono cosa stupenda! But
Jehan had not the wherewithal to buy a breakfast, and he plunged, with a
profound sigh, under the gateway of the Petit-Châtelet, that enormous double
trefoil of massive towers which guarded the entrance to the City.
He did not even take the trouble to cast a stone in passing, as was the usage,
at the miserable statue of that Périnet Leclerc who had delivered up the Paris of
Charles VI. to the English, a crime which his effigy, its face battered with stones
and soiled with mud, expiated for three centuries at the corner of the Rue de la
Harpe and the Rue de Buci, as in an eternal pillory.
The Petit-Pont traversed, the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève crossed, Jehan de
Molendino found himself in front of Notre- Dame. Then indecision seized upon
him once more, and he paced for several minutes round the statue of M. Legris,
repeating to himself with anguish: "The sermon is sure, the crown is doubtful."
He stopped a beadle who emerged from the cloister,-- "Where is monsieur
the archdeacon of Josas?"
"I believe that he is in his secret cell in the tower," said the beadle; "I should
advise you not to disturb him there, unless you come from some one like the
pope or monsieur the king."
Jehan clapped his hands.
"Bécliable! here's a magnificent chance to see the famous sorcery cell!"
Thesaurus
effigy: (n) likeness, figure, copy, idol, olfactory: (adj) olfact, odorous, house, eating place, oven, restaurant,
simulacrum, picture, effigies, sensory. skewer.
dummy, appearance, semblance, pillory: (n) stocks, whipping post, sermon: (n) discourse, oration, speech,
graven image. instrument of punishment; (v) address, homily, preachment,
friar: (n) monk, conventual, cenobite, punish, crucify, slate, attack, libel, harangue, preaching, exhortation,
abbot, monastic, palmer, pilgrim, lay malign, penalize, pick holes in. predication; (n, v) lecture.
brother, religious, prior, beadsman. ANTONYMS: (v) compliment, praise. soiled: (adj) grubby, dirty, nasty,
furred: (adj) hairy, hirsute, fur lined, roast: (v) burn, grill, bake, joke, heat, grimy, unclean, filthy, muddy, black,
wooly, fuzzy. quiz, fry, cook, scorch; (n, v) ridicule; mucky, polluted, foul. ANTONYMS:
odor: (n) aroma, scent, odour, (n) joint. ANTONYMS: (v) cool, (adj) pure, immaculate.
bouquet, flavour, perfume, flavor, praise.
savor, stink; (n, v) smell, stench. rotisserie: (n) grill, broiler, eating
Victor Hugo 321
This reflection having brought him to a decision, he plunged resolutely into

the small black doorway, and began the ascent of the spiral of Saint-Gilles, which
leads to the upper stories of the tower. "I am going to see," he said to himself on
the way. "By the ravens of the Holy Virgin! it must needs be a curious thing, that
cell which my reverend brother hides so secretly! 'Tis said that he lights up the
kitchens of hell there, and that he cooks the philosopher's stone there over a hot
fire. Bédieu! I care no more for the philosopher's stone than for a pebble, and I
would rather find over his furnace an omelette of Easter eggs and bacon, than
the biggest philosopher's stone in the world."'
On arriving at the gallery of slender columns, he took breath for a moment,
and swore against the interminable staircase by I know not how many million
cartloads of devils; then he resumed his ascent through the narrow door of the
north tower, now closed to the public. Several moments after passing the bell
chamber, he came upon a little landing-place, built in a lateral niche, and under
the vault of a low, pointed door, whose enormous lock and strong iron bars he
was enabled to see through a loophole pierced in the opposite circular wall of
the staircase. Persons desirous of visiting this door at the present day will
recognize it by this inscription engraved in white letters on the black wall:
"J'ADORE CORALIE, 1823. SIGNE UGENE." "Signé" stands in the text.%
"Ugh!" said the scholar; "'tis here, no doubt."
The key was in the lock, the door was very close to him; he gave it a gentle
push and thrust his head through the opening.
The reader cannot have failed to turn over the admirable works of
Rembrandt, that Shakespeare of painting. Amid so many marvellous
engravings, there is one etching in particular, which is supposed to represent
Doctor Faust, and which it is impossible to contemplate without being dazzled.
It represents a gloomy cell; in the centre is a table loaded with hideous objects;
skulls, spheres, alembics, compasses, hieroglyphic parchments. The doctor is
before this table clad in his large coat and covered to the very eyebrows with his
furred cap. He is visible only to his waist. He has half risen from his immense
arm-chair, his clenched fists rest on the table, and he is gazing with curiosity and
Thesaurus
compasses: (n) aesthesiometer. alternative, keyhole, balistraria, granite, pebblestone; (adj) quartz.
etching: (n) print, corrosion, aperture, eyelet, watchtower, resolutely: (adv) determinedly,
impression, printmaking, etching pigeonhole, mousehole; (v) decidedly, steadfastly, decisively,
process, copper etching, aquatinta, machicolation. unfalteringly, boldly, steadily,
drawing; (v) etch, engrave, water niche: (n) alcove, hole, bay, recess, stubbornly, definitely, resolvedly,
color drawing. nook, compartment, recession, unwaveringly. ANTONYMS: (adv)
hideous: (adj) dreadful, frightful, opening, place, ecological niche, irresolutely, indecisively, uncertainly,
fearful, ghastly, horrid, ugly, fireplace. feebly, hesitantly, aimlessly.
repulsive, lurid, horrible, grisly, omelette: (n) fluffy omelet, dish, firm scholar: (n) learner, academic, student,
grim. ANTONYMS: (adj) lovely, omelet. pundit, apprentice, intellectual, brain,
pleasant, beautiful, wonderful. pebble: (n) boulder, crystal, flint, rock, exhibitioner, academician, professor,
loophole: (n) crevice, gazebo, scree, cobblestone, calculus, crag, disciple. ANTONYM: (n) teacher.
terror at a large luminous circle, formed of magic letters, which gleams from the
wall beyond, like the solar spectrum in a dark chamber. This cabalistic sun
seems to tremble before the eye, and fills the wan cell with its mysterious
radiance. It is horrible and it is beautiful.%
Something very similar to Faust's cell presented itself to Jehan's view, when
he ventured his head through the half- open door. It also was a gloomy and
sparsely lighted retreat. There also stood a large arm-chair and a large table,
compasses, alembics, skeletons of animals suspended from the ceiling, a globe
rolling on the floor, hippocephali mingled promiscuously with drinking cups, in
which quivered leaves of gold, skulls placed upon vellum checkered with
figures and characters, huge manuscripts piled up wide open, without mercy on
the cracking corners of the parchment; in short, all the rubbish of science, and
everywhere on this confusion dust and spiders' webs; but there was no circle of
luminous letters, no doctor in an ecstasy contemplating the flaming vision, as the
eagle gazes upon the sun.
Nevertheless, the cell was not deserted. A man was seated in the arm-chair,
and bending over the table. Jehan, to whom his back was turned, could see only
his shoulders and the back of his skull; but he had no difficulty in recognizing
that bald head, which nature had provided with an eternal tonsure, as though
desirous of marking, by this external symbol, the archdeacon's irresistible clerical
vocation.
Jehan accordingly recognized his brother; but the door had been opened so
softly, that nothing warned Dom Claude of his presence. The inquisitive scholar
took advantage of this circumstance to examine the cell for a few moments at his
leisure. A large furnace, which he had not at first observed, stood to the left of
the arm-chair, beneath the window. The ray of light which penetrated through
this aperture made its way through a spider's circular web, which tastefully
inscribed its delicate rose in the arch of the window, and in the centre of which
the insect architect hung motionless, like the hub of this wheel of lace. Upon the
furnace were accumulated in disorder, all sorts of vases, earthenware bottles,
Thesaurus
cabalistic: (adj) mysterious, cryptic, investigative, meddlesome, quizzical, slenderly, scarcely, leanly.
esoteric, incantatory, phylacteric, overcurious. ANTONYMS: (adj) ANTONYMS: (adv) thickly, densely.
talismanic, cabalistical, cryptical, apathetic, uninterested. tastefully: (adv) elegantly, neatly,
impenetrable, inscrutable; (adj, v) promiscuously: (adv) licentiously, refinedly, beautifully, smartly,
recondite. miscellaneously, randomly, stylishly, classily, savorily,
checkered: (adj) check, chequered, wantonly, mixedly, loosely, unobtrusively, decently,
varied, ever changing, motley, plaid, undiscriminatingly, confusedly, inconspicuously. ANTONYMS: (adv)
dappled, variable, mutable, sluttishly, every which way, indecently, obviously.
multicolored, mottled. arbitrarily. vellum: (v) parchment, paper,
inquisitive: (adj) inquiring, sparsely: (adv) infrequently, lightly, foolscap; (n) skin, lambskin, lambskin
speculative, nosy, prying, rarely, scatteredly, meagerly, parchment, papyrus, pillar, tablet,
questioning, nosey, meddling, scantily, poorly, sporadically, sheepskin, forel.
Victor Hugo 323
glass retorts, and mattresses of charcoal. Jehan observed, with a sigh, that there
was no frying-pan. "How cold the kitchen utensils are!" he said to himself.
In fact, there was no fire in the furnace, and it seemed as though none had
been lighted for a long time. A glass mask, which Jehan noticed among the
utensils of alchemy, and which served no doubt, to protect the archdeacon's face
when he was working over some substance to be dreaded, lay in one corner
covered with dust and apparently forgotten. Beside it lay a pair of bellows no
less dusty, the upper side of which bore this inscription incrusted in copper
letters: SPIRA SPERA.%
Other inscriptions were written, in accordance with the fashion of the
hermetics, in great numbers on the walls; some traced with ink, others engraved
with a metal point. There were, moreover, Gothic letters, Hebrew letters, Greek
letters, and Roman letters, pell-mell; the inscriptions overflowed at haphazard,
on top of each other, the more recent effacing the more ancient, and all entangled
with each other, like the branches in a thicket, like pikes in an affray. It was, in
fact, a strangely confused mingling of all human philosophies, all reveries, all
human wisdom. Here and there one shone out from among the rest like a
banner among lance heads. Generally, it was a brief Greek or Roman device,
such as the Middle Ages knew so well how to formulate.-- Unde? Inde?--Homo
homini monstrurn-Ast'ra, castra, nomen, numen.--Meya Bibklov, ueya xaxov.--Sapere
aude. Fiat ubi vult-- etc.; sometimes a word devoid of all apparent sense,
Avayxoqpayia, which possibly contained a bitter allusion to the regime of the
cloister; sometimes a simple maxim of clerical discipline formulated in a regular
hexameter Coelestem dominum terrestrem dicite dominum. There was also Hebrew
jargon, of which Jehan, who as yet knew but little Greek, understood nothing;
and all were traversed in every direction by stars, by figures of men or animals,
and by intersecting triangles; and this contributed not a little to make the
scrawled wall of the cell resemble a sheet of paper over which a monkey had
drawn back and forth a pen filled with ink.
The whole chamber, moreover, presented a general aspect of abandonment
and dilapidation; and the bad state of the utensils induced the supposition that
Thesaurus
affray: (n) fray, riot, quarrel, fracas, intersecting: (adj) decussate, decipher, incomprehensible, written,
affrayment, brawl, clash, hubbub, intersectant, crossing, intersecant, unreadable, indecipherable,
melee, ado, scrap. interchanged, decisive, cruciform, impossible to read.
allusion: (n) innuendo, reference, cue, crucial, contrary, angular, across. supposition: (n, v) conjecture; (n)
suggestion, mention, intimation, lance: (n) pike, javelin, shaft, lancet, assumption, hypothesis,
pointer, insinuation, implication, assegai, fishgig, fizgig; (v) dart, presumption, premise, speculation,
indication, clue. impale, open, gore. surmise, guess, supposal, thought,
dilapidation: (n) disrepair, nomen: (n) title, denomination, imagination. ANTONYMS: (n) fact,
devastation, desolation, designation, handle, nome. knowledge, proof, reality, practice.
deterioration, ruin, collapse, neglect, pikes: (n) muskellunges, pickerels, traced: (adj) graphic.
decrepitude, waste, destruction, family Esocidae. utensils: (n) gear, equipment, tackle,
impairment. scrawled: (adj) scribbled, hard to apparatus, hardware.
their owner had long been distracted from his labors by other preoccupations.
Meanwhile, this master, bent over a vast manuscript, ornamented with
fantastical illustrations, appeared to be tormented by an idea which incessantly
mingled with his meditations. That at least was Jehan's idea, when he heard him
exclaim, with the thoughtful breaks of a dreamer thinking aloud,
"Yes, Manou said it, and Zoroaster taught it! the sun is born from fire, the
moon from the sun; fire is the soul of the universe; its elementary atoms pour
forth and flow incessantly upon the world through infinite channels! At the
point where these currents intersect each other in the heavens, they produce
light; at their points of intersection on earth, they produce gold. Light, gold; the
same thing! From fire to the concrete state. The difference between the visible
and the palpable, between the fluid and the solid in the same substance, between
water and ice, nothing more. These are no dreams; it is the general law of nature.
But what is one to do in order to extract from science the secret of this general
law? What! this light which inundates my hand is gold! These same atoms
dilated in accordance with a certain law need only be condensed in accordance
with another law. How is it to be done? Some have fancied by burying a ray of
sunlight, Averroës,-- yes, 'tis Averroës,-- Averroës buried one under the first
pillar on the left of the sanctuary of the Koran, in the great Mahometan mosque
of Cordova; but the vault cannot he opened for the purpose of ascertaining
whether the operation has succeeded, until after the lapse of eight thousand
years.%
"The devil!" said Jehan, to himself, "'tis a long while to wait for a crown!"
"Others have thought," continued the dreamy archdeacon, "that it would be
better worth while to operate upon a ray of Sirius. But 'tis exceeding hard to
obtain this ray pure, because of the simultaneous presence of other stars whose
rays mingle with it. Flamel esteemed it more simple to operate upon terrestrial
fire. Flamel! there's predestination in the name! Flamma! yes, fire. All lies there.
The diamond is contained in the carbon, gold is in the fire. But how to extract it?
Magistri affirms that there are certain feminine names, which possess a charm so
sweet and mysterious, that it suffices to pronounce them during the operation.
Thesaurus
burying: (n) entombment, inhumation. sleeper, slumberer, illusionist, destiny, lot, fatality, foredoom,
condensed: (adj) concise, compressed, logician, philosopher, escapist. preordination, predetermination,
concentrated, succinct, compact, exclaim: (v) call out, call, shout, cry election, premeditation, kismet.
summary, compendious, short, out, ejaculate, clamor, outcry, scream, pronounce: (v) articulate, declare,
shortened; (adj, v) condense; (n) shout out, speak, vociferate. affirm, say, assert, express, vocalize,
tabloid. ANTONYMS: (adj) loose, fantastical: (adj, v) fanciful; (adj) antic, proclaim; (n, v) allege; (adj, v) deliver,
uncondensed, diluted, expanded, chimerical, unusual, beautiful, utter. ANTONYM: (v) mumble.
convoluted, long. unreal, strange, grotesque, odd, tormented: (adj) worried, tortured,
dilated: (adj) wide, inflated, extraordinary; (v) fancy. hagridden, troubled, beleaguered,
ampulliform. meditations: (n) contemplation, beset, besieged, cruciate, cruciform,
dreamer: (n) romancer, visionary, consideration, cogitation. distraught, distressed. ANTONYM:
daydreamer, woolgatherer, seer, predestination: (n) fate, doom, (adj) calm.
Victor Hugo 325
Let us read what Manon says on the matter: 'Where women are honored, the
divinities are rejoiced; where they are despised, it is useless to pray to God. The
mouth of a woman is constantly pure; it is a running water, it is a ray of sunlight.
The name of a woman should be agreeable, sweet, fanciful; it should end in long
vowels, and resemble words of benediction.' Yes, the sage is right; in truth,
Maria, Sophia, la Esmeral-- Damnation! always that thought!"
And he closed the book violently.%
He passed his hand over his brow, as though to brush away the idea which
assailed him; then he took from the table a nail and a small hammer, whose
handle was curiously painted with cabalistic letters.
"For some time," he said with a bitter smile, "I have failed in all my
experiments! one fixed idea possesses me, and sears my brain like fire. I have
not even been able to discover the secret of Cassiodorus, whose lamp burned
without wick and without oil. A simple matter, nevertheless"
"The deuce!" muttered Jehan in his beard.
"Hence," continued the priest, "one wretched thought is sufficient to render a
man weak and beside himself! Oh! how Claude Pernelle would laugh at me.
She who could not turn Nicholas Flamel aside, for one moment, from his pursuit
of the great work! What! I hold in my hand the magic hammer of Zéchiélé! at
every blow dealt by the formidable rabbi, from the depths of his cell, upon this
nail, that one of his enemies whom he had condemned, were he a thousand
leagues away, was buried a cubit deep in the earth which swallowed him. The
King of France himself, in consequence of once having inconsiderately knocked
at the door of the thermaturgist, sank to the knees through the pavement of his
own Paris. This took place three centuries ago. Well! I possess the hammer and
the nail, and in my hands they are utensils no more formidable than a club in the
hands of a maker of edge tools. And yet all that is required is to find the magic
word which Zéchiélé pronounced when he struck his nail."
"What nonsense!" thought Jehan.
Thesaurus
agreeable: (adj) accordant, nice, sweet, tactlessly, rashly, unkindly, rudely, rabbi: (n) priest, rabbin, chaplain.
consistent, suitable, amusing, headlongly, inattentively, selfishly. render: (v) interpret, explain, give,
enjoyable, affable; (adj, v) pleasant, ANTONYMS: (adv) considerately, offer, furnish, pay, construe, return,
desirable; (adj, n) acceptable. politely. provide, impart, translate.
ANTONYMS: (adj) disagreeable, maker: (n) creator, manufacturer, resemble: (v) seem, imitate, compare,
discordant, unpleasant, nasty, author, architect, builder, producer, correspond, to resemble, agree, look,
unwilling, resistant, aggressive, inventor, constructor, father, simulate; (adj) look like; (n)
repugnant, averse, stubborn, generator, designer. resemblance; (adv) alike.
unacceptable. nail: (n, v) arrest, capture; (v) catch, sage: (adj) sagacious, discerning,
experiments: (n) data. collar, apprehend, hook, strike, hit, intelligent, prudent, judicious,
inconsiderately: (adv) unthinkingly, fasten, nab; (adj, n) pin. ANTONYMS: learned, profound, knowing; (adj, v)
indiscreetly, carelessly, unadvisedly, (v) unfasten, detach. grave; (n) philosopher, scholar.
"Let us see, let us try!" resumed the archdeacon briskly. "Were I to succeed, I
should behold the blue spark flash from the head of the nail. Emen-Hétan!
Emen-Hétan! That's not it. Sigéani! Sigéani! May this nail open the tomb to any
one who bears the name of Phoebus! A curse upon it! Always and eternally the
same idea!"
And he flung away the hammer in a rage. Then he sank down so deeply on
the arm-chair and the table, that Jehan lost him from view behind the great pile
of manuscripts. For the space of several minutes, all that he saw was his fist
convulsively clenched on a book. Suddenly, Dom Claude sprang up, seized a
compass and engraved in silence upon the wall in capital letters, this Greek word
ANArKH.%
"My brother is mad," said Jehan to himself; "it would have been far more
simple to write Fatum, every one is not obliged to know Greek."
The archdeacon returned and seated himself in his armchair, and placed his
head on both his hands, as a sick man does, whose head is heavy and burning.
The student watched his brother with surprise. He did not know, he who
wore his heart on his sleeve, he who observed only the good old law of Nature in
the world, he who allowed his passions to follow their inclinations, and in whom
the lake of great emotions was always dry, so freely did he let it off each day by
fresh drains,-- he did not know with what fury the sea of human passions
ferments and boils when all egress is denied to it, how it accumulates, how it
swells, how it overflows, how it hollows out the heart; how it breaks in inward
sobs, and dull convulsions, until it has rent its dikes and burst its bed. The
austere and glacial envelope of Claude Frollo, that cold surface of steep and
inaccessible virtue, had always deceived Jehan. The merry scholar had never
dreamed that there was boiling lava, furious and profound, beneath the snowy
brow of AEtna.
We do not know whether he suddenly became conscious of these things; but,
giddy as he was, he understood that he had seen what he ought not to have seen,
that he had just surprised the soul of his elder brother in one of its most secret
altitudes, and that Claude must not be allowed to know it. Seeing that the
Thesaurus
convulsions: (n) convulsion, spasm, impenetrable, distant, merry: (adj) joyful, lively, cheerful,
epilepsy, eclampsia, mirth. unapproachable, unattainable, glad, jolly, facetious, frolicsome,
convulsively: (adv) spasmodically, untouchable, unobtainable, lighthearted, festive; (adj, n)
paroxysmally, spasticly, with unaccessible, impossible, aloof. convivial, jovial. ANTONYMS: (adj)
convulsions. ANTONYMS: (adj) available, nearby, gloomy, miserable, serious, uptight.
deceived: (adj) mistaken, misguided. attainable, approachable, achievable. snowy: (adj) white, pure, clean, blank,
egress: (n) exit, egression, outlet, door, inward: (adj) inner, intrinsic, internal, hoary, achromatic, snow-white,
emergence, departure, emersion, interior, intestine, inherent, domestic; unblemished, wintry, wet, favorite.
emission, way out, dissilience; (v) (adv) inwardly, inwards, in; (n) spark: (n, v) flicker, flash, gleam, glint,
emerge. ANTONYMS: (n) entry, innards. ANTONYMS: (adj, adv) glitter; (n) light, glimmer, arc, flame,
ingress. outward; (adj) outgoing, external. fire; (v) activate.
inaccessible: (adj) impervious, remote, lava: (adj) pituite. whether: (pron) where.
Victor Hugo 327
archdeacon had fallen back into his former immobility, he withdrew his head
very softly, and made some noise with his feet outside the door, like a person
who has just arrived and is giving warning of his approach.
"Enter!" cried the archdeacon, from the interior of his cell; "I was expecting
you. I left the door unlocked expressly; enter Master Jacques!"
The scholar entered boldly. The archdeacon, who was very much
embarrassed by such a visit in such a place, trembled in his arm-chair. "What!
'tis you, Jehan?"
"'Tis a J, all the same," said the scholar, with his ruddy, merry, and audacious
face.%
Dom Claude's visage had resumed its severe expression.
"What are you come for?"
"Brother," replied the scholar, making an effort to assume a decent, pitiful,
and modest mien, and twirling his cap in his hands with an innocent air; "I am
come to ask of you"
"What?"
"A little lecture on morality, of which I stand greatly in need," Jehan did not
dare to add aloud,-- "and a little money of which I am in still greater need." This
last member of his phrase remained unuttered.
"Monsieur," said the archdeacon, in a cold tone, "I am greatly displeased with
you."
"Alas!" sighed the scholar.
Dom Claude made his arm-chair describe a quarter circle, and gazed intently
at Jehan.
"I am very glad to see you."
This was a formidable exordium. Jehan braced himself for a rough
encounter.
Thesaurus
boldly: (adj, adv) courageously, outset, preface, opening, symphony, ruddy: (adj) cherry, rubicund, rosy,
valiantly, heroically; (adv) fearlessly, foreword, prologue, proem, flushed, florid, sanguine, reddish,
daringly, bravely, intrepidly, beginning, preliminary. glowing, blooming, crimson; (adj,
impudently, audaciously, expecting: (adj) pregnant, confident, adv) blushing.
shamelessly, brashly. ANTONYMS: with child, heavy, hopeful; (n) family unlocked: (adj) unbarred, unlatched,
(adv) discreetly, modestly, nervously, way. unbolted, not closed, loose,
hesitantly, shyly, fearfully, meekly, expressly: (adv) specially, particularly, unsecured, ajar, wide open,
submissively, secretly, respectfully, distinctly, specifically, explicitly, unguaranteed.
diffidently. especially, utterly, clearly, precisely, unuttered: (adj) implicit, unstated,
braced: (adj) prepared, buttressed, telly, exactly. ANTONYMS: (adv) unspoken, unexpressed, quiet,
firm. ambiguously, conditionally, implied, inarticulate, mute, silent,
exordium: (n) overture, prelude, implicitly, indirectly, vaguely. tongueless, unverbalized.
"Jehan, complaints are brought me about you every day. What affray was
that in which you bruised with a cudgel a little vicomte, Albert de
Ramonchamp?"
"Oh!" said Jehan, "a vast thing that! A malicious page amused himself by
splashing the scholars, by making his horse gallop through the mire!"
"Who," pursued the archdeacon, "is that Mahiet Fargel, whose gown you
have torn? Tunicam dechiraverunt, saith the complaint."
"Ah bah! a wretched cap of a Montaigu! Isn't that it?"
"The complaint says tunicam and not cappettam. Do you know Latin?"
Jehan did not reply.%
"Yes," pursued the priest shaking his head, "that is the state of learning and
letters at the present day. The Latin tongue is hardly understood, Syriac is
unknown, Greek so odious that 'tis accounted no ignorance in the most learned
to skip a Greek word without reading it, and to say, 'Groecum est non legitur.'"
The scholar raised his eyes boldly. "Monsieur my brother, doth it please you
that I shall explain in good French vernacular that Greek word which is written
yonder on the wall?"
"What word?"
"'ANArKH."
A slight flush spread over the cheeks of the priest with their high bones, like
the puff of smoke which announces on the outside the secret commotions of a
volcano. The student hardly noticed it.
"Well, Jehan," stammered the elder brother with an effort, "What is the
meaning of yonder word?"
"FATE."
Dom Claude turned pale again, and the scholar pursued carelessly.
"And that word below it, graved by the same hand, 'Ayáyvela, signifies
'impurity.' You see that people do know their Greek."
Thesaurus
cudgel: (n) bludgeon, truncheon, stick, odious: (adj, v) hateful, obnoxious; ANTONYMS: (v) attend, trudge,
staff, switch, mace, baton; (v) beat, (adj) detestable, hideous, nasty, include.
bat, hit, drub. execrable, disgusting, abhorrent, splashing: (n) spatter, spattering,
flush: (adj, n, v) blush, glow; (adj) flat, abominable, heinous, forbidding. painting, splattering, dab, plash; (adj)
affluent, rich; (adj, v) even, smooth, ANTONYMS: (adj) pleasant, liquid.
level; (n) bloom; (n, v) color; (v) delightful, agreeable, lovable, nice. vernacular: (n) jargon, slang, patois,
redden. ANTONYMS: (n) pallor; (v) puff: (adj, n, v) gasp; (n, v) blow, whiff, language, dialect, cant, idiom,
blanch, blench; (adj) empty, low, gust, drag; (v) boast, inflate, huff, tongue, argot; (adj) vulgar, native.
poor. heave, brag, distend. volcano: (n) mountain, vent, lascar,
gallop: (v) speed, dart, dash, race, skip: (n, v) bound, leap, hop, caper, maelstrom, etna, Fuji, vulcano,
spring, tear, hasten, sprint; (adj, v) fly; trip; (v) dance, bounce, prance, skim; venthole, scissure, thunderstorm;
(n, v) trot; (n) gait. (adj, v) miss; (n) omission. (adj) earthquake.
Victor Hugo 329
And the archdeacon remained silent. This Greek lesson had rendered him
thoughtful.
Master Jehan, who possessed all the artful ways of a spoiled child, judged
that the moment was a favorable one in which to risk his request. Accordingly,
he assumed an extremely soft tone and began,
"My good brother, do you hate me to such a degree as to look savagely upon
me because of a few mischievous cuffs and blows distributed in a fair war to a
pack of lads and brats, quibusdam marmosetis? You see, good Brother Claude, that
people know their Latin."
But all this caressing hypocrisy did not have its usual effect on the severe
elder brother. Cerberus did not bite at the honey cake. The archdeacon's brow
did not lose a single wrinkle.%
"What are you driving at?" he said dryly.
"Well, in point of fact, this!" replied Jehan bravely, "I stand in need of money."
At this audacious declaration, the archdeacon's visage assumed a thoroughly
pedagogical and paternal expression.
"You know, Monsieur Jehan, that our fief of Tirecbappe, putting the direct
taxes and the rents of the nine and twenty houses in a block, yields only nine and
thirty livres, eleven sous, six deniers, Parisian. It is one half more than in the
time of the brothers Paclet, but it is not much."
"I need money," said Jehan stoically.
"You know that the official has decided that our twenty-one houses should he
moved full into the fief of the Bishopric, and that we could redeem this homage
only by paying the reverend bishop two marks of silver gilt of the price of six
livres parisis. Now, these two marks I have not yet been able to get together.
You know it."
"I know that I stand in need of money," repeated Jehan for the third time.
"And what are you going to do with it?"
Thesaurus
artful: (adj) crafty, cunning, scheming, helpful; (adj, v) friendly; (adj, n) mischievous: (adj) bad, injurious,
wily, shrewd, insidious, designing, kindly. ANTONYMS: (adj) adverse, detrimental, naughty, deleterious,
sly, adroit, subtle, disingenuous. negative, ominous, disapproving, impish, harmful, playful, maleficent,
ANTONYMS: (adj) artless, unskillful, inauspicious, detrimental, arch; (adj, v) hurtful. ANTONYMS:
inept, ingenuous, unskilled, open, unfriendly, disagreeable, hindering, (adj) harmless, serious.
straight. harmful, untimely. pedagogical: (adj) educational,
cuffs: (n) handcuffs, manacles, hypocrisy: (n, v) insincerity; (n) cant, academic.
manacle, handcuff, shackles, fetters, dissimulation, falsity, deception, redeem: (v) recover, deliver, atone,
bond, bonds, handlock, chains. falseness, sanctimony, deceit, lip recoup, expiate, ransom, reclaim,
favorable: (adj) lucky, fortunate, service; (v) double dealing; (adj) save, free, extricate, refund.
propitious, prosperous, convenient, hypocritical. ANTONYMS: (n) ANTONYMS: (v) hock, pawn, lose.
advantageous, encouraging, happy, sincerity, honesty. stoically: (adv) indifferently, patiently.
This question caused a flash of hope to gleam before Jehan's eyes. He

resumed his dainty, caressing air.
"Stay, dear Brother Claude, I should not come to you, with any evil motive.
There is no intention of cutting a dash in the taverns with your unzains, and of
strutting about the streets of Paris in a caparison of gold brocade, with a lackey,
cum meo laquasio. No, brother, 'tis for a good work."
"What good work?" demanded Claude, somewhat surprised.%
"Two of my friends wish to purchase an outfit for the infant of a poor
Haudriette widow. It is a charity. It will cost three forms, and I should like to
contribute to it."
"What are names of your two friends?"
"Pierre l'Assommeur and Baptiste Croque-Oison."
"Hum," said the archdeacon; "those are names as fit for a good work as a
catapult for the chief altar."
It is certain that Jehan had made a very bad choice of names for his two
friends. He realized it too late.
"And then," pursued the sagacious Claude, "what sort of an infant's outfit is it
that is to cost three forms, and that for the child of a Haudriette? Since when
have the Haudriette widows taken to having babes in swaddling-clothes?"
Jehan broke the ice once more.
"Eh, well! yes! I need money in order to go and see Isabeau la Thierrye to-
night; in the Val-d' Amour!"
"Impure wretch!" exclaimed the priest.
"Avayveia!" said Jehan.
This quotation, which the scholar borrowed with malice, perchance, from the
wall of the cell, produced a singular effect on the archdeacon. He bit his lips and
his wrath was drowned in a crimson flush.
"Begone," he said to Jehan. "I am expecting some one."
Thesaurus
babes: (n) babies, babe. sprint, strike, splash, jog; (v) dart, squalid, sordid, filthy, bastard, foul,
borrowed: (adj) foreign, rubato, break; (n) tinge, beat; (adj, n) immoral, profane, contaminated.
secondary. animation. ANTONYMS: (v) dawdle, ANTONYMS: (adj) unmixed, clean.
caparison: (v) bard, equip; (n) inspirit, languish, saunter, encourage, outfit: (n, v) dress, gear, garb, attire,
trappings, housing, horsecloth, linger; (n) stagnation, languor, apparel; (n) kit, costume, company,
accouterment, rigging, saddlery, listlessness, mass, dullness. ensemble; (v) furnish, equip.
slops, suit, toggery. flash: (n, v) flicker, blaze, shimmer, pierre: (n) capital of south Dakota.
catapult: (n, v) sling; (n) launcher, glitter, gleam, glimmer, blink, flame; quotation: (n) extract, mention,
slingshot, balister, bow, ordnance, (adj, n, v) twinkle; (n) instant; (v) reference, passage, excerpt, quote,
plaything; (v) shoot, fling, launch, coruscate. ANTONYMS: (adj) value, example, price, worth, cost.
propel. tasteful; (n) age; (v) dawdle. strutting: (n) boasting, stiffening,
dash: (adj, n, v) rush; (n, v) touch, impure: (adj) defiled, dirty, unclean, bracing; (adj) boastful.
Victor Hugo 331
The scholar made one more effort.

"Brother Claude, give me at least one little parisis to buy something to eat."
"How far have you gone in the Decretals of Gratian?" demanded Dom
Claude.
"I have lost my copy books.
"Where are you in your Latin humanities?"
"My copy of Horace has been stolen."
"Where are you in Aristotle?"
"I' faith! brother what father of the church is it, who says that the errors of
heretics have always had for their lurking place the thickets of Aristotle's
metaphysics? A plague on Aristotle! I care not to tear my religion on his
metaphysics."
"Young man," resumed the archdeacon, "at the king's last entry, there was a
young gentleman, named Philippe de Comines, who wore embroidered on the
housings of his horse this device, upon which I counsel you to meditate: Qui non
laborat, non manducet."
The scholar remained silent for a moment, with his finger in his ear, his eyes
on the ground, and a discomfited mien.%
All at once he turned round to Claude with the agile quickness of a wagtail.
"So, my good brother, you refuse me a sou parisis, wherewith to buy a crust
at a baker's shop?"
"Qui non laborat, non manducet."
At this response of the inflexible archdeacon, Jehan hid his head in his
hands, like a woman sobbing, and exclaimed with an expression of despair:
"Orororororoi."
"What is the meaning of this, sir?" demanded Claude, surprised at this freak.
"What indeed!" said the scholar; and he lifted to Claude his impudent eyes
into which he had just thrust his fists in order to communicate to them the
Thesaurus
counsel: (v) advise, consult, admonish, housings: (n) horsecloth, caparison, lurking: (n) ambush; (adj) snaky,
confer, warn; (n, v) caution, advocate; saddlery, tack, furnishings, bard, backstair, backstairs, clandestine,
(n) barrister, advisement, trapping, trappings. concealed, dormant, latent, potential,
consultation, admonition. inflexible: (adj) rigid, fixed, skulking, sneaky.
ANTONYMS: (v) betray, trick, uncompromising, immovable, quickness: (n) celerity, expedition,
deceive, conceal, oppose; (n) rigorous, unbending, inexorable, promptness, alacrity, agility, speed,
warning. dogged; (adj, n) hard, firm, harsh. dispatch, dexterity, fleetness, hurry,
discomfited: (adj) uncomfortable, ill at ANTONYMS: (adj) compliant, readiness. ANTONYMS: (n)
ease, disappointed, embarrassed, irresolute, adaptable, awkwardness, delay, ineptness.
frustrated, thwarted, self-conscious, accommodating, stretchy, wagtail: (n) oscine, oscine bird,
mortified, humiliated, unsuccessful; compromising, bendy, weak, lithe, quaketail.
(adj, n) defeated. pliable, soft.
redness of tears; "'tis Greek! 'tis an anapaest of AEschylus which expresses grief
perfectly."
And here he burst into a laugh so droll and violent that it made the
archdeacon smile. It was Claude's fault, in fact: why had he so spoiled that
child?
"Oh! good Brother Claude," resumed Jehan, emboldened by this smile, "look
at my worn out boots. Is there a cothurnus in the world more tragic than these
boots, whose soles are hanging out their tongues?"
The archdeacon promptly returned to his original severity.%
"I will send you some new boots, but no money."
"Only a poor little parisis, brother," continued the suppliant Jehan. "I will
learn Gratian by heart, I will believe firmly in God, I will be a regular Pythagoras
of science and virtue. But one little parisis, in mercy! Would you have famine
bite me with its jaws which are gaping in front of me, blacker, deeper, and more
noisome than a Tartarus or the nose of a monk?"
Dom Claude shook his wrinkled head: "Qui non laborat"
Jehan did not allow him to finish.
"Well," he exclaimed, "to the devil then! Long live joy! I will live in the
tavern, I will fight, I will break pots and I will go and see the wenches." And
thereupon, he hurled his cap at the wall, and snapped his fingers like castanets.
The archdeacon surveyed him with a gloomy air.
"Jehan, you have no soul."
"In that case, according to Epicurius, I lack a something made of another
something which has no name."
"Jehan, you must think seriously of amending your ways."
"Oh, come now," cried the student, gazing in turn at his brother and the
alembics on the furnace, "everything is preposterous here, both ideas and
bottles!"
Thesaurus
amending: (n) correction. (v) mazard. plausible.
cothurnus: (n) Melpomene and Thalia, noisome: (adj) injurious, bad, fetid, snapped: (adj) torn.
histrionic art, sock, theatricals, mischievous, repugnant, foul, spoiled: (adj) bad, rotten, stale, spoil,
Thespis, dramaturgy. noxious, repulsive, detrimental, coddled, pampered, corrupt,
famine: (n) scarcity, shortage, poisonous, deleterious. ANTONYM: damaged, spoilt, putrid, rancid.
privation, deficiency, deficit, (adj) moral. ANTONYM: (adj) unspoiled.
starvation, drought, hunger, poverty, preposterous: (adj) absurd, irrational, thereupon: (adv) hereupon, next, then,
penury, failure. ANTONYMS: (n) ludicrous, nonsensical, foolish, immediately, therefore, therewith, in
abundance, plenty, glut, feast, ridiculous, laughable, derisory, the sequel, close upon, upon which,
bounty, excess. monstrous, inconsistent; (adj, v) whereupon, accordingly.
jaws: (n) jaw, chops, fauces, chaps, extravagant. ANTONYMS: (adj)
mandible, maw, lips, holding device; sensible, reasonable, impressive,
Victor Hugo 333
"Jehan, you are on a very slippery downward road. Do you know whither
you are going?"
"To the wine-shop," said Jehan.
"The wine-shop leads to the pillory."
"'Tis as good a lantern as any other, and perchance with that one, Diogenes
would have found his man."
"The pillory leads to the gallows."
"The gallows is a balance which has a man at one end and the whole earth at
the other. 'Tis fine to be the man."
"The gallows leads to hell."
"'Tis a big fire.".%
"Jehan, Jehan, the end will be bad."
"The beginning will have been good."
At that moment, the sound of a footstep was heard on the staircase.
"Silence!" said the archdeacon, laying his finger on his mouth, "here is Master
Jacques. Listen, Jehan," he added, in a low voice; "have a care never to speak of
what you shall have seen or heard here. Hide yourself quickly under the
furnace, and do not breathe."
The scholar concealed himself; just then a happy idea occurred to him.
"By the way, Brother Claude, a form for not breathing."
"Silence! I promise."
"You must give it to me."
"Take it, then!" said the archdeacon angrily, flinging his purse at him.
Jehan darted under the furnace again, and the door opened.
Thesaurus
angrily: (adv) irately, passionately, disclosed, uncovered, noticeable, leads: (n) slating, pieced leads, slates,
fiercely, indignantly, cholericly, mainstream. pile driving leads, tiling.
resentfully, enragedly, infuriatedly, footstep: (n) pace, footfall, track, slippery: (adj, v) precarious; (adj)
wrathfully, madly, crossly. footmark, vestige, tread, trail, stride, crafty, glib, elusive, oily, glossy,
ANTONYMS: (adv) warmly, lightly, degree; (n, v) step, action. untrustworthy, wily, unreliable,
calmly, cheerfully, gently, gladly. gallows: (n) gibbet, gallous, gallows- tricky; (v) questionable.
concealed: (adj) covert, clandestine, bitts, hanging, noose, scaffold, halter, ANTONYMS: (adj) rough, dry,
blind, occult, secret, mysterious, tree, rope, gallowstree, bough. reliable, straight, direct.
obscure, buried, invisible, secreted, laying: (n) egg laying, placing, staircase: (n) stair, ladder, flight, steps,
surreptitious. ANTONYMS: (adj) parturition, place, repose, setting, flight of steps, stairs, backstairs,
unconcealed, available, overt, open, put, position, lay, oyster park, escalator, companionway, way,
divulged, Shown, revealed, oviposition. entrance.
Victor Hugo 335
CHAPTER V
THE TWO MEN CLOTHED IN BLACK
The personage who entered wore a black gown and a gloomy mien. The first
point which struck the eye of our Jehan (who, as the reader will readily surmise,
had ensconced himself in his nook in such a manner as to enable him to see and
hear everything at his good pleasure) was the perfect sadness of the garments
and the visage of this new-corner. There was, nevertheless, some sweetness
diffused over that face, but it was the sweetness of a cat or a judge, an affected,
treacherous sweetness. He was very gray and wrinkled, and not far from his
sixtieth year, his eyes blinked, his eyebrows were white, his lip pendulous, and
his hands large. When Jehan saw that it was only this, that is to say, no doubt a
physician or a magistrate, and that this man had a nose very far from his mouth,
a sign of stupidity, he nestled down in his hole, in despair at being obliged to
pass an indefinite time in such an uncomfortable attitude, and in such bad
company.%
The archdeacon, in the meantime, had not even risen to receive this
personage. He had made the latter a sign to seat himself on a stool near the door,
and, after several moments of a silence which appeared to be a continuation of a
preceding meditation, he said to him in a rather patronizing way, "Good day,
Master Jacques."
Thesaurus
ensconced: (v) imbedded, situate, arrogant, snobbish, arch, denseness, idiocy, imbecility.
posited. supercilious; (v) patronize; (n) ANTONYMS: (n) sense, logic,
indefinite: (adj, v) ambiguous, vague; patronage; (adv) patronizingly. cleverness, shrewdness, wisdom,
(adj) uncertain, boundless, hazy, ANTONYMS: (adj) humble, ability.
equivocal, unlimited, doubtful, deferential, modest. treacherous: (adj) unfaithful, deceitful,
dubious, imprecise, indecisive. pendulous: (adj) drooping, hanging, false, perfidious, dangerous, disloyal,
ANTONYMS: (adj) definite, limited, cernuous, droopy, nodding, flagging, unreliable, unsafe, Punic, fraudulent,
fixed, constrained, specific, distinct, swinging, pensile, flabby, wavering, faithless. ANTONYMS: (adj) faithful,
known, precise, clear, exact. unstable. loyal, honest, safe, true, genuine,
nestled: (adj) closer, close. stupidity: (n) foolishness, nonsense, forthright, stable, harmless,
patronizing: (adj) condescending, obtuseness, dullness, fatuity, dependable, open.
haughty, patronising, superior, absurdity, stolidity, slowness,
"Greeting, master," replied the man in black.%

There was in the two ways in which "Master Jacques" was pronounced on the
one hand, and the "master" by preeminence on the other, the difference between
monseigneur and monsieur, between domine and domne. It was evidently the
meeting of a teacher and a disciple.
"Well!" resumed the archdeacon, after a fresh silence which Master Jacques
took good care not to disturb, "how are you succeeding?"
"Alas! master," said the other, with a sad smile, "I am still seeking the stone.
Plenty of ashes. But not a spark of gold."
Dom Claude made a gesture of impatience. "I am not talking to you of that,
Master Jacques Charmolue, but of the trial of your magician. Is it not Marc
Cenaine that you call him? the butler of the Court of Accounts? Does he confess
his witchcraft? Have you been successful with the torture?"
"Alas! no," replied Master Jacques, still with his sad smile; "we have not that
consolation. That man is a stone. We might have him boiled in the Marché aux
Pourceaux, before he would say anything. Nevertheless, we are sparing nothing
for the sake of getting at the truth; he is already thoroughly dislocated, we are
applying all the herbs of Saint John's day; as saith the old comedian Plautus,
'Advorsum stimulos, laminas, crucesque, compedesque,
Nerros, catenas, carceres, numellas, pedicas, boias.'
Nothing answers; that man is terrible. I am at my wit's end over him."
"You have found nothing new in his house?"
"I' faith, yes," said Master Jacques, fumbling in his pouch; "this parchment.
There are words in it which we cannot comprehend. The criminal advocate,
Monsieur Philippe Lheulier, nevertheless, knows a little Hebrew, which he
learned in that matter of the Jews of the Rue Kantersten, at Brussels."
So saying, Master Jacques unrolled a parchment. "Give it here," said the
archdeacon. And casting his eyes upon this writing: "Pure magic, Master
Jacques!" he exclaimed. "'Emen-Hétan!' 'Tis the cry of the vampires when they
Thesaurus
answers: (n) replies; (adj) answering. domine: (n) dominie, dominus, preeminence: (n) excellence,
ashes: (n) dust, cinders, remains, clergyman, a clergyman, dominee. eminence, supremacy, dominance,
cinder, clay, earth, embers, clinker; fumbling: (adj) clumsy, fumble, note, dominion, mastery, primacy,
(adj) scoriae, mother, precipitate. butterfingered, awkward, bumbling, superiority, government note; (adj)
disciple: (n) adherent, follower, bunglesome, clunky, cumbersome, supereminence. ANTONYM: (n)
devotee, scholar, pupil, believer, incompetent, left-handed, unskilled. inferiority.
proselyte, cohort, learner, partisan, parchment: (n) vellum, sheepskin, sparing: (adj, n) economical, saving;
votary. ANTONYMS: (n) leader, lambskin, diploma, testament, will; (adj, v) scanty, poor, chary, meager,
teacher, God, instructor. (v) foolscap, tablet, table, slate, pillar. parsimonious, spare, moderate; (adj)
dislocated: (adj) disordered, dislocate, pouch: (n, v) bag; (n) pocket, poke, thrifty, careful. ANTONYMS: (adj)
disorderly, disconnected, separated, mailbag, sac, pod, purse, sack, spendthrift, generous, wasteful,
topsy-turvy, confused, detached. bladder; (v) bulk, bulge. extravagant.
Victor Hugo 337
arrive at the witches' sabbath. Per ipsum, et cum ipso, et in ipso! 'Tis the command
which chains the devil in hell. Hax, pax, max! that refers to medicine. A formula
against the bite of mad dogs. Master Jacques! you are procurator to the king in
the Ecclesiastical Courts: this parchment is abominable."
"We will put the man to the torture once more. Here again," added Master
Jacques, fumbling afresh in his pouch, "is something that we have found at Marc
Cenaine's house."
It was a vessel belonging to the same family as those which covered Dom
Claude's furnace.%
"Ah!" said the archdeacon, "a crucible for alchemy."
"I will confess to you," continued Master Jacques, with his timid and
awkward smile, "that I have tried it over the furnace, but I have succeeded no
better than with my own."
The archdeacon began an examination of the vessel. "What has he engraved
on his crucible? Och! och! the word which expels fleas! That Marc Cenaine is an
ignoramus! I verily believe that you will never make gold with this! 'Tis good to
set in your bedroom in summer and that is all!"
"Since we are talking about errors," said the king's procurator, "I have just
been studying the figures on the portal below before ascending hither; is your
reverence quite sure that the opening of the work of physics is there portrayed
on the side towards the Hôtel-Dieu, and that among the seven nude figures
which stand at the feet of Notre-Dame, that which has wings on his heels is
Mercurius?"
"Yes," replied the priest; "'tis Augustin Nypho who writes it, that Italian
doctor who had a bearded demon who acquainted him with all things.
However, we will descend, and I will explain it to you with the text before us."
"Thanks, master," said Charmolue, bowing to the earth. "By the way, I was on
the point of forgetting. When doth it please you that I shall apprehend the little
sorceress?"
"What sorceress?"
Thesaurus
acquainted: (adj) knowledgeable, assurgent, climbing, ascendent; (n) Siphonaptera.
informed, aware, cognizant, ascension, ascent, rise, advance, forgetting: (v) forget; (adj) oblivious;
conversant, hand and glove, intimate, movement; (v) go up. (n) disregard.
thick; (adv) abreast; (v) inform, bowing: (n) obeisance, playing, ignoramus: (n) fool, dolt, idiot,
acquaint. gesticulation, capitulation, blockhead, simpleton, numskull,
apprehend: (v) arrest, comprehend, genuflection, scraping, submission; bungler, dullard, dumbbell, dummy,
grasp, catch, understand, fathom, (adj) bowed, bent, fawning, booby.
realize, sense, follow, nail; (adj, v) submissive. verily: (adj, adv) really; (adv) indeed, in
conceive. ANTONYMS: (v) crucible: (n) melting pot, retort, reality, genuinely, quitely, actually,
misunderstand, discharge, free, calabash, touchstone, still, vessel, selfly, truely, identically, exactly;
liberate. matrix, pix, reagent, ordeal, check. (adv, int) in truth.
ascending: (adj) uphill, rising, fleas: (n) order Siphonaptera, vermin,
"That gypsy girl you know, who comes every day to dance on the church
square, in spite of the official's prohibition! She hath a demoniac goat with horns
of the devil, which reads, which writes, which knows mathematics like Picatrix,
and which would suffice to hang all Bohemia. The prosecution is all ready; 'twill
soon be finished, I assure you! A pretty creature, on my soul, that dancer! The
handsomest black eyes! Two Egyptian carbuncles! When shall we begin?"
The archdeacon was excessively pale.%
"I will tell you that hereafter," he stammered, in a voice that was barely
articulate; then he resumed with an effort, "Busy yourself with Marc Cenaine."
"Be at ease," said Charmolue with a smile; "I'll buckle him down again for
you on the leather bed when I get home. But 'tis a devil of a man; he wearies
even Pierrat Torterue himself, who hath hands larger than my own. As that
good Plautus saith,
'Nudus vinctus, centum pondo,
es quando pendes per pedes.'
The torture of the wheel and axle! 'Tis the most effectual! He shall taste it!"
Dom Claude seemed absorbed in gloomy abstraction. He turned to
Charmolue,
"Master Pierrat-- Master Jacques, I mean, busy yourself with Marc Cenaine."
"Yes, yes, Dom Claude. Poor man! he will have suffered like Mummol. What
an idea to go to the witches' sabbath! a butler of the Court of Accounts, who
ought to know Charlemagne's text; Stryga vel masea!-- In the matter of the little
girl,-- Smelarda, as they call her,-- I will await your orders. Ah! as we pass
through the portal, you will explain to me also the meaning of the gardener
painted in relief, which one sees as one enters the church. Is it not the Sower?
Hé! master, of what are you thinking, pray?"
Dom Claude, buried in his own thoughts, no longer listened to him.
Charmolue, following the direction of his glance, perceived that it was fixed
mechanically on the great spider's web which draped the window. At that
moment, a bewildered fly which was seeking the March sun, flung itself through
Thesaurus
abstraction: (n) abstract, reverie, clear, oriented, precise, ineffective, unproductive,
engrossment, extraction, withdrawal, understanding, alert. unsuccessful, useless.
removal, deduction, abbreviation, demoniac: (adj) diabolic, devilish, excessively: (adj, adv) immoderately,
preoccupancy, theorisation, possessed, demoniacal, amuck, exorbitantly, inordinately; (adv)
theorization. ANTONYMS: (n) amok, berserk, violent; (n) fiend, extremely, enormously, exceedingly,
attentiveness, inclusion, alertness, monster, ogre. very, profusely, overly,
concentration, fact. effectual: (adj, n) efficient, efficacious, exaggeratedly, intemperately.
bewildered: (adj) bemused, confused, able; (adj) forceful, telling, ANTONYMS: (adv) justifiably,
confounded, perplexed, befuddled, authoritative, operative, potent, moderately, insufficiently.
puzzled, dumbfounded, taken aback, adequate, impressive, powerful. suffice: (v) satisfy, do, answer,
addled, disoriented; (adj, v) lost. ANTONYMS: (adj) ineffectual, content, fulfill, be sufficient, qualify,
ANTONYMS: (adj) unimpressed, incapable, weak, impotent, function, be enough, suit, fulfil.
Victor Hugo 339
the net and became entangled there. On the agitation of his web, the enormous
spider made an abrupt move from his central cell, then with one bound, rushed
upon the fly, which he folded together with his fore antennae, while his hideous
proboscis dug into the victim's bead. "Poor fly!" said the king's procurator in the
ecclesiastical court; and he raised his hand to save it. The archdeacon, as though
roused with a start, withheld his arm with convulsive violence.%
"Master Jacques," he cried, "let fate take its course!" The procurator wheeled
round in affright; it seemed to him that pincers of iron had clutched his arm.
The priest's eye was staring, wild, flaming, and remained riveted on the horrible
little group of the spider and the fly.
"Oh, yes!" continued the priest, in a voice which seemed to proceed from the
depths of his being, "behold here a symbol of all. She flies, she is joyous, she is
just born; she seeks the spring, the open air, liberty: oh, yes! but let her come in
contact with the fatal network, and the spider issues from it, the hideous spider!
Poor dancer! poor, predestined fly! Let things take their course, Master Jacques,
'tis fate! Alas! Claude, thou art the spider! Claude, thou art the fly also! Thou
wert flying towards learning, light, the sun. Thou hadst no other care than to
reach the open air, the full daylight of eternal truth; but in precipitating thyself
towards the dazzling window which opens upon the other world,-- upon the
world of brightness, intelligence, and science-- blind fly! senseless, learned man!
thou hast not perceived that subtle spider's web, stretched by destiny betwixt the
light and thee-- thou hast flung thyself headlong into it, and now thou art
struggling with head broken and mangled wings between the iron antennae of
fate! Master Jacques! Master Jacques! let the spider work its will!"
"I assure you," said Charmolue, who was gazing at him without
comprehending him, "that I will not touch it. But release my arm, master, for
pity's sake! You have a hand like a pair of pincers."
The archdeacon did not hear him. "Oh, madman!" he went on, without
removing his gaze from the window. "And even couldst thou have broken
through that formidable web, with thy gnat's wings, thou believest that thou
couldst have reached the light? Alas! that pane of glass which is further on, that
Thesaurus
betwixt: (n) midst; (prep) among, unsteady, hysterical; (v) unquiet, predestined: (adj) fated, foreordained,
amid; (adv) atwixt. restless, saltatory. certain, predestinate, intended, fatal,
brightness: (n) luminance, light, shine, issues: (n) edition. predetermined, ordained, meant,
clarity, lustre, glow, glare, glitter, mangled: (adj, prep) lacerated, rent; doomed, designed.
luminosity; (n, v) illumination, gloss. (adj) deformed, mutilated, lacerate, proboscis: (n) beak, nozzle, neb, trunk,
ANTONYMS: (n) cloudiness, disabled, broken, maimed, distorted, muzzle, snout, bole, boot, olfactory
murkiness, dimness, darkness, damaged, blasted. organ, automobile trunk, luggage
mistiness, softness, sadness, pincers: (n) tweezers, pliers, nippers, compartment.
bleakness, dirtiness, pessimism; (adv) tweezer, pair of tongs, nipper, wheeled: (adj) on wheels. ANTONYM:
seriously. pinchers, pair of pincers, vice; (n, v) (adj) wheelless.
convulsive: (adj) spastic, galvanic, tongs; (v) clutches. withheld: (adj) hidden, uncommitted.
fitful, paroxysmal, violent, choreic, precipitating: (adj) down. ANTONYM: (adj) ongoing.
transparent obstacle, that wall of crystal, harder than brass, which separates all
philosophies from the truth, how wouldst thou have overcome it? Oh, vanity of
science! how many wise men come flying from afar, to dash their heads against
thee! How many systems vainly fling themselves buzzing against that eternal
pane!"
He became silent. These last ideas, which had gradually led him back from
himself to science, appeared to have calmed him. Jacques Charmolue recalled
him wholly to a sense of reality by addressing to him this question: "Come, now,
master, when will you come to aid me in making gold? I am impatient to
succeed."
The archdeacon shook his head, with a bitter smile. "Master Jacques read
Michel Psellus' 'Dialogus de Energia et Operatione Daemonum.' What we are doing
is not wholly innocent."
"Speak lower, master! I have my suspicions of it," said Jacques Charmolue.
"But one must practise a bit of hermetic science when one is only procurator of
the king in the ecclesiastical court, at thirty crowns tournois a year. Only speak
low."
At that moment the sound of jaws in the act of mastication, which proceeded
from beneath the furnace, struck Charmolue's uneasy ear.%
"What's that?" he inquired.
It was the scholar, who, ill at ease, and greatly bored in his hiding-place, had
succeeded in discovering there a stale crust and a triangle of mouldy cheese, and
had set to devouring the whole without ceremony, by way of consolation and
breakfast. As he was very hungry, he made a great deal of noise, and he accented
each mouthful strongly, which startled and alarmed the procurator.
"'Tis a cat of mine," said the archdeacon, quickly, "who is regaling herself
under there with a mouse,"
This explanation satisfied Charmolue.
Thesaurus
accented: (adj) strong, emphatic, mouthful: (n) gulp, morsel, swallow, worthlessly, abortively, bootlessly,
heavy. gobbet, nip, bit, sip, piece, drink; (adj, arrogantly, unproductively; (adj, adv)
buzzing: (n) noise, murmur; (adj) n) handful; (adj) thimbleful. foolishly. ANTONYMS: (adv)
humming, abuzz, bustling, lively, separates: (n) coordinates. fruitfully, successfully, effectively.
droning, purring, vibrant, vivacious, stale: (adj, n) musty, moldy; (adj) old, vanity: (n) egotism, pride, emptiness,
full of beans. commonplace, hackneyed, insipid, arrogance, futility, inanity, vainglory,
discovering: (adj) observant, oracular. trite, corny, flat, stagnant; (adj, v) dry. conceitedness, pretension,
harder: (adj) serious. ANTONYMS: (adj) fresh, original, pomposity; (adj, n) amour propre.
mastication: (n) chewing, chew, innovative, airy, new, exceptional, ANTONYMS: (n) selflessness,
manducation, chaw, cud, gumming, imaginative. humility, importance, value,
change of state; (v) deglutition, vainly: (adv) uselessly, futilely, effectiveness.
epulation, gulp, rumination. fruitlessly, conceitedly, in vain,
Victor Hugo 341
"In fact, master," he replied, with a respectful smile, "all great philosophers
have their familiar animal. You know what Servius saith: 'Nullus enim locus sine
genio est,-- for there is no place that hath not its spirit.'"
But Dom Claude, who stood in terror of some new freak on the part of Jehan,
reminded his worthy disciple that they had some figures on the façade to study
together, and the two quitted the cell, to the accompaniment of a great "ouf!"
from the scholar, who began to seriously fear that his knee would acquire the
imprint of his chin.%
Thesaurus
accompaniment: (n) concomitant, part, print; (n) impression, effect, feeling; ANTONYMS: (adj) cheeky,
backing, escort, support, occurrence, (v) engrave, inscribe, emboss, dent. impudent, insolent, rude,
protection, companionship, addition; knee: (n) bracket, articulation, joint, contemptuous, disobedient, scornful,
(adv) second, bass. kneel, knee joint, genu, articulatio nasty, sneering, irreverent, impolite.
acquire: (v) achieve, gain, find, take, genus, scythe, zigzag, sickle, bend. terror: (n, v) alarm, scare; (adj, n)
accept, attain, buy, collect, earn, locus: (n) position, spot, location, dread, awe; (n) fear, dismay,
receive; (n, v) contract. ANTONYMS: venue, place, point, orbit, post, scene, consternation, horror, panic,
(v) sell, yield, surrender, relinquish, situation, space. apprehension, scourge.
forfeit, give, scatter, remove. respectful: (adj) deferential, mannerly, ANTONYMS: (n) peace, security,
figures: (n) statistics, numbers, dutiful, courteous, attentive, delight, calm, confidence.
information, facts, poll. obedient, reverential, regardful,
imprint: (n, v) mark, stamp, brand, reverent, polite, humble.
Victor Hugo 343
CHAPTER VI
THE EFFECT WHICH SEVEN OATHS IN THE

OPEN AIR CAN PRODUCE
"Te Deum Laudamus!" exclaimed Master Jehan, creeping out from his hole,
"the screech-owls have departed. Och! och! Hax! pax! max! fleas! mad dogs! the
devil! I have had enough of their conversation! My head is humming like a bell
tower. And mouldy cheese to boot! Come on! Let us descend, take the big
brother's purse and convert all these coins into bottles!"%
He cast a glance of tenderness and admiration into the interior of the precious
pouch, readjusted his toilet, rubbed up his boots, dusted his poor half sleeves, all
gray with ashes, whistled an air, indulged in a sportive pirouette, looked about
to see whether there were not something more in the cell to take, gathered up
here and there on the furnace some amulet in glass which might serve to bestow,
in the guise of a trinket, on Isabeau la Thierrye, finally pushed open the door
which his brother had left unfastened, as a last indulgence, and which he, in his
turn, left open as a last piece of malice, and descended the circular staircase,
skipping like a bird.
In the midst of the gloom of the spiral staircase, he elbowed something which
drew aside with a growl; he took it for granted that it was Quasimodo, and it
struck him as so droll that he descended the remainder of the staircase holding
Thesaurus
creeping: (n) creep, crawl, locomotion, (n) buzzing, vocalizing, sound, skipping: (n) jumping, leaping,
spreading; (v) lentor; (adj) reptile, murmur, growling. absenteeism; (adv) skippingly,
slow, reptant, reptatory, serpiginous, indulgence: (adj, n) gratification, leapingly.
moving. delight; (n) allowance, extravagance, sportive: (adj) frolicsome, jocund, gay,
growl: (adj, n, v) snarl; (n, v) roar, bark, debauchery, hobby, tolerance, jolly, cheerful, lively, merry,
howl, yap, moan, thunder; (v) gnarl, luxury, enjoyment, leniency, pardon. rollicking, mirthful, vivacious, blithe.
mutter, complain, croak. ANTONYMS: (n) denial, virtue, trinket: (n) trifle, novelty, charm,
guise: (n) form, dress, aspect, costume, intolerance, uprightness, necessity, gaud, jewel, fallal; (adj, n) bauble,
disguise, fashion, pretense, indifference, dismay, severity. gewgaw, gimcrack; (adj) toy, paper
camouflage, attire, figure, color. rubbed: (adj) polished, refined, terse, pellet.
humming: (adj) droning, zippy, attrite, marked, accomplished,
reeking, bustling, grunting, stinking; fretten.
his sides with laughter. On emerging upon the Place, he laughed yet more
heartily.%
He stamped his foot when he found himself on the ground once again. "Oh!"
said he, "good and honorable pavement of Paris, cursed staircase, fit to put the
angels of Jacob's ladder out of breath! What was I thinking of to thrust myself
into that stone gimlet which pierces the sky; all for the sake of eating bearded
cheese, and looking at the bell- towers of Paris through a hole in the wall!"
He advanced a few paces, and caught sight of the two screech owls, that is to
say, Dom Claude and Master Jacques Charmolue, absorbed in contemplation
before a carving on the façade. He approached them on tiptoe, and heard the
archdeacon say in a low tone to Charmolue: "'Twas Guillaume de Paris who
caused a Job to be carved upon this stone of the hue of lapis-lazuli, gilded on the
edges. Job represents the philosopher's stone, which must also be tried and
martyrized in order to become perfect, as saith Raymond Lulle: Sub conservatione
formoe speciftoe salva anima."
"That makes no difference to me," said Jehan, "'tis I who have the purse."
At that moment he heard a powerful and sonorous voice articulate behind
him a formidable series of oaths. "Sang Dieu! Ventre-.Dieu! Bédieu! Corps de
Dieu! Nombril de Belzebuth! Nom d'un pape! Come et tonnerre."
"Upon my soul!" exclaimed Jehan, "that can only be my friend, Captain
Phoebus!"
This name of Phoebus reached the ears of the archdeacon at the moment
when he was explaining to the king's procurator the dragon which is hiding its
tail in a bath, from which issue smoke and the head of a king. Dom Claude
started, interrupted himself and, to the great amazement of Charmolue, turned
round and beheld his brother Jehan accosting a tall officer at the door of the
Gondelaurier mansion.
It was, in fact, Captain Phoebus de Châteaupers. He was backed up against a
corner of the house of his betrothed and swearing like a heathen.
Thesaurus
articulate: (v) speak, pronounce, utter, emerging: (adj) nascent, rising, heathen: (adj, n) gentile, ethnic; (n)
vocalize, voice, state, say, joint, acclivitous, promising, embryonic, infidel, idolater, paynim, heretic; (adj)
enunciate, express; (adj) eloquent. budding; (n) emanation. heathenish, irreligious, giaour,
ANTONYMS: (adj) incoherent, formidable: (adj) grim, appalling, godless, barbaric.
unintelligible, illogical, awful, difficult, forbidding, heavy, owls: (n) order Strigiformes,
misrepresented, mumbled, unclear, dreadful, fearful, uphill, trying, Strigiformes.
unarticulated; (v) mumble, tough. ANTONYMS: (adj) stamped: (adj) beaten, marked,
disconnect, misrepresent, misspeak. insignificant, easy, comforting, feeble, pressed, printed; (v) fixed, engraved.
dragon: (adj) wyvern, cockatrice, tiger, cheerful. swearing: (n) curse, expletive,
wild beast, sea serpent, scold, gimlet: (n) auger, borer, wimble, drill, profanity, oath, abuse, blasphemy,
madcap; (adj, n) shrew; (n) demon, bore, probe, trepan, awl, corkscrew, swearword, execration, adjuration,
beldame, Megaera. cocktail, gimblet. asseveration; (v) swear.
Victor Hugo 345
"By my faith! Captain Phoebus," said Jehan, taking him by the hand, "you are
cursing with admirable vigor."
"Horns and thunder!" replied the captain.%
"Horns and thunder yourself!" replied the student. "Come now, fair captain,
whence comes this overflow of fine words?"
"Pardon me, good comrade Jehan," exclaimed Phoebus, shaking his hand, "a
horse going at a gallop cannot halt short. Now, I was swearing at a hard gallop.
I have just been with those prudes, and when I come forth, I always find my
throat full of curses, I must spit them out or strangle, ventre et tonnerre!"
"Will you come and drink?" asked the scholar.
This proposition calmed the captain.
"I'm willing, but I have no money."
"But I have!"
"Bah! let's see it!"
Jehan spread out the purse before the captain's eyes, with dignity and
simplicity. Meanwhile, the archdeacon, who had abandoned the dumbfounded
Charmolue where he stood, had approached them and halted a few paces
distant, watching them without their noticing him, so deeply were they absorbed
in contemplation of the purse.
Phoebus exclaimed: "A purse in your pocket, Jehan! 'tis the moon in a bucket
of water, one sees it there but 'tis not there. There is nothing but its shadow.
Pardieu! let us wager that these are pebbles!"
Jehan replied coldly: "Here are the pebbles wherewith I pave my fob!"
And without adding another word, he emptied the purse on a neighboring
post, with the air of a Roman saving his country.
"True God!" muttered Phoebus, "targes, big-blanks, little blanks, mailles,
every two worth one of Tournay, farthings of Paris, real eagle liards! 'Tis
dazzling!"
Thesaurus
bucket: (n) pail, container, bucketful, blasphemy, anathema, swearing, hard surface; (adj) causewayed.
scoop, tankard, pipkin, skeel, mug, swear word, malediction, execration, spit: (v) drizzle, expectorate, sprinkle,
pan, can; (v) rain cats and dogs. denunciation, cursedness; (v) spew, drool, spike, spatter; (n)
coldly: (adv) frigidly, icily, coolly, beshrew. broach, saliva, cape; (n, v) skewer.
indifferently, frostily, distantly, noticing: (n) observation, look; (adj) strangle: (v) smother, stifle,
gelidly, reservedly, bleakly, wintrily, conscious. asphyxiate, scrag, tighten, repress,
frozenly. ANTONYMS: (adv) warmly, overflow: (n, v) flood, deluge; (n) constrict, pinch, strangulate; (adj, v)
affectionately, sympathetically, inundation, excess, flooding, torrent, throttle; (n) strangling.
sensitively, kindly, cheerfully, outpouring; (v) inundate, flow, thunder: (adj, n, v) boom; (n, v) roar,
emotionally. drown, submerge. ANTONYMS: (n) bang, roll, bellow; (adj, n) peal; (adj, v)
curses: (n) abuse. lack, drought. explode, detonate; (v) howl, rumble,
cursing: (adj) cursed, execrative; (n) pave: (v) case, face, veneer, impave, fulminate.
Jehan remained dignified and immovable. Several liards had rolled into the
mud; the captain in his enthusiasm stooped to pick them up. Jehan restrained
him.%
"Fye, Captain Phoebus de Châteaupers!"
Phoebus counted the coins, and turning towards Jehan with solemnity, "Do
you know, Jehan, that there are three and twenty sous parisis! whom have you
plundered to-night, in the Street Cut-Weazand?"
Jehan flung back his blonde and curly head, and said, half- closing his eyes
disdainfully,
"We have a brother who is an archdeacon and a fool."
"Corne de Dieu!" exclaimed Phoebus, "the worthy man!"
"Let us go and drink," said Jehan.
"Where shall we go?" said Phoebus; "'To Eve's Apple.'"
"No, captain, to 'Ancient Science.' An old woman sawing a basket handle; 'tis
a rebus, and I like that."
"A plague on rebuses, Jehan! the wine is better at 'Eve's Apple'; and then,
beside the door there is a vine in the sun which cheers me while I am drinking."
"Well! here goes for Eve and her apple," said the student, and taking
Phoebus's arm. "By the way, my dear captain, you just mentioned the Rue
Coupe-Gueule That is a very bad form of speech; people are no longer so
barbarous. They say, Coupe-Gorge."
The two friends set out towards "Eve's Apple." It is unnecessary to mention
that they had first gathered up the money, and that the archdeacon followed
them.
The archdeacon followed them, gloomy and haggard. Was this the Phoebus
whose accursed name had been mingled with all his thoughts ever since his
interview with Gringoire? He did not know it, but it was at least a Phoebus, and
that magic name sufficed to make the archdeacon follow the two heedless
comrades with the stealthy tread of a wolf, listening to their words and
Thesaurus
barbarous: (adj) barbaric, savage, unseemly, vulgar, poor, lowly, fleeced, ransacked.
gothic, brutal, heathen, truculent, modest, base. rebus: (n) puzzle, conundrum,
rude, fell, ferocious, fierce, disdainfully: (adv) contemptuously, enigma, problem, charade, nut to
uncivilized. ANTONYMS: (adj) nice, superciliously, haughtily, proudly, crack, mystery, logogriph.
cultured, civilized, sophisticated, cavalierly, derogatorily, stealthy: (adj) clandestine, secret,
refined, humane. contumeliously, sneeringly, surreptitious, sneaky, covert, private,
dignified: (adj) exalted, majestic, arrogantly, insultingly, backstairs, concealed, feline; (adj, v)
noble, grand, lofty, respectable, condescendingly. ANTONYMS: (adv) sly, insidious. ANTONYM: (adj)
solemn, distinguished, lordly, high; humbly, hopefully. blatant.
(adj, v) great. ANTONYMS: (adj) mentioned: (adj) spoken. vine: (n) grapevine, grape, creeper,
undignified, foolish, dishonorable, plundered: (adj) pillaged, despoiled, vignette, vignoble, potato, gourd,
boisterous, unceremonious, raped, robbed, emptier, empty, groundnut, haoma, horsebrier, hoya.
Victor Hugo 347
observing their slightest gestures with anxious attention. Moreover, nothing

was easier than to hear everything they said, as they talked loudly, not in the
least concerned that the passers-by were taken into their confidence. They talked
of duels, wenches, wine pots, and folly.%
At the turning of a street, the sound of a tambourine reached them from a
neighboring square. Dom Claude heard the officer say to the scholar,
"Thunder! Let us hasten our steps!"
"Why, Phoebus?"
"I'm afraid lest the Bohemian should see me."
"What Bohemian?"
"The little girl with the goat."
"La Smeralda?"
"That's it, Jehan. I always forget her devil of a name. Let us make haste, she
will recognize me. I don't want to have that girl accost me in the street."
"Do you know her, Phoebus?"
Here the archdeacon saw Phoebus sneer, bend down to Jehan's ear, and say a
few words to him in a low voice; then Phoebus burst into a laugh, and shook his
head with a triumphant air.
"Truly?" said Jehan.
"Upon my soul!" said Phoebus.
"This evening?"
"This evening."
"Are you sure that she will come?"
"Are you a fool, Jehan? Does one doubt such things?"
"Captain Phoebus, you are a happy gendarme!"
The archdeacon heard the whole of this conversation. His teeth chattered; a
visible shiver ran through his whole body. He halted for a moment, leaned
against a post like a drunken man, then followed the two merry knaves.
Thesaurus
accost: (v) hail, greet, solicit, salute, pissed. laughter, cackle. ANTONYM: (v)
approach, call, buttonhole, welcome, fool: (n) blockhead, dunce, clown, weep.
speak, greeting, speak to. idiot, ass, booby, buffoon; (v) deceive, loudly: (adv) vociferously, noisily,
ANTONYMS: (v) avoid, dodge, shun. bamboozle; (n, v) joke, gull. loud, clamorously, showily, strongly,
bend: (n, v) bow, turn, arch, arc, crook, ANTONYM: (n) savant. flamboyantly, obstreperously,
twist, elbow; (adj, n, v) curve; (v) hasten: (adj, n, v) speed, quicken; (v) luridly, boisterously; (adj, adv) forte.
stoop, crouch; (adj, v) flex. expedite, advance, hurry, hie, dash, ANTONYMS: (adv) softly, thinly,
ANTONYMS: (n, v) square; (v) align, rush; (n, v) further, forward, silently, piano, pleasantly.
unbend, leave. dispatch. ANTONYMS: (v) linger, observing: (adj) observant, mindful,
drunken: (adj) boozy, sottish, retard, amble. watchful, commemorative, conscious,
intoxicated, tipsy, tight, bibulous, laugh: (n, v) joke, giggle, chortle, titter, observative, perceptive, thoughtful;
groggy, intemperate, blotto, canned, snicker; (v) smile; (n) jest, gag, jape, (n) investigation.
At %the moment when he overtook them once more, they had changed their
conversation. He heard them singing at the top of their lungs the ancient
refrain,
Les enfants des Petits-Carreaux
Se font pendre cornme des veaux.
Thesaurus
ancient: (adj) old, obsolete, antiquated, communication, colloquy, v) forbear; (n) chorus, hold.
former, past, archaic, antique, confabulation, discussion, language, ANTONYMS: (v) participate, act,
primitive, bygone, hoary; (adj, n) discourse, speech, talking, palaver. consume, persist.
elder. ANTONYMS: (adj) font: (n) type, fountain, baptistery, singing: (v) sing; (n) chanting,
contemporary, young, recent, fresh, typeface, spring, print, well, boldface, caroling, crooning, hymnody,
new, present, youthful, current. black letter, baptistry, baptismal font. humming, intonation, scat,
changed: (adj) transformed, varied, lungs: (v) air pump, air blower, psalmody, harmonization; (adj)
switched, change, transform, ventilator, punkah; (n) blowpipe, cantabile. ANTONYM: (adj) silent.
converted, distorted, affected, organ.
changeling, disguised, inverse. overtook: (v) overtake.
ANTONYM: (adj) unchanged. refrain: (v) desist, cease, fast, avoid,
conversation: (n) talk, conference, leave off, withhold, stop, spare; (adj,
Victor Hugo 349
CHAPTER VII
THE MYSTERIOUS MONK
The illustrious wine shop of "Eve's Apple" was situated in the University, at
the corner of the Rue de la Rondelle and the Rue de la Bâtonnier. It was a very
spacious and very low hail on the ground floor, with a vaulted ceiling whose
central spring rested upon a huge pillar of wood painted yellow; tables
everywhere, shining pewter jugs hanging on the walls, always a large number of
drinkers, a plenty of wenches, a window on the street, a vine at the door, and
over the door a flaring piece of sheet-iron, painted with an apple and a woman,
rusted by the rain and turning with the wind on an iron pin. This species of
weather-vane which looked upon the pavement was the signboard.%
Night was falling; the square was dark; the wine-shop, full of candles, flamed
afar like a forge in the gloom; the noise of glasses and feasting, of oaths and
quarrels, which escaped through the broken panes, was audible. Through the
mist which the warmth of the room spread over the window in front, a hundred
confused figures could be seen swarming, and from time to time a burst of noisy
laughter broke forth from it. The passers-by who were going about their
business, slipped past this tumultuous window without glancing at it. Only at
intervals did some little ragged boy raise himself on tiptoe as far as the ledge,
Thesaurus
audible: (adj) plain, hearable, distinct, ANTONYMS: (adj) unknown, ragged: (adj, n) shabby; (adj) seedy,
detectable, sounding, sharp, sonic, obscure, ordinary, undistinguished, worn, hoarse, jagged, scruffy, torn,
definite, discernible, perceptible, lowly. untidy, unkempt; (adj, v) threadbare;
sensory. ANTONYMS: (adj) ledge: (n) projection, bulge, jetty, (n) harsh. ANTONYMS: (adj) smart,
inaudible, unintelligible, board, shelf, rack, bench, hummock, elegant, smooth, new, even.
undetectable, silent, faint. protrusion, rim; (adj) escarpment. spacious: (adj) broad, extensive, large,
feasting: (n) carnival, eating. ANTONYM: (n) depression. wide, ample, commodious, vast,
glancing: (adj) passing. mist: (n, v) cloud; (v) blur, cover, capacious, comprehensive, open,
illustrious: (adj, n) glorious, obscure, befog, drizzle, bedim; (n) great. ANTONYMS: (adj) cramped,
celebrated, excellent, grand; (adj) haze, vapor, brume; (adj) misty. narrow, airless, overcrowded.
famous, bright, eminent, famed, panes: (n) Fauni.
distinguished, brilliant, well-known. pewter: (n) chowchow, solder, alloy.
and hurl into the drinking-shop, that ancient, jeering hoot, with which drunken
men were then pursued: "Aux Houls, saouls, saouls, saouls!"
Nevertheless, one man paced imperturbably back and forth in front of the
tavern, gazing at it incessantly, and going no further from it than a pikernan
from his sentry-box. He was enveloped in a mantle to his very nose. This mantle
he had just purchased of the old-clothes man, in the vicinity of the "Eve's Apple,"
no doubt to protect himself from the cold of the March evening, possibly also, to
conceal his costume. From time to time he paused in front of the dim window
with its leaden lattice, listened, looked, and stamped his foot.%
At length the door of the dram-shop opened. This was what he appeared to
be waiting for. Two boon companions came forth. The ray of light which
escaped from the door crimsoned for a moment their jovial faces.
The man in the mantle went and stationed himself on the watch under a
porch on the other side of the street.
"Corne et tonnerre!" said one of the comrades. "Seven o'clock is on the point of
striking. 'Tis the hour of my appointed meeting."
"I tell you," repeated his companion, with a thick tongue, "that I don't live in
the Rue des Mauvaises Paroles, indignus qui inter mala verba habitat. I have a
lodging in the Rue Jean-Pain-Mollet, in vico Johannis Pain-Mollet. You are more
horned than a unicorn if you assert the contrary. Every one knows that he who
once mounts astride a bear is never after afraid; but you have a nose turned to
dainties like Saint-Jacques of the hospital."
"Jehan, my friend, you are drunk," said the other.
The other replied staggering, "It pleases you to say so, Phoebus; but it hath
been proved that Plato had the profile of a hound."
The reader has, no doubt, already recognized our two brave friends, the
captain and the scholar. It appears that the man who was lying in wait for them
had also recognized them, for he slowly followed all the zigzags that the scholar
caused the captain to make, who being a more hardened drinker had retained all
Thesaurus
boon: (n) blessing, benefit, mercy, confirmed, tough, indurated, intomb, among, embed deeply.
concession, good, gratuity; (n, v) tempered, unfeeling, inured, ANTONYM: (adj) intra.
benefaction, gift, grant; (adj) jocund, habitual, enured, veteran. lattice: (n) grill, grille, grid, net,
hilarious. ANTONYMS: (n) ANTONYMS: (adj) inexperienced, fretwork, network, gridiron, wicket,
disadvantage, privation, disaster, smooth, unaccustomed, untempered, web, netting; (v) trellis.
minus. feeling, mild. mala: (n) cheekbone, bucca, malar
dainties: (n) delicacies, food, cates. horned: (adj) cornuted, somm, horny, bone, os zygomaticum, zygomatic
drinker: (n) tippler, drunkard, sharp, cuckolded, cornigerous, bone, bone.
imbiber, toper, guzzler, bacchanal, bearing horns, having horns. unicorn: (n) trap, dogcart, imaginary
bacchant, carouser, alcoholic, boozer, ANTONYM: (adj) hornless. being, imaginary creature,
potator. inter: (v) inhume, entomb, lay to rest, monoceros, tandem, Whitechapel,
hardened: (adj) hard, callous, sepulchre, tomb, inurn, repose, lay, random.
Victor Hugo 351
his self-possession. By listening to them attentively, the man in the mantle could
catch in its entirety the following interesting conversation,
"Corbacque! Do try to walk straight, master bachelor; you know that I must
leave you. Here it is seven o'clock. I have an appointment with a woman."%
"Leave me then! I see stars and lances of fire. You are like the Chateau de
Dampmartin, which is bursting with laughter."
"By the warts of my grandmother, Jehan, you are raving with too much
rabidness. By the way, Jehan, have you any money left?"
"Monsieur Rector, there is no mistake; the little butcher's shop, parva
boucheria."
"Jehau! my friend Jehan! You know that I made an appointment with that
little girl at the end of the Pont Saint- Michel, and I can only take her to the
Falourdel's, the old crone of the bridge, and that I must pay for a chamber. The
old witch with a white moustache would not trust me. Jehan! for pity's sake!
Have we drunk up the whole of the curé's purse? Have you not a single parisis
left?"
"The consciousness of having spent the other hours well is a just and savory
condiment for the table."
"Belly and guts! a truce to your whimsical nonsense! Tell me, Jehan of the
devil! have you any money left? Give it to me, bédieu!" or I will search you, were
you as leprous as Job, and as scabby as Caesar!"
"Monsieur, the Rue Galiache is a street which hath at one end the Rue de la
Verrerie, and at the other the Rue de la Tixeranderie."
"Well, yes! my good friend Jehan, my poor comrade, the Rue Galiache is
good, very good. But in the name of heaven collect your wits. I must have a sou
parisis, and the appointment is for seven o'clock."
"Silence for the rondo, and attention to the refrain,
"Quand les rats mangeront les cas,
Thesaurus
condiment: (n) relish, dressing, n) madness, distraction, rage; (n) sneaking, scabrous; (adj, n)
flavoring, sauce, catsup, chutney, rabid, delirium. contemptible, scurvy.
flavour, flavouring, seasoner, spice, rondo: (n) rondeau, round, ode, stars: (n) heavenly bodies, fate.
paste. roundelay, rondel, Anacreontic, lyric, truce: (n, v) respite; (n) peace, breather,
entirety: (n) completeness, entire, pastoral, bucolic, idyl, dithyramb. reprieve, ceasefire agreement,
entireness, ensemble, sum, whole, savory: (adj) spicy, dainty, fragrant, agreement, pact, accord; (v) rest,
aggregate, gross, amount, fullness, appetizing, tasteful, delectable, tasty, pause, lull. ANTONYMS: (n)
total. ANTONYMS: (n) element, delicious, piquant, aromatic; (adj, n) disagreement, fight, war.
component, particular. savoury. ANTONYMS: (adj) wits: (n) intellect, mind, wit, brains,
rabidness: (n) furiousness. unpleasant, unappetizing, sweet. common sense, presence,
raving: (adj, v) wild; (adj) frantic, scabby: (adj) paltry, dirty, mangy, percipience, observation, mother wit,
delirious, furious, mad, insane; (adj, shabby, abject, rascally, little, right mind, judgment.
Le roi sera seigneur d'Arras;

Quand la mer, qui est grande et lee
Sera a la Saint-Jean gelee,
On verra, par-dessus la glace,
Sortir ceux d'Arras de leur place."
"Well, scholar of Antichrist, may you be strangled with the entrails of your
mother!" exclaimed Phoebus, and he gave the drunken scholar a rough push; the
latter slipped against the wall, and slid flabbily to the pavement of Philip
Augustus. A remnant of fraternal pity, which never abandons the heart of a
drinker, prompted Phoebus to roll Jehan with his foot upon one of those pillows
of the poor, which Providence keeps in readiness at the corner of all the street
posts of Paris, and which the rich blight with the name of "a rubbish- heap." The
captain adjusted Jehan's head upon an inclined plane of cabbage-stumps, and on
the very instant, the scholar fell to snoring in a magnificent bass. Meanwhile, all
malice was not extinguished in the captain's heart. "So much the worse if the
devil's cart picks you up on its passage!" he said to the poor, sleeping clerk; and
he strode off.%
The man in the mantle, who had not ceased to follow him, halted for a
moment before the prostrate scholar, as though agitated by indecision; then,
uttering a profound sigh, he also strode off in pursuit of the captain.
We, like them, will leave Jehan to slumber beneath the open sky, and will
follow them also, if it pleases the reader.
On emerging into the Rue Saint-André-des-Arcs, Captain Phoebus perceived
that some one was following him. On glancing sideways by chance, he
perceived a sort of shadow crawling after him along the walls. He halted, it
halted; he resumed his march, it resumed its march. This disturbed him not
overmuch. "Ah, bah!" he said to himself, "I have not a sou."
He paused in front of the College d'Autun. It was at this college that he had
sketched out what he called his studies, and, through a scholar's teasing habit
which still lingered in him, he never passed the façade without inflicting on the
Thesaurus
blight: (n, v) blast, decay, plague; (v) flabbily: (adv) flaccidly, slackly, exorbitant, superabundant, undue;
damage, wither, blemish, perish; (n) limply, softly, laxly, weakly, baggily, (adv) overly, too, unduly, too much.
bane, pest, curse, rust. ANTONYMS: droopingly, frailly, tenderly, heavily. perceived: (adj) sensed, apparent,
(v) aid, help, guard, protect, enhance, fraternal: (adj) brotherly, brotherlike, supposed, professed, ostensible.
improve; (n) health, boon, bounty. biovular, sympathetic, kind, hearty, slumber: (n, v) rest, doze, snooze, nap,
crawling: (adj, n) creeping; (n) creep, amicable, unhostile, affectionate, drowse, repose, catnap; (v) be asleep,
itch; (adj) slow, teeming, thick, thick, related. ANTONYM: (adj) kip, take a nap; (n) siesta.
swarming, reptant, populous, identical. snoring: (n) stertor, respiration; (adj)
packed, moving. glace: (adj) sleek, crystalized, glossy, stertorous, asleep.
entrails: (n) bowels, gut, bowel, lustrous, shiny, slippery, crystallized. strangled: (adj) smothered, completely
viscera, innards, internal organs, overmuch: (n) excess, surfeit, covered, muffled, suppressed; (v)
insides, intestines, guts, tripe, inside. overabundance; (adj) inordinate, bowstringed.
Victor Hugo 353
statue of Cardinal Pierre Bertrand, sculptured to the right of the portal, the
affront of which Priapus complains so bitterly in the satire of Horace, Olim
truncus eram ficulnus. He had done this with so much unrelenting animosity that
the inscription, Eduensis episcopus, had become almost effaced. Therefore, he
halted before the statue according to his wont. The street was utterly deserted.
At the moment when he was coolly retying his shoulder knots, with his nose in
the air, he saw the shadow approaching him with slow steps, so slow that he had
ample time to observe that this shadow wore a cloak and a hat. On arriving near
him, it halted and remained more motionless than the statue of Cardinal
Bertrand. Meanwhile, it riveted upon Phoebus two intent eyes, full of that vague
light which issues in the night time from the pupils of a cat.%
The captain was brave, and would have cared very little for a highwayman,
with a rapier in his hand. But this walking statue, this petrified man, froze his
blood. There were then in circulation, strange stories of a surly monk, a
nocturnal prowler about the streets of Paris, and they recurred confusedly to his
memory. He remained for several minutes in stupefaction, and finally broke the
silence with a forced laugh.
"Monsieur, if you are a robber, as I hope you are, you produce upon me the
effect of a heron attacking a nutshell. I am the son of a ruined family, my dear
fellow. Try your hand near by here. In the chapel of this college there is some
wood of the true cross set in silver."
The hand of the shadow emerged from beneath its mantle and descended
upon the arm of Phoebus with the grip of an eagle's talon; at the same time the
shadow spoke,
"Captain Phoebus de Châteaupers!"
What, the devil!" said Phoebus, "you know my name!"
"I know not your name alone," continued the man in the mantle, with his
sepulchral voice. "You have a rendezvous this evening."
"Yes," replied Phoebus in amazement.
"At seven o'clock."
Thesaurus
affront: (n, v) insult, abuse, outrage, sum up, abridge, digest, simplify, squib.
slight, snub; (v) face, offend; (n) shorten, reduce, distill, concentrate, stories: (n) tale.
disgrace, slur, offense, mortification. abbreviate. streets: (n) street.
ANTONYMS: (n, v) praise; (v) please, prowler: (n) sneak, thief, interloper, talon: (n) talus, ogee, unguis, sere,
placate, mollify, gratify, flatter, intruder, burglar, robber, raider, renewal coupon, stock.
assuage, appease, adulate; (n) impostor, canary, fink, looter. unrelenting: (adj, n) harsh, hard,
pleasantry, appeasement. rapier: (n) bilbo, brand, blade, foil, severe; (adj) stern, relentless,
highwayman: (n) footpad, brigand, glaive, whinyard, saber, Glave, steel, implacable, austere, cruel, grim,
bandit, robber, outlaw, hijacker, road cimeter, broadsword. unforgiving, persistent.
agent, highjacker, padder, freebooter, satire: (n) sarcasm, lampoon, mockery, ANTONYMS: (adj) feeble, inexorable,
sturdy beggar. parody, ridicule, caricature, sympathetic, temporary, merciful,
nutshell: (n) summary; (v) summarize, burlesque, quip, spoof, derision; (v) compassionate, finite, gentle.
"In a quarter of an hour."

"At la Falourdel's."
"Precisely."
"The lewd hag of the Pont Saint-Michel."
"Of Saint Michel the archangel, as the Pater Noster saith."
"Impious wretch!" muttered the spectre. "With a woman?"
"Confiteor,-- I confess--."
"Who is called--?"
"La Smeralda," said Phoebus, gayly. All his heedlessness had gradually
returned.%
At this name, the shadow's grasp shook the arm of Phoebus in a fury.
"Captain Phoebus de Châteaupers, thou liest!"
Any one who could have beheld at that moment the captain's inflamed
countenance, his leap backwards, so violent that he disengaged himself from the
grip which held him, the proud air with which he clapped his hand on his
swordhilt, and, in the presence of this wrath the gloomy immobility of the man
in the cloak,-- any one who could have beheld this would have been frightened.
There was in it a touch of the combat of Don Juan and the statue.
"Christ and Satan!" exclaimed the captain. "That is a word which rarely
strikes the ear of a Châteaupers! Thou wilt not dare repeat it."
"Thou liest!" said the shadow coldly.
The captain gnashed his teeth. Surly monk, phantom, superstitions,-- he had
forgotten all at that moment. He no longer beheld anything but a man, and an
insult.
"Ah! this is well!" he stammered, in a voice stifled with rage. He drew his
sword, then stammering, for anger as well as fear makes a man tremble: "Here!
On the spot! Come on! Swords! Swords! Blood on the pavement!"
Thesaurus
archangel: (n) angelica, angelica good. doubt; (adj) halting, hesitating,
Archangelica, angelique, garden lewd: (adj) indecent, dirty, bawdy, inarticulate, incoherent, broken,
angelica, seraph. filthy, abandoned, carnal, lustful, ashamed.
disengaged: (adj) vacant, unemployed, impure, debauched; (adj, v) stifled: (adj) strangled, suppressed,
disentangled, free, freed, lecherous, dissolute. ANTONYMS: muffled, deafened, completely
untrammelled, devoid, unreserved, (adj) decent, refined, chaste, clean. covered, dead, deadened, weak, deaf
detached, liberated, loosened. phantom: (n, v) apparition, phantasm, corn, regardless, decayed.
impious: (adj) godless, ungodly, vision, phantasma; (n) spectre, wilt: (v) flag, shrivel, sag, weaken,
disrespectful, profane, unholy, sinful, specter, appearance, shade, shadow, fade, languish, dry, wither, collapse,
unhallowed, wicked, iniquitous, wraith, spirit. tire; (n) wilting. ANTONYMS: (v)
irreligious, irreverent. ANTONYMS: stammering: (n) hesitation, hesitancy, flourish, rise, rally.
(adj) reverent, devout, restrained, psellism, indistinct pronunciation,
Victor Hugo 355
But the other never stirred. When he beheld his adversary on guard and
ready to parry,
"Captain Phoebus," he said, and his tone vibrated with bitterness, "you forget
your appointment."
The rages of men like Phoebus are milk-soups, whose ebullition is calmed by
a drop of cold water. This simple remark caused the sword which glittered in
the captain's hand to be lowered.%
"Captain," pursued the man, "to-morrow, the day after to-morrow, a month
hence, ten years hence, you will find me ready to cut your throat; but go first to
your rendezvous."
"In sooth," said Phoebus, as though seeking to capitulate with himself, "these
are two charming things to be encountered in a rendezvous,-- a sword and a
wench; but I do not see why I should miss the one for the sake of the other, when
I can have both."
He replaced his sword in its scabbard.
"Go to your rendezvous," said the man.
"Monsieur," replied Phoebus with some embarrassment, "many thanks for
your courtesy. In fact, there will be ample time to-morrow for us to chop up
father Adam's doublet into slashes and buttonholes. I am obliged to you for
allowing me to pass one more agreeable quarter of an hour. I certainly did hope
to put you in the gutter, and still arrive in time for the fair one, especially as it
has a better appearance to make the women wait a little in such cases. But you
strike me as having the air of a gallant man, and it is safer to defer our affair until
to-morrow. So I will betake myself to my rendezvous; it is for seven o'clock, as
you know." Here Phoebus scratched his ear. "Ah. Corne Dieu! I had forgotten! I
haven't a sou to discharge the price of the garret, and the old crone will insist on
being paid in advance. She distrusts me."
"Here is the wherewithal to pay."
Phoebus felt the stranger's cold hand slip into his a large piece of money. He
could not refrain from taking the money and pressing the hand.
Thesaurus
adversary: (n) antagonist, foe, enemy, acquiesce. ANTONYMS: (v) fight, garret: (n) cockloft, loft, attic, house
competitor, rival, opposition, overpower, resist, conquer. top, storey, level, upper story, story,
opposer, contestant, match, defer: (v) adjourn, postpone, comply, dome, noggin, classical Greek.
somebody; (adj) hostile. procrastinate, bow, suspend, retard, parry: (v) evade, dodge, fend off,
ANTONYMS: (n) ally, supporter, accede, protract; (adj, v) put off; (n, v) avoid, deflect, duck, hedge, block,
friend, partner, helper, assistant. delay. ANTONYMS: (v) advance, circumvent, elude; (n, v) counter.
betake: (v) wend, apply, address, rush, hurry, hasten, forge, disagree, rendezvous: (n) encounter, tryst,
accost, get, obtain, refer, acquire, aim, expedite, continue, resist. appointment, meeting, meeting place,
beget, attach. ebullition: (n) boiling, ferment, choler, date, engagement, resort, affair; (v)
capitulate: (v) cede, submit, give in, bile, dander; (adj, n) effervescence; (v) meet, center round.
give up, surrender, succumb, bow, seethe, coction; (adj) seething, stir, scabbard: (n) case, vagina, casing, pod,
resign, retreat, come to terms, splutter. covering, cover, pouch, pocket, fob.
"Vrai Dieu!" he exclaimed, "you are a good fellow!"

"One condition," said the man. "Prove to me that I have been wrong and that
you were speaking the truth. Hide me in some corner whence I can see whether
this woman is really the one whose name you uttered."
"Oh!" replied Phoebus, "'tis all one to me. We will take, the Sainte-Marthe
chamber; you can look at your ease from the kennel hard by."
"Come then," said the shadow.%
"At your service," said the captain, "I know not whether you are Messer
Diavolus in person; but let us be good friends for this evening; to-morrow I will
repay you all my debts, both of purse and sword."
They set out again at a rapid pace. At the expiration of a few minutes, the
sound of the river announced to them that they were on the Pont Saint-Michel,
then loaded with houses.
"I will first show you the way," said Phoebus to his companion, "I will then
go in search of the fair one who is awaiting me near the Petit-Châtelet."
His companion made no reply; he had not uttered a word since they had
been walking side by side. Phoebus halted before a low door, and knocked
roughly; a light made its appearance through the cracks of the door.
"Who is there?" cried a toothless voice.
"Corps-Dieu! Tête-Dieu! Ventre-Dieu!" replied the captain.
The door opened instantly, and allowed the new-corners to see an old
woman and an old lamp, both of which trembled. The old woman was bent
double, clad in tatters, with a shaking head, pierced with two small eyes, and
coiffed with a dish clout; wrinkled everywhere, on hands and face and neck; her
lips retreated under her gums, and about her mouth she had tufts of white hairs
which gave her the whiskered look of a cat.
The interior of the den was no less dilapitated than she; there were chalk
walls, blackened beams in the ceiling, a dismantled chimney-piece, spiders'
webs in all the corners, in the middle a staggering herd of tables and lame stools,
Thesaurus
blackened: (adj) sulphured, hairs: (n) hair. fosse, dike, drain, culvert, sewer,
blackening, colored, coloured, filthy, herd: (n, v) crowd; (adj) bevy, many; gutter, hutch, trough.
achromatic, colorful. (adj, n, v) swarm; (n) drove, gang, lamp: (n) light, lantern, beacon,
chalk: (n) trace, score, mold, subsoil, crew, collection, covey, multitude, headlight, flashbulb, flashgun, table
whiteness, gravel, clod; (v) black mob. lamp, oil lamp, storm lantern; (n, v)
lead, mark, pastel; (adj) lily. instantly: (adv, n) directly; (adj, adv) look; (v) behold.
debts: (n) amount overdue, amount immediately, at once; (adv) repay: (v) recompense, reward, pay,
outstanding. ANTONYM: (n) credit. instantaneously, promptly, forthwith, reimburse, compensate, refund,
dish: (n) basin, disk, plate, meal, now, readily, quickly, momently, render, requite, remunerate, return,
platter, food, saucer, beauty, meat, momentarily. ANTONYMS: (adv) redeem. ANTONYM: (v) penalize.
repast; (n, v) hollow. later, slowly, gradually. whiskered: (adj) barbate, bewhiskered,
dismantled: (adj) razed, destroyed. kennel: (n) doghouse, ditch, gully, fleecy, hairy, unshaven, whiskery.
Victor Hugo 357
a dirty child among the ashes, and at the back a staircase, or rather, a wooden
ladder, which ended in a trap door in the ceiling.%
On entering this lair, Phoebus's mysterious companion raised his mantle to
his very eyes. Meanwhile, the captain, swearing like a Saracen, hastened to
"make the sun shine in a crown" as saith our admirable Régnier.
"The Sainte-Marthe chamber," said he.
The old woman addressed him as monseigneur, and shut up the crown in a
drawer. It was the coin which the man in the black mantle had given to Phoebus.
While her back was turned, the bushy-headed and ragged little boy who was
playing in the ashes, adroitly approached the drawer, abstracted the crown, and
put in its place a dry leaf which he had plucked from a fagot.
The old crone made a sign to the two gentlemen, as she called them, to follow
her, and mounted the ladder in advance of them. On arriving at the upper story,
she set her lamp on a coffer, and, Phoebus, like a frequent visitor of the house,
opened a door which opened on a dark hole. "Enter here, my dear fellow," he
said to his companion. The man in the mantle obeyed without a word in reply,
the door closed upon him; he heard Phoebus bolt it, and a moment later descend
the stairs again with the aged hag. The light had disappeared.
Thesaurus
abstracted: (adj) absentminded, (n) arrow; (adj, n) pin; (n, v) dash, mantle: (n) cloak, cape, pall, blanket,
separate, absent-minded, abstract, lock, latch, escape; (adv) bang. curtain, blind, coat; (n, v) cover, veil;
distrait, inattentive, pensive, ANTONYMS: (v) nibble, unbolt, (adj, n, v) blush, flush.
preoccupied, remote, lost, vacant. loosen, amble, snack, wait, open, mounted: (adj) equestrian, mounting,
ANTONYM: (adj) alert. unfasten, stroll, saunter, unscrew. mounts, set, firm, affixed, decorated.
adroitly: (adv) aptly, dexterously, drawer: (n) draftsman, drawers, till, ANTONYM: (adj) unmounted.
deftly, ingeniously, cleverly, agilely, designer, box car, cartoonist, plucked: (v) ploughed; (adj) pulled,
craftily, skillfully, proficiently, neatly, commode, engraver, chest, case, unfeathered, featherless, moulting,
handily. ANTONYMS: (adv) locker. pilled.
maladroitly, ineptly, incompetently, leaf: (n) page, folio, foliage, petal, shine: (n, v) light, sheen, flash, glitter,
awkwardly. frond, leafage, slip, verdure, leaflet; sparkle, polish, rub; (v) burnish,
bolt: (v) bar, gobble, abscond, fasten; (n, v) sheet; (v) leave. gleam, blaze; (n) radiance.
Victor Hugo 359
CHAPTER VIII
THE UTILITY OF WINDOWS WHICH OPEN ON

THE RIVER
Claude Frollo (for we presume that the reader, more intelligent than Phoebus,
has seen in this whole adventure no other surly monk than the archdeacon),
Claude Frollo groped about for several moments in the dark lair into which the
captain had bolted him. It was one of those nooks which architects sometimes
reserve at the point of junction between the roof and the supporting wall. A
vertical section of this kennel, as Phoebus had so justly styled it, would have
made a triangle. Moreover, there was neither window nor air-hole, and the slope
of the roof prevented one from standing upright. Accordingly, Claude crouched
down in the dust, and the plaster which cracked beneath him; his head was on
fire; rummaging around him with his hands, be found on the floor a bit of
broken glass, which he pressed to his brow, and whose coolness afforded him
some relief.%
What was taking place at that moment in the gloomy soul of the archdeacon?
God and himself could alone know.
In what order was he arranging in his mind la Esmeralda, Phoebus, Jacques
Charmolue, his young brother so beloved, yet abandoned by him in the mire, his
archdeacon's cassock, his reputation perhaps dragged to la Falourdel's, all these
Thesaurus
arranging: (n) arrange, arrangements, tight. immorally.
disposition, composing, composition, cracked: (adj) nutty, batty, crazy, monk: (n) monastic, hermit, priest,
order, position, set, orchestration, chapped, balmy, wacky, dotty, conventual, Buddhist, brother,
organization, agreement. crackled, deranged, loony, crackers. cenobite, monkly, friar, abbot,
beloved: (adj, n) dear, darling, ANTONYMS: (adj) resonant, sane. monkey.
favorite, pet; (adj) precious, loved, justly: (adv) accurately, fairly, ness: (n) cape, spit, tongue, headland,
cherished; (n) love, dearest, honey, correctly, honestly, lawfully, promontory, earth, ground, land,
sweetheart. ANTONYMS: (adj) properly, exactly, uprightly, mantle, dry land.
detested, despised, disliked. legitimately, impartially, purely. prevented: (adj) disallowed, barred,
bolted: (adj) barred, Bolten, secured, ANTONYMS: (adv) wrongly, banned. ANTONYM: (adj) legitimate.
firm, barricaded, blockaded, bolted unfairly, unjustifiably, unjustly, styled: (v) titled, named, benempt.
attachment, fast, fastened, latched, unlawfully, sinfully, falsely,
adventures, all these images? I cannot say. But it is certain that these ideas
formed in his mind a horrible group.%
He had been waiting a quarter of an hour; it seemed to him that he had
grown a century older. All at once be heard the creaking of the boards of the
stairway; some one was ascending. The trapdoor opened once more; a light
reappeared. There was a tolerably large crack in the worm-eaten door of his den;
he put his face to it. In this manner he could see all that went on in the adjoining
room. The cat-faced old crone was the first to emerge from the trap-door, lamp
in hand; then Phoebus, twirling his moustache, then a third person, that beautiful
and graceful figure, la Esmeralda. The priest beheld her rise from below like a
dazzling apparition. Claude trembled, a cloud spread over his eyes, his pulses
beat violently, everything rustled and whirled around him; he no longer saw nor
heard anything.
When he recovered himself, Phoebus and Esmeralda were alone seated on
the wooden coffer beside the lamp which made these two youthful figures and a
miserable pallet at the end of the attic stand out plainly before the archdeacon's
eyes.
Beside the pallet was a window, whose panes broken like a spider's web
upon which rain has fallen, allowed a view, through its rent meshes, of a corner
of the sky, and the moon lying far away on an eiderdown bed of soft clouds.
The young girl was blushing, confused, palpitating. Her long, drooping
lashes shaded her crimson cheeks. The officer, to whom she dared not lift her
eyes, was radiant. Mechanically, and with a charmingly unconscious gesture,
she traced with the tip of her finger incoherent lines on the bench, and watched
her finger. Her foot was not visible. The little goat was nestling upon it.
The captain was very gallantly clad; he had tufts of embroidery at his neck
and wrists; a great elegance at that day.
It was not without difficulty that Dom Claude managed to hear what they
were saying, through the humming of the blood, which was boiling in his
temples.
Thesaurus
apparition: (n) ghost, phantom, spirit, comforter, down. clear, articulate, eloquent, intelligible,
spectre, hallucination, spook, shade, gallantly: (adv) courageously, lucid, sound, concise, consistent.
eidolon, wraith, advent; (n, v) vision. intrepidly, chivalrously, splendidly, meshes: (n) cobweb, mouse trap, toils,
charmingly: (adv) pleasingly, prettily, valiantly, heroically, fearlessly, maze; (adj) awkwardness, knot,
alluringly, attractively, fascinatingly, finely, doughtily, pluckily, Gordian knot, delicacy, ticklish card
pleasantly, enchantingly, temptingly, courteously. ANTONYMS: (adv) to play.
engagingly, sweetly, beautifully. unchivalrously, poorly, timidly. nestling: (n) chick, bairn, toddler,
ANTONYMS: (adv) unpleasantly, incoherent: (adj) disjointed, baby bird, bambino, changeling, fry,
unattractively, horribly, awkwardly. disconnected, delirious, rambling, kiddy, nesting, pullet, tadpole.
eiderdown: (n) duvet, quilt, confused, disordered, incompatible, trapdoor: (n) postern, ostiary, porch,
continental quilt, antimacassar, wandering, muddled, inconsistent, pitfall, gate, false bottom, door, back
pillowslip, numdah, pillowcase, contradictory. ANTONYMS: (adj) door, sliding panel, wicket, hatch.
Victor Hugo 361
(A conversation between lovers is a very commonplace affair. It is a

perpetual "I love you." A musical phrase which is very insipid and very bald for
indifferent listeners, when it is not ornamented with some fioriture; but Claude
was not an indifferent listener.)
"Oh!" said the young girl, without raising her eyes, "do not despise me,
monseigneur Phoebus. I feel that what I am doing is not right."
"Despise you, my pretty child!" replied the officer with an air of superior and
distinguished gallantry, "despise you, tête-Dieu! and why?"
"For having followed you!"
"On that point, my beauty, we don't agree. I ought not to despise you, but to
hate you."
The young girl looked at him in affright: "Hate me! what have I done?"
"For having required so much urging."
"Alas!" said she, "'tis because I am breaking a vow. I shall not find my
parents! The amulet will lose its virtue. But what matters it? What need have I
of father or mother now?"
So saying, she fixed upon the captain her great black eyes, moist with joy and
tenderness.%
"Devil take me if I understand you!" exclaimed Phoebus. La Esmeralda
remained silent for a moment, then a tear dropped from her eyes, a sigh from her
lips, and she said,-- "Oh! monseigneur, I love you."
Such a perfume of chastity, such a charm of virtue surrounded the young
girl, that Phoebus did not feel completely at his ease beside her. But this remark
emboldened him: "You love me!" he said with rapture, and he threw his arm
round the gypsy's waist. He had only been waiting for this opportunity.
The priest saw it, and tested with the tip of his finger the point of a poniard
which he wore concealed in his breast.
"Phoebus," continued the Bohemian, gently releasing her waist from the
captain's tenacious hands, "You are good, you are generous, you are handsome;
Thesaurus
chastity: (n) honor, purity, abstinence, rare, romantic, uncommon, weird; (n) exciting, tasty, interesting, flavorful,
virtue, innocence, chasteness, deepness, profundity, profoundness. spicy, lively, colorful, dark, bright,
continence, modesty, cleanliness, despise: (v) disdain, loathe, inspired, imaginative.
austerity; (adj) honesty. depreciate, abhor, dislike, detest, listeners: (n) listener, viewers,
ANTONYMS: (n) nymphomania, slight, hate; (n, v) contemn; (n) spectators, addressees.
lewdness, adultery. contempt, deride. ANTONYMS: (v) tenacious: (adj) obstinate, dogged,
commonplace: (adj, v) trite, respect, love, adore, appreciate, adhesive, persistent, resolute, tough,
hackneyed; (adj) banal, ordinary, cherish, like, praise, accept. sticky; (adj, v) strong, steadfast; (v)
humdrum, common, average, plain, insipid: (adj) tasteless, bland, dull, retentive; (adj, n) firm. ANTONYMS:
mundane, dull; (n) platitude. watery, flavorless, uninteresting, (adj) fickle, loose, slack, surrendering,
ANTONYMS: (adj) extraordinary, vapid, savorless, boring, tame, unattached, weak, compliant,
unusual, exceptional, infrequent, humdrum. ANTONYMS: (adj) yielding, malleable.
you saved me, me who am only a poor child lost in Bohemia. I had long been
dreaming of an officer who should save my life. 'Twas of you that I was
dreaming, before I knew you, my Phoebus; the officer of my dream had a
beautiful uniform like yours, a grand look, a sword; your name is Phoebus; 'tis a
beautiful name. I love your name; I love your sword. Draw your sword,
Phoebus, that I may see it."
"Child!" said the captain, and he unsheathed his sword with a smile.%
The gypsy looked at the hilt, the blade; examined the cipher on the guard
with adorable curiosity, and kissed the sword, saying,
You are the sword of a brave man. I love my captain." Phoebus again
profited by the opportunity to impress upon her beautiful bent neck a kiss which
made the young girl straighten herself up as scarlet as a poppy. The priest
gnashed his teeth over it in the dark.
"Phoebus," resumed the gypsy, "let me talk to you. Pray walk a little, that I
may see you at full height, and that I may hear your spurs jingle. How
handsome you are!"
The captain rose to please her, chiding her with a smile of satisfaction,
"What a child you are! By the way, my charmer, have you seen me in my
archer's ceremonial doublet?"
"Alas! no," she replied.
"It is very handsome!"
Phoebus returned and seated himself beside her, but much closer than before.
"Listen, my dear"
The gypsy gave him several little taps with her pretty hand on his mouth,
with a childish mirth and grace and gayety.
"No, no, I will not listen to you. Do you love me? I want you to tell me
whether you love me."
Thesaurus
ceremonial: (n) ceremony, observance, admonition; (adv) scoldingly. poppy, bocconia; (v) balm.
rite, service, liturgy, formality, hilt: (n) knob, grip, handgrip, haft, straighten: (v) tidy, unbend, neaten,
etiquette, observation; (adj) formal, helm, gripe, tiller, treadle, key, square away, extend, dress, adjust,
solemn, official. ANTONYMS: (adj) trigger, butt. stretch, unwind, right, straight.
unstructured, relaxed, casual. jingle: (n, v) ring, chime, ding, clank; ANTONYMS: (v) bend, sink,
charmer: (n) warlock, enchanter, (v) clang, clink, tinkle, rattle, sound, withdraw, align, stoop, distort,
sorcerer, person, mortal, soul, peal; (n) chink. ANTONYM: (n) confuse, complicate, tilt.
someone, somebody, phony, mage, silence. taps: (n) demise, bugle call.
individual. poppy: (n) opiate, celandine, unsheathed: (adj) denudate, stripped,
chiding: (n) scolding, rebuke, blame, creamcups, opium poppy, Papaver bald, barren, bleak, completely
reprehension, rap, censure, somniferum, celandine poppy, unclothed, denuded, desolate,
upbraiding, wigging, brawl, swallowwort, corn poppy, field marginal, naked, nude.
Victor Hugo 363
"Do I love thee, angel of my life!" exclaimed the captain, half kneeling. "My
body, my blood, my soul, all are thine; all are for thee. I love thee, and I have
never loved any one but thee."
The captain had repeated this phrase so many times, in many similar
conjunctures, that he delivered it all in one breath, without committing a single
mistake. At this passionate declaration, the gypsy raised to the dirty ceiling
which served for the skies a glance full of angelic happiness.%
"Oh!" she murmured, "this is the moment when one should die!"
Phoebus found "the moment" favorable for robbing her of another kiss,
which went to torture the unhappy archdeacon in his nook. "Die!" exclaimed the
amorous captain, "What are you saying, my lovely angel? 'Tis a time for living,
or Jupiter is only a scamp! Die at the beginning of so sweet a thing! Corne-de-
boeuf, what a jest! It is not that. Listen, my dear Similar, Esmenarda-- Pardon!
you have so prodigiously Saracen a name that I never can get it straight. 'Tis a
thicket which stops me short."
"Good heavens!" said the poor girl, "and I thought my name pretty because of
its singularity! But since it displeases you, I would that I were called Goton."
"Ah! do not weep for such a trifle, my graceful maid! 'tis a name to which
one must get accustomed, that is all. When I once know it by heart, all will go
smoothly. Listen then, my dear Similar; I adore you passionately. I love you so
that 'tis simply miraculous. I know a girl who is bursting with rage over it"
The jealous girl interrupted him: "Who?"
"What matters that to us?" said Phoebus; "do you love me?"
"Oh!"-- said she.
"Well! that is all. You shall see how I love you also. May the great devil
Neptunus spear me if I do not make you the happiest woman in the world. We
will have a pretty little house somewhere. I will make my archers parade before
your windows. They are all mounted, and set at defiance those of Captain
Mignon. There are voulgiers, cranequiniers and hand couleveiniers. I will take you
to the great sights of the Parisians at the storehouse of Rully. Eighty thousand
Thesaurus
angelic: (adj) cherubic, heavenly, maiden, housemaid, handmaid. particularity.
seraphic, virtuous, celestial, beautiful, prodigiously: (adv) astonishingly, spear: (n) harpoon, lance, pike, fizgig,
angelical, divine, good, holy, saintly. enormously, immensely, vastly, prick, gig, javelin, shaft, halberd; (v)
ANTONYMS: (adj) devilish, marvelously, exceptionally, stab, spike.
demonic, dark, wicked. colossally, largely, wonderfully, storehouse: (adj, n, v) magazine; (n)
eighty: (n) four score. hugely, tremendously. granary, depot, barn, depository,
kneeling: (n) homage, kowtow, robbing: (adj) freebooting, practicing arsenal, repertory, treasury, storage,
kneelingly, prostration, genuflexion, freebootery; (n) theft. entrepot; (adj, n) repository.
genuflection, curtsy, courtesy, singularity: (n) oddity, peculiarity, trifle: (n, v) play; (adj, n, v) trinket; (v)
obeisance. individuality, eccentricity, dally, fiddle, flirt, fool, frivol; (n)
maid: (n) damsel, chambermaid, lass, idiosyncrasy, oddness, abnormality, nothing, triviality, detail; (adj, n)
lassie, girl, domestic, amah, virgin, uniqueness, irregularity, identity, bagatelle.
armed men, thirty thousand white harnesses, short coats or coats of mail; the
sixty-seven banners of the trades; the standards of the parliaments, of the
chamber of accounts, of the treasury of the generals, of the aides of the mint; a
devilish fine array, in short! I will conduct you to see the lions of the Hôtel du
Roi, which are wild beasts. All women love that."
For several moments the young girl, absorbed in her charming thoughts, was
dreaming to the sound of his voice, without listening to the sense of his words.%
"Oh! how happy you will be!" continued the captain, and at the same time he
gently unbuckled the gypsy's girdle.
"What are you doing?" she said quickly. This "act of violence" had roused her
from her revery.
"Nothing," replied Phoebus, "I was only saying that you must abandon all
this garb of folly, and the street corner when you are with me."
"When I am with you, Phoebus!" said the young girl tenderly.
She became pensive and silent once more.
The captain, emboldened by her gentleness, clasped her waist without
resistance; then began softly to unlace the poor child's corsage, and disarranged
her tucker to such an extent that the panting priest beheld the gypsy's beautiful
shoulder emerge from the gauze, as round and brown as the moon rising
through the mists of the horizon.
The young girl allowed Phoebus to have his way. She did not appear to
perceive it. The eye of the bold captain flashed.
Suddenly she turned towards him,
"Phoebus," she said, with an expression of infinite love, "instruct me in thy
religion."
"My religion!" exclaimed the captain, bursting with laughter, "I instruct you
in my religion! Corne et tonnerre! What do you want with my religion?"
"In order that we may be married," she replied.
Thesaurus
accounts: (n) financial statement. disturbed, delirious, disordered, advise, enlighten, direct, drill,
aides: (n) Aidoneus, Pluto. unkempt, tousled, topsy-turvy, inform, command, indoctrinate,
beasts: (n) stock. mussy. ANTONYM: (adj) neat. tutor.
devilish: (adj, v) diabolic, satanic, gentleness: (adj, n) kindness, courtesy, mint: (n) fortune, pile, heap, mass,
infernal, mephistophelian, benignity, compassion; (n) kindliness, peck, lot, peppermint; (v) invent,
demoniacal; (adj) demonic, wicked, lenity, mildness, sweetness, softness, manufacture, strike, stamp.
diabolical, terrific; (v) Stygian; (adv) benevolence, mercy. ANTONYMS: panting: (adj) gasping, breathless,
devilishly. ANTONYMS: (adj) (n) severity, harshness, fierceness, blown, winded, puffed; (v)
cherubic, godlike, good, saintly, cruelty, ferocity, brusqueness, palpitation; (n) heaving, gasp,
virtuous. abruptness, rage, callousness, asthma, heave, puff.
disarranged: (adj) disheveled, sharpness, roughness. unlace: (v) loosen, untie, unbrace,
disorderly, untidy, deranged, instruct: (v) charge, educate, teach, unlash, unlashed, unloose.
Victor Hugo 365
The captain's face assumed an expression of mingled surprise and disdain, of

carelessness and libertine passion.%
"Ah, bah!" said he, "do people marry?"
The Bohemian turned pale, and her head drooped sadly on her breast.
"My beautiful love," resumed Phoebus, tenderly, "what nonsense is this? A
great thing is marriage, truly! one is none the less loving for not having spit
Latin into a priest's shop!"
While speaking thus in his softest voice, he approached extremely near the
gypsy; his caressing hands resumed their place around her supple and delicate
waist, his eye flashed more and more, and everything announced that Monsieur
Phoebus was on the verge of one of those moments when Jupiter himself
commits so many follies that Homer is obliged to summon a cloud to his rescue.
But Dom Claude saw everything. The door was made of thoroughly rotten
cask staves, which left large apertures for the passage of his hawklike gaze. This
brown-skinned, broad- shouldered priest, hitherto condemned to the austere
virginity of the cloister, was quivering and boiling in the presence of this night
scene of love and voluptuousness. This young and beautiful girl given over in
disarray to the ardent young man, made melted lead flow in his-veins; his eyes
darted with sensual jealousy beneath all those loosened pins. Any one who
could, at that moment, have seen the face of the unhappy man glued to the
wormeaten bars, would have thought that he beheld the face of a tiger glaring
from the depths of a cage at some jackal devouring a gazelle. His eye shone like
a candle through the cracks of the door.
All at once, Phoebus, with a rapid gesture, removed the gypsy's gorgerette.
The poor child, who had remained pale and dreamy, awoke with a start; she
recoiled hastily from the enterprising officer, and, casting a glance at her bare
neck and shoulders, red, confused, mute with shame, she crossed her two
beautiful arms on her breast to conceal it. Had it not been for the flame which
burned in her cheeks, at the sight of her so silent and motionless, one would
have. declared her a statue of Modesty. Her eyes were lowered.
Thesaurus
bars: (n) grinding media, gymnastics, enterprising: (adj) bold, energetic, tool.
parallel bars. active, aggressive, courageous, supple: (adj, v) flexible, pliable, limber,
carelessness: (n) negligence, vigorous, ambitious, go-ahead, brave, pliant; (adj) lithe, soft, plastic,
inattention, indifference, pushing; (adj, n) daring. graceful, lithesome, lissom, lissome.
nonchalance, thoughtlessness, ANTONYMS: (adj) lethargic, ANTONYMS: (adj) rigid, inflexible,
abandon, incaution, disregard, unenterprising, passive, inactive, stocky, clumsy, hard, rough, slow,
omission, forgetfulness, dereliction. indolent, lazy, cautious, cowardly. tight, unyielding.
ANTONYMS: (n) attention, caution, gazelle: (adj) antelope, race horse, voluptuousness: (n) shapeliness,
alertness, vigilance, carefulness, eagle, courser; (n) springbuck, gazel. lewdness, lasciviousness,
thoughtfulness, assiduousness, hawklike: (n) accipitral; (adj) curvaceousness, lust, prurience,
economy, regard, prudence, accipitrine, beaked, hawky. delicacy, lechery, gratification,
forethought. jackal: (v) pelican; (n) canid, puppet, luxury, fullness.
But the captain's gesture had revealed the mysterious amulet which she wore
about her neck.%
"What is that?" he said, seizing this pretext to approach once more the
beautiful creature whom he had just alarmed.
"Don't touch it!" she replied, quickly, "'tis my guardian. It will make me find
my family again, if I remain worthy to do so. Oh, leave me, monsieur le
capitaine! My mother! My poor mother! My mother! Where art thou? Come to
my rescue! Have pity, Monsieur Phoebus, give me back my gorgerette!"
Phoebus retreated amid said in a cold tone,
"Oh, mademoiselle! I see plainly that you do not love me!"
"I do not love him!" exclaimed the unhappy child, and at the same time she
clung to the captain, whom she drew to a seat beside her. "I do not love thee, my
Phoebus? What art thou saying, wicked man, to break my heart? Oh, take me!
take all! do what you will with me, I am thine. What matters to me the amulet!
What matters to me my mother! 'Tis thou who art my mother since I love thee!
Phoebus, my beloved Phoebus, dost thou see me? 'Tis I. Look at me; 'tis the little
one whom thou wilt surely not repulse, who comes, who comes herself to seek
thee. My soul, my life, my body, my person, all is one thing-- which is thine, my
captain. Well, no! We will not marry, since that displeases thee; and then, what
am I? a miserable girl of the gutters; whilst thou, my Phoebus, art a gentleman.
A fine thing, truly! A dancer wed an officer! I was mad. No, Phoebus, no; I will
be thy mistress, thy amusement, thy pleasure, when thou wilt; a girl who shall
belong to thee. I was only made for that, soiled, despised, dishonored, but what
matters it?-- beloved. I shall be the proudest and the most joyous of women.
And when I grow old or ugly, Phoebus, when I am no longer good to love you,
you will suffer me to serve you still. Others will embroider scarfs for you; 'tis I,
the servant, who will care for them. You will let me polish your spurs, brush
your doublet, dust your riding-boots. You will have that pity, will you not,
Phoebus? Meanwhile, take me! here, Phoebus, all this belongs to thee, only love
me! We gypsies need only air and love."
Thesaurus
alarmed: (adj) afraid, scared, entertainment, distraction, diversion, proceedings.
frightened, apprehensive, horrified, sport, pastime, laughter, enjoyment, mistress: (n) dame, concubine,
anxious, uneasy, agitated, shocked, joy, hobby. ANTONYMS: (n) madame, inamorata, lady, lover,
terrified, concerned. ANTONYM: sadness, boredom, work, tedium, fancy woman, doxy, girl, kept
(adj) carefree. business, despondency, discomfort, woman, missis.
amid: (adv, prep) among, amongst; displeasure. wicked: (adj) bad, sinful, atrocious,
(prep) between, amidst, mid, during, embroider: (v) embellish, adorn, evil, vile, depraved, mischievous,
in the midst of, with, surrounded by, decorate, broider, trim, hyperbolize, immoral, unholy, nasty, naughty.
stuck between; (n) midst. stitch, ornament, glorify, lard; (adv, v) ANTONYMS: (adj) innocent, pure,
ANTONYMS: (prep) outside, color. ANTONYMS: (v) understate, pious, moral, kind, admirable,
separate. unpick, deemphasize, minimize. kindhearted, helpful, decent,
amusement: (n) pleasure, recreation, matters: (n) affairs, materials, dealings, assisting, aiding.
Victor Hugo 367
So saying, she threw her arms round the officer's neck; she looked up at him,
supplicatingly, with a beautiful smile, and all in tears. Her delicate neck rubbed
against his cloth doublet with its rough embroideries. She writhed on her knees,
her beautiful body half naked. The intoxicated captain pressed his ardent lips to
those lovely African shoulders. The young girl, her eyes bent on the ceiling, as
she leaned backwards, quivered, all palpitating, beneath this kiss.%
All at once, above Phoebus's head she beheld another head; a green, livid,
convulsed face, with the look of a lost soul; near this face was a hand grasping a
poniard.-- It was the face and hand of the priest; he had broken the door and he
was there. Phoebus could not see him. The young girl remained motionless,
frozen with terror, dumb, beneath that terrible apparition, like a dove which
should raise its head at the moment when the hawk is gazing into her nest with
its round eyes.
She could not even utter a cry. She saw the poniard descend upon Phoebus,
and rise again, reeking.
"Maledictions!" said the captain, and fell.
She fainted.
At the moment when her eyes closed, when all feeling vanished in her, she
thought that she felt a touch of fire imprinted upon her lips, a kiss more burning
than the red-hot iron of the executioner.
When she recovered her senses, she was surrounded by soldiers of the watch
they were carrying away the captain, bathed in his blood the priest had
disappeared; the window at the back of the room which opened on the river was
wide open; they picked up a cloak which they supposed to belong to the officer
and she heard them saying around her,
"'Tis a sorceress who has stabbed a captain."
Thesaurus
cloak: (n, v) veil, mask, camouflage, dim, silent, dull, slow, stupid, sultry, contemporary.
wrap, masquerade, screen, pall; (n) inarticulate, foolish, obtuse. reeking: (adj) dripping, overly diluted,
cape; (v) conceal, dissemble, hide. ANTONYMS: (adj) bright, odorous, noisome, high, fetid, stale;
ANTONYMS: (v) reveal, uncloak, communicative, intelligent, (v) sloppy, soft, soaking, sodden.
unmask; (n, v) uncover. loquacious, sharp, smart, speaking, supplicatingly: (adv) beseechingly,
cloth: (n) drapery, fabric, clothes, brilliant, talkative. imploring, supplicate.
clothing, rag, stuff, linen, tapestry, hawk: (v) peddle, cough, expectorate, utter: (v) say, state, speak, breathe,
silk, flannel; (v) napkin. sell, vend, hunt, huckster; (n) eagle, articulate, deliver, voice, pronounce;
dove: (n) turtledove, squab, emblem, goshawk, harrier, buzzard. (adj, n, v) express, declare; (adj, v) tell.
pacificist, pacifist, poultry, dover, red-hot: (adj) impassioned, flaming, ANTONYMS: (adj) qualified,
pigeon, Holy Spirit, culver, peacenik. burning, fiery, incandescent, torrid, incomplete, uncertain, rather, slight;
dumb: (adj) mute, speechless, dense, enthusiastic, boiling, up-to-date, (v) conceal, hide, block.
Victor Hugo 369
BOOK VIII
Victor Hugo 371
CHAPTER I
THE CROWN CHANGED INTO A DRY LEAF
Gringoire and the entire Court of Miracles were suffering mortal anxiety. For
a whole month they had not known what had become of la Esmeralda, which
greatly pained the Duke of Egypt and his friends the vagabonds, nor what had
become of the goat, which redoubled Gringoire's grief. One evening the gypsy
had disappeared, and since that time had given no signs of life. All search had
proved fruitless. Some tormenting bootblacks had told Gringoire about meeting
her that same evening near the Pont Saint-Michel, going off with an officer; but
this husband, after the fashion of Bohemia, was an incredulous philosopher, and
besides, he, better than any one else, knew to what a point his wife was virginal.
He had been able to form a judgment as to the unconquerable modesty resulting
from the combined virtues of the amulet and the gypsy, and he had
mathematically calculated the resistance of that chastity to the second power.
Accordingly, he was at ease on that score.%
Still he could not understand this disappearance. It was a profound sorrow.
He would have grown thin over it, had that been possible. He had forgotten
everything, even his literary tastes, even his great work, De figuris regularibus et
irregularibus, which it was his intention to have printed with the first money
which he should procure (for he had raved over printing, ever since he had seen
Thesaurus
fruitless: (adj, v) abortive; (adj) barren, ANTONYM: (adj) convinced. unconquerable: (adj) insurmountable,
useless, empty, futile, ineffective, mathematically: (adv) arithmetically, impregnable, insuperable, irresistible,
idle, pointless, sterile, bootless, scientifically, punctually, unbeatable, proof against, resistless,
unproductive. ANTONYMS: (adj) algebraically, algebraicly. indomitable, unquenchable,
fertile, useful, effective, satisfying, pained: (adj) offended, aggrieved, impassable, inextinguishable.
fruitful, worthwhile, profitable, distressed, displeased, sore, grieved, ANTONYMS: (adj) conquerable,
successful, productive, hopeful, miserable, injured, wounded, feeble.
meaningful. worried, upset. ANTONYM: (adj) virginal: (adj) pure, chaste, vestal,
incredulous: (adj) dubious, doubtful, unaffected. virtuous, innocent, intact, spotless,
suspicious, unbelieving, faithless, procure: (v) get, obtain, buy, earn, win, fresh, maidenly; (n) Ebenezer, pair of
skeptical, doubting, lacking faith, gain, have, purchase, induce, derive, virginals.
questioning, cynical, mistrustful. find. ANTONYM: (v) give.
the "Didascalon" of Hugues de Saint Victor, printed with the celebrated

characters of Vindelin de Spire).%
One day, as he was passing sadly before the criminal Tournelle, he perceived
a considerable crowd at one of the gates of the Palais de Justice.
"What is this?" he inquired of a young man who was coming out.
"I know not, sir," replied the young man. "'Tis said that they are trying a
woman who hath assassinated a gendarme. It appears that there is sorcery at the
bottom of it, the archbishop and the official have intervened in the case, and my
brother, who is the archdeacon of Josas, can think of nothing else. Now, I wished
to speak with him, but I have not been able to reach him because of the throng,
which vexes me greatly, as I stand in need of money."
"Alas! sir," said Gringoire, "I would that I could lend you some, but, my
breeches are worn to holes, and 'tis not crowns which have done it."
He dared not tell the young man that he was acquainted with his brother the
archdeacon, to whom he had not returned after the scene in the church; a
negligence which embarrassed him.
The scholar went his way, and Gringoire set out to follow the crowd which
was mounting the staircase of the great chamber. In his opinion, there was
nothing like the spectacle of a criminal process for dissipating melancholy, so
exhilaratingly stupid are judges as a rule. The populace which he had joined
walked and elbowed in silence. After a slow and tiresome march through a
long, gloomy corridor, which wound through the court-house like the intestinal
canal of the ancient edifice, he arrived near a low door, opening upon a hall
which his lofty stature permitted him to survey with a glance over the waving
heads of the rabble.
The hall was vast and gloomy, which latter fact made it appear still more
spacious. The day was declining; the long, pointed windows permitted only a
pale ray of light to enter, which was extinguished before it reached the vaulted
ceiling, an enormous trellis-work of sculptured beams, whose thousand figures
seemed to move confusedly in the shadows, many candles were already lighted
Thesaurus
alas: (adv) unluckily, regrettably, ANTONYMS: (adj) relaxed, ascension; (adj, adv) rising.
sadly, unhappily, sorry to say; (n) oh; unabashed, natural, talkative. tiresome: (adj) tedious, dull, laborious,
(int) lackaday. ANTONYM: (adv) exhilaratingly: (adv) invigoratingly, irksome, monotonous, annoying,
luckily. excitingly, thrillingly, stirringly, slow, dreary, bothersome; (adj, v)
canal: (n) channel, conduit, duct, rousingly, bracingly, cheeringly, wearisome, troublesome.
sound, culvert, adit, trench, sewer, movingly, inspiritingly; (adv, v) ANTONYMS: (adj) stimulating, fun,
passage, watercourse, pipe. happily. varied, soothing, pleasant, brisk,
dissipating: (n) distribution. intestinal: (adj) enteral, intestine, exciting, convenient, refreshing.
embarrassed: (adj) awkward, abashed, abdominal, inner. waving: (adj) flying, aflare, fluttering,
uncomfortable, disconcerted, bashful, mounting: (n, v) mount; (adj, n) flaring, flared, curly, burning,
sheepish, shy, shamefaced, mortified, climbing; (n) ascent, setting, climb, blazing, billowy, palpitating; (n)
discomfited, chagrined. frame, assembly, chassis, framework, wafture.
Victor Hugo 373
here and there on tables, and beaming on the heads of clerks buried in masses of
documents. The anterior portion of the ball was occupied by the crowd; on the
right and left were magistrates and tables; at the end, upon a platform, a number
of judges, whose rear rank sank into the shadows, sinister and motionless faces.
The walls were sown with innumerable fleurs-de-lis. A large figure of Christ
might be vaguely descried above the judges, and everywhere there were pikes
and halberds, upon whose points the reflection of the candles placed tips of fire.%
"Monsieur," Gringoire inquired of one of his neighbors, "who are all those
persons ranged yonder, like prelates in council?"
"Monsieur," replied the neighbor, "those on the right are the counsellors of
the grand chamber; those on the left, the councillors of inquiry; the masters in
black gowns, the messires in red."
"Who is that big red fellow, yonder above them, who is sweating?" pursued
Gringoire.
"It is monsieur the president."
"And those sheep behind him?" continued Gringoire, who as we have seen,
did not love the magistracy, which arose, possibly, from the grudge which he
cherished against the Palais de Justice since his dramatic misadventure.
"They are messieurs the masters of requests of the king's household."
"And that boar in front of him?"
"He is monsieur the clerk of the Court of Parliament."
"And that crocodile on the right?"
"Master Philippe Lheulier, advocate extraordinary of the king."
"And that big, black tom-cat on the left?"
"Master Jacques Charmolue, procurator of the king in the Ecclesiastical Court,
with the gentlemen of the officialty."
"Come now, monsieur, said Gringoire, "pray what are all those fine fellows
doing yonder?"
"They are judging."
Thesaurus
advocate: (n, v) counsel, support; (n) (adj, adv, n) lots; (n) mass, public, gloom, cloudiness. ANTONYM: (n)
backer, champion, sponsor, people, hoi polloi, crowd, common brightness.
counselor, defender, attorney; (v) people, multitude. ANTONYMS: (n) tips: (n) information, guidelines,
vindicate, urge, defend. aristocracy, few, elite; (adj) commands, orders.
ANTONYMS: (n) detractor, skeptic, inadequate. vaguely: (adv) hazily, faintly,
opponent, critic, attacker; (v) assail, masters: (n) Edgar lee Masters. indistinctly, ambiguously, dimly,
attack, criticize, impugn, protest, portion: (n, v) division, lot, allot, mistily, unclearly, loosely, shadowily,
discourage. dividend, divide; (n) piece, parcel, indeterminately, obscurely.
fellows: (n) fellow, membership, fragment, component, section; (adj, n) ANTONYMS: (adv) clearly,
faculty. constituent. ANTONYM: (n) whole. definitely, unmistakably, exactly,
magistrates: (n) bench, courts, judges. shadows: (n) dark, darkness, night, closely, distinctly, alertly, calmly,
masses: (adj, n) plenty, heaps, loads; dimness, dusk, fogginess, mistiness, considerably, intelligibly.
"Judging whom? I do not see the accused."

"'Tis a woman, sir. You cannot see her. She has her back turned to us, and
she is hidden from us by the crowd. Stay, yonder she is, where you see a group
of partisans."
"Who is the woman?" asked Gringoire. "Do you know her name?"
"No, monsieur, I have but just arrived. I merely assume that there is some
sorcery about it, since the official is present at the trial."
"Come!" said our philosopher, "we are going to see all these magistrates
devour human flesh. 'Tis as good a spectacle as any other."
"Monsieur," remarked his neighbor, "think you not, that Master Jacques
Charmolue has a very sweet air?"
"Hum!" replied Gringoire. "I distrust a sweetness which hath pinched
nostrils and thin lips."
Here the bystanders imposed silence upon the two chatterers. They were
listening to an important deposition.%
"Messeigneurs," said an old woman in the middle of the hall, whose form was
so concealed beneath her garments that one would have pronounced her a
walking heap of rags; "Messeigneurs, the thing is as true as that I am la
Falourdel, established these forty years at the Pont Saint Michel, and paying
regularly my rents, lord's dues, and quit rents; at the gate opposite the house of
Tassin-Caillart, the dyer, which is on the side up the river-- a poor old woman
now, but a pretty maid in former days, my lords. Some one said to me lately, 'La
Falourdel, don't use your spinning-wheel too much in the evening; the devil is
fond of combing the distaffs of old women with his horns. 'Tis certain that the
surly monk who was round about the temple last year, now prowls in the City.
Take care, La Falourdel, that he doth not knock at your door.' One evening I was
spinning on my wheel, there comes a knock at my door; I ask who it is. They
swear. I open. Two men enter. A man in black and a handsome officer. Of the
black man nothing could be seen but his eyes, two coals of fire. All the rest was
hat and cloak. They say to me,-- 'The Sainte-Marthe chamber.'-- 'Tis my upper
Thesaurus
coals: (n) ashes, fire, residue, embers. assessment, sess, cost, contribution, emaciated, cadaverous, narrow,
combing: (n) hairdressing, search, impost, toll, union dues, deficit. penurious, thin, penniless, adenoidal;
combing waste, cockscomb. heap: (n, v) pile, aggregate, amass; (n) (adj, n) necessitous; (n) distressed.
distrust: (n, v) mistrust, discredit; (n) collection, accumulation, mound, ANTONYM: (adj) relaxed.
suspicion, misgiving, disbelief, mass, group, lot; (v) bank, collect. rents: (n) quad, board walk, close,
uncertainty, hesitation; (v) suspect, ANTONYM: (v) tidy. embankment, esplanade, lane,
disbelieve, question; (adj) distrustful. imposed: (adj) compulsory, obligatory. parade, alley, place, Alameda,
ANTONYMS: (n) confidence, faith, lately: (adv) tardily, newly, freshly, quadrangle.
trustingness, certainty, belief, belatedly, slowly, latterly, deadly; spinning: (n) rotation, revolution,
optimism; (v) believe, entrust, (adj, adv) anew, late, afresh; (adj) gyration; (adj) rotary, revolving,
depend, confide. recent. rotating, turning, whirling, swirling;
dues: (n) tax, obligation, tallage, pinched: (adj) haggard, drawn, (v) rotate, revolve.
Victor Hugo 375
chamber, %my lords, my cleanest. They give me a crown. I put the crown in my
drawer, and I say: 'This shall go to buy tripe at the slaughter-house of la Gloriette
to-morrow.' We go up stairs. On arriving at the upper chamber, and while my
back is turned, the black man disappears. That dazed me a bit. The officer, who
was as handsome as a great lord, goes down stairs again with me. He goes out.
In about the time it takes to spin a quarter of a handful of flax, be returns with a
beautiful young girl, a doll who would have shone like the sun had she been
coiffed. She had with her a goat; a big billy- goat, whether black or white, I no
longer remember. That set me to thinking. The girl does not concern me, but the
goat! I love not those beasts, they have a beard and horns. They are so like a
man. And then, they smack of the witches, sabbath. However, I say nothing. I
had the crown. That is right, is it not, Monsieur Judge? I show the captain and
the wench to the upper chamber, and I leave them alone; that is to say, with the
goat. I go down and set to spinning again-- I must inform you that my house has
a ground floor and story above. I know not why I fell to thinking of the surly
monk whom the goat had put into my head again, and then the beautiful girl
was rather strangely decked out. All at once, I hear a cry upstairs, and
something falls on the floor and the window opens. I run to mine which is
beneath it, and I behold a black mass pass before my eyes and fall into the water.
It was a phantom clad like a priest. It was a moonlight night. I saw him quite
plainly. He was swimming in the direction of the city. Then, all of a tremble, I
call the watch. The gentlemen of the police enter, and not knowing just at the
first moment what the matter was, and being merry, they beat me. I explain to
them. We go up stairs, and what do we find? my poor chamber all blood, the
captain stretched out at full length with a dagger in his neck, the girl pretending
to be dead, and the goat all in a fright. 'Pretty work!' I say, 'I shall have to wash
that floor for more than a fortnight. It will have to be scraped; it will be a terrible
job.' They carried off the officer, poor young man, and the wench with her
bosom all bare. But wait, the worst is that on the next day, when I wanted to
take the crown to buy tripe, I found a dead leaf in its place."
The old woman ceased. A murmur of horror ran through the audience.
Thesaurus
beard: (v) defy, dare; (adj, v) brave; amount of time. pretension, deception, deceit; (adv)
(adj, n) hair; (n) whiskers, moustache, fright: (n, v) dismay, alarm, scare, pretendingly.
sloven, facial hair; (n, v) camouflage, affright; (n) awe, fear, dread, terror, smack: (adv, n, v) slap, bang; (n, v)
disguise, mask. ANTONYM: (n) horror, consternation, apprehension. savor, knock, kiss, hit, buss, wallop;
shaven. ANTONYMS: (n) calm, fearlessness, (n) flavor, blow; (adj, n) dash.
doll: (n) baby, chick, figurine, girl, courage, confidence, security. spin: (n, v) whirl, twist, twirl, run,
dolly, dummy, marionette, toy, murmur: (n, v) grumble, mumble, drive, roll; (v) revolve, reel; (n)
blockhead-board, bird, dame. hum, whisper, mutter, whine, babble, revolution, ride, turning.
flax: (n) hemp, lint, line, feature, drone; (v) complain, bubble, breathe. tripe: (n) drivel, rubbish, trash,
clothesline, flex, figure, boundary; (v) pretending: (n, v) pretense; (n) baloney, twaddle, applesauce,
hit, trounce, flog. affectation, appearance, acting, claptrap, folderol, garbage, gut,
fortnight: (n) two weeks, period, pretence, mannerism, dissembling, rigmarole. ANTONYM: (n) fact.
"That phantom, that goat,-- all smacks of magic," said one of Gringoire's
neighbors.%
"And that dry leaf!" added another.
"No doubt about it," joined in a third, "she is a witch who has dealings with
the surly monk, for the purpose of plundering officers."
Gringoire himself was not disinclined to regard this as altogether alarming
and probable.
"Goody Falourdel," said the president majestically, "have you nothing more
to communicate to the court?"
"No, monseigneur," replied the crone, "except that the report has described
my house as a hovel and stinking; which is an outrageous fashion of speaking.
The houses on the bridge are not imposing, because there are such multitudes of
people; but, nevertheless, the butchers continue to dwell there, who are wealthy
folk, and married to very proper and handsome women."
The magistrate who had reminded Gringoire of a crocodile rose,
"Silence!" said he. "I pray the gentlemen not to lose sight of the fact that a
dagger was found on the person of the accused. Goody Falourdel, have you
brought that leaf into which the crown which the demon gave you was
transformed?
"Yes, monseigneur," she replied; "I found it again. Here it is."
A bailiff banded the dead leaf to the crocodile, who made a doleful shake of
the head, and passed it on to the president, who gave it to the procurator of the
king in the ecclesiastical court, and thus it made the circuit of the hail.
"It is a birch leaf," said Master Jacques Charmolue. "A fresh proof of magic.
A counsellor took up the word.
"Witness, two men went upstairs together in your house: the black man,
whom you first saw disappear and afterwards swimming in the Seine, with his
priestly garments, and the officer. Which of the two handed you the crown?"
The old woman pondered for a moment and then said,-- "The officer."
Thesaurus
birch: (v) lash, flog, scourge, wipe, wander. ridiculous, monstrous, offensive,
warm, whop; (adj) birchen; (n) birch goody: (n) dainty, tidbit, gammer, gross, excessive, extravagant, absurd,
tree, stick, white birch, rod. titbit, kickshaw, gelatin, dowager, unconscionable; (adj, v) furious.
disinclined: (adj) reluctant, loath, ambrosia, Donna Belle, treat, ANTONYMS: (adj) acceptable,
averse, indisposed, loth, backward, confectionery. reasonable, normal, credible, good,
not content, opposed, dubious, hovel: (n) hut, cot, booth, hole, cottage, honorable, lovely, complimentary,
afraid, not in the vein. ANTONYMS: hutch, shanty, bothy, shed, shack, appealing, commendable, admirable.
(adj) tending, willing, leaning, eager, croft. ANTONYM: (n) mansion. plundering: (n) rape, pillage,
bent, keen, disposed. magistrate: (n) judge, jurist, justiciary, depredation, despoliation, rapine,
dwell: (adj, v) inhabit; (v) reside, bide, adjudicator, beak, official, provost, spoliation, despoilment, plunder,
live, stay, lodge, delay, occupy, recorder, archon, doge, chancellor. looting; (adj) predatory, marauding.
continue, be, settle. ANTONYM: (v) outrageous: (adj) inordinate, atrocious,
Victor Hugo 377
A murmur ran through the crowd.%

"Ah!" thought Gringoire," this makes some doubt in my mind."
But Master Philippe Lheulier, advocate extraordinary to the king, interposed
once more.
"I will recall to these gentlemen, that in the deposition taken at his bedside,
the assassinated officer, while declaring that he had a vague idea when the black
man accosted him that the latter might be the surly monk, added that the
phantom had pressed him eagerly to go and make acquaintance with the
accused; and upon his, the captain's, remarking that he had no money, he had
given him the crown which the said officer paid to la Falourdel. Hence, that
crown is the money of hell."
This conclusive observation appeared to dissipate all the doubts of Gringoire
and the other sceptics in the audience.
"You have the documents, gentlemen," added the king's advocate, as he took
his seat; "you can consult the testimony of Phoebus de Châteaupers."
At that name, the accused sprang up, her head rose above the throng.
Gringoire with horror recognized la Esmeralda.
She was pale; her tresses, formerly so gracefully braided and spangled with
sequins, hung in disorder; her lips were blue, her hollow eyes were terrible.
Alas!
"Phoebus!" she said, in bewilderment; "where is he? O messeigneurs! before
you kill me, tell me, for pity sake, whether he still lives?"
"Hold your tongue, woman," replied the president, "that is no affair of ours."
"Oh! for mercy's sake, tell me if he is alive!" she repeated, clasping her
beautiful emaciated hands; and the sound of her chains in contact with her dress,
was heard.
"Well!" said the king's advocate roughly, "he is dying. Are you satisfied?"
The unhappy girl fell back on her criminal's seat, speechless, tearless, white
as a wax figure.
Thesaurus
bewilderment: (n) astonishment, indecisive, uncertain, dubious, depression, cave, dell; (adj) empty,
quandary, confusion, surprise, unconfirmed, indefinite, false; (adj, n, v) concave; (n, v)
wonder, bemusement, maze, chaos, questionable, iffy, opening, excavate, dent, scoop. ANTONYMS:
jumble, mess; (adj, n) perplexity. unconvincing, provisional. (adj) convex, sincere, true, full,
ANTONYMS: (n) order, clarity. declaring: (adj) affirming, predicant. meaningful, cramped, valid; (n)
braided: (adj) curled, decorated, artful, deposition: (n) affidavit, declaration, hump, bump, hill, lump.
tressed, breaded. statement, evidence, dismissal, sequins: (n) tinsel.
conclusive: (adj) decisive, undeniable, ousting, allegation, degradation, testimony: (n, v) attestation, witness;
definitive, certain, definite, crucial, testimony; (v) deposal; (n, v) (n) declaration, proof, evidence,
indisputable, ultimate; (adj, prep) dethronement. testimonial, confirmation, statement,
cogent; (adj, v) unanswerable, doubts: (adj) doubting. affidavit, affirmation, profession.
determinate. ANTONYMS: (adj) hollow: (adj, n) blank; (n) cavity, tresses: (n) locks, mop, head of hair.
The president bent down to a man at his feet, who wore a gold cap and a
black gown, a chain on his neck and a wand in his hand.%
"Bailiff, bring in the second accused."
All eyes turned towards a small door, which opened, and, to the great
agitation of Gringoire, gave passage to a pretty goat with horns and hoofs of
gold. The elegant beast halted for a moment on the threshold, stretching out its
neck as though, perched on the summit of a rock, it had before its eyes an
immense horizon. Suddenly it caught sight of the gypsy girl, and leaping over
the table and the head of a clerk, in two bounds it was at her knees; then it rolled
gracefully on its mistress's feet, soliciting a word or a caress; but the accused
remained motionless, and poor Djali himself obtained not a glance.
"Eh, why-- 'tis my villanous beast," said old Falourdel, "I recognize the two
perfectly!"
Jacques Charmolue interfered.
"If the gentlemen please, we will proceed to the examination of the goat." He
was, in fact, the second criminal. Nothing more simple in those days than a suit
of sorcery instituted against an animal. We find, among others in the accounts of
the provost's office for 1466, a curious detail concerning the expenses of the trial
of Gillet-Soulart and his sow, "executed for their demerits," at Corbeil.
Everything is there, the cost of the pens in which to place the sow, the five
hundred bundles of brushwood purchased at the port of Morsant, the three pints
of wine and the bread, the last repast of the victim fraternally shared by the
executioner, down to the eleven days of guard and food for the sow, at eight
deniers parisis each. Sometimes, they went even further than animals. The
capitularies of Charlemagne and of Louis le Débonnaire impose severe penalties
on fiery phantoms which presume to appear in the air.
Meanwhile the procurator had exclaimed: "If the demon which possesses this
goat, and which has resisted all exorcisms, persists in its deeds of witchcraft, if it
alarms the court with them, we warn it that we shall be forced to put in
requisition against it the gallows or the stake. Gringoire broke out into a cold
Thesaurus
agitation: (n) disturbance, excitement, underbrush, firewood, spinney, penalties: (n) penalty.
tumult, stirring, convulsion, stir, thicket, bushes, copse. repast: (n) feast, food, banquet, dinner,
commotion, emotion, unrest, shake, fiery: (adj, n) burning, passionate, lunch, refection, collation, luncheon,
turmoil. ANTONYMS: (n) serenity, glowing; (adj) fervent, ablaze, hot, spread, potluck, eating.
calm, equanimity, rest, peace, fervid, impassioned, peppery; (adj, v) requisition: (n, v) request, claim,
deterrent. fierce, violent. ANTONYMS: (adj) command; (v) commandeer, call,
bounds: (n) boundary, border, limit, calm, passionless, dispassionate, require, exact; (n) application,
bound, margin, borderline, end, indifferent, placid, gentle, cool; (adv) requirement, order, exaction.
bourn, Bourne, brink, edge. easygoing. ANTONYMS: (v) supply, restore.
ANTONYMS: (n) center, middle. fraternally: (adv) brotherly, heartily, wand: (n, v) stick, rod; (n) scepter,
brushwood: (n) brush, underwood, kindly, sympathetically, verge, mace, pole, baton, sceptre,
undergrowth, brake, scrub, harmoniously. fasces, rod of empire; (v) staff.
Victor Hugo 379
perspiration. Charmolue took from the table the gypsy's tambourine, and
presenting it to the goat, in a certain manner, asked the latter,
"What o'clock is it?"
The goat looked at it with an intelligent eye, raised its gilded hoof, and struck
seven blows.%
It was, in fact, seven o'clock. A movement of terror ran through the crowd.
Gringoire could not endure it.
"He is destroying himself!" he cried aloud; "You see well that he does not
know what he is doing."
"Silence among the louts at the end of the hail!" said the bailiff sharply.
Jacques Charmolue, by the aid of the same manoeuvres of the tambourine,
made the goat perform many other tricks connected with the date of the day, the
month of the year, etc., which the reader has already witnessed. And, by virtue
of an optical illusion peculiar to judicial proceedings, these same spectators who
had, probably, more than once applauded in the public square Djali's innocent
magic were terrified by it beneath the roof of the Palais de Justice. The goat was
undoubtedly the devil.
It was far worse when the procurator of the king, having emptied upon a
floor a certain bag filled with movable letters, which Djali wore round his neck,
they beheld the goat extract with his hoof from the scattered alphabet the fatal
name of Phoebus. The witchcraft of which the captain had been the victim
appeared irresistibly demonstrated, and in the eyes of all, the gypsy, that
ravishing dancer, who had so often dazzled the passers-by with her grace, was
no longer anything but a frightful vampire.
However, she betrayed no sign of life; neither Djali's graceful evolutions, nor
the menaces of the court, nor the suppressed imprecations of the spectators any
longer reached her mind.
In order to arouse her, a police officer was obliged to shake her unmercifully,
and the president had to raise his voice,-- "Girl, you are of the Bohemian race,
addicted to deeds of witchcraft. You, in complicity with the bewitched goat
Thesaurus
addicted: (adj) habituated, dedicated, complicity: (n) collusion, guilt, overpoweringly, appealingly,
habitual, hooked, devoted, guiltiness, conspiracy, agreement, beguilingly.
accustomed, captivated, devote, connivance, participation, o'clock: (n) period, hours.
obsessive, obsessed; (v) dedicate. involvement, implication, unmercifully: (adv) pitilessly,
ANTONYMS: (adj) unaccustomed, accomplice, plot. remorselessly, unpityingly,
averse, disinclined, independent, deeds: (n) works, activity, actions, unrelentingly, ruthlessly, cruelly,
opposed, unenthusiastic, occasional. conduct, background, events, relentlessly, unsparingly, hardly,
bewitched: (adj) enchanted, fascinated, happenings, performance, activities. heartlessly, inclemently.
infatuated, magical, ensorcelled, evolutions: (n) evolution. vampire: (n) lamia, leech, ghoul,
doomed, captive, rapt, enamored, irresistibly: (adv) charmingly, vulture, extortioner, vampire bat,
obsessed. ANTONYM: (adj) necessarily, overwhelmingly, exploiter, ghost, gorilla, mosquito,
disgusted. charismatically, fiercely, temptingly, ogre.
implicated in this suit, during the night of the twenty-ninth of March last,
murdered and stabbed, in concert with the powers of darkness, by the aid of
charms and underhand practices, a captain of the king's arches of the watch,
Phoebus de Châteaupers. Do you persist in denying it?"
"Horror!" exclaimed the young girl, hiding her face in her hands. "My
Phoebus! Oh, this is hell!"
"Do you persist in your denial?" demanded the president coldly.%
"Do I deny it?" she said with terrible accents; and she rose with flashing eyes.
The president continued squarely,
"Then how do you explain the facts laid to your charge?"
She replied in a broken voice,
"I have already told you. I do not know. 'Twas a priest, a priest whom I do
not know; an infernal priest who pursues me!"
"That is it," retorted the judge; "the surly monk."
"Oh, gentlemen! have mercy! I am but a poor girl"
"Of Egypt," said the judge.
Master Jacques Charmolue interposed sweetly,
"In view of the sad obstinacy of the accused, I demand the application of the
torture."
"Granted," said the president.
The unhappy girl quivered in every limb. But she rose at the command of the
men with partisans, and walked with a tolerably firm step, preceded by
Charmolue and the priests of the officiality, between two rows of halberds,
towards a medium-sized door which suddenly opened and closed again behind
her, and which produced upon the grief-stricken Gringoire the effect of a
horrible mouth which had just devoured her.
When she disappeared, they heard a plaintive bleating; it was the little goat
mourning.
Thesaurus
charms: (n) trinkets, jewelry, jewels. bullheadedness, determination, correspondly, straightly.
denying: (v) deny; (adv) denyingly; contumacy, mulishness, impenitence, sweetly: (adv) pleasantly, sweet,
(adj) opposed, recusative, unselfish, resolve, resoluteness, impenitency, mildly, melodically, melodiously,
abnegative. pertinacity. ANTONYMS: (n) softly, syrupily, beautifully,
grief-stricken: (adj) brokenhearted, cooperation, compliance. pleasingly, dulcetly, fairly.
woebegone, plaintive, disconsolate, plaintive: (adj) pathetic, piteous, ANTONYMS: (adv) discordantly,
despairing. lugubrious, doleful, sad, wistful, horribly, sharply, harshly, unkindly.
implicated: (adj) involved, involve, sorrowful, woeful, elegiac, dolorous, underhand: (adj) stealthy, furtive,
associated, caught up, occupied, lamentable. clandestine, sly, underhanded,
mixed up, interested, allied to, squarely: (adv) straightforwardly, sneaky, shifty, covert, crooked,
culpably involved, affiliated. square, forthright, rightly, fairly, indirect; (adj, adv) underarm.
obstinacy: (n) stubbornness, firmness, quadrately, truely, right, squaredly, ANTONYMS: (adj) honest, overhand.
Victor Hugo 381
The sitting of the court was suspended. A counsellor having remarked that
the gentlemen were fatigued, and that it would be a long time to wait until the
torture was at an end, the president replied that a magistrate must know how to
sacrifice himself to his duty.%
"What an annoying and vexatious hussy," said an aged judge, "to get herself
put to the question when one has not supped!"
Thesaurus
aged: (adj) senile, elderly, older, hoary, charming, satisfying, welcome, torture: (n, v) pain, distress, agonize,
ripe, venerable, ancient, senior, convenient. afflict; (n) agony, anguish, suffering,
decrepit, antique, antiquated. having: (n) estate, possession, excruciation, grief; (v) rack,
ANTONYMS: (adj) youthful, new, acceptance, enjoyment. excruciate. ANTONYMS: (n) relief,
fresh, green, unripe, unseasoned, sacrifice: (n, v) oblation, forfeit; (v) alleviation, content, ecstasy, joy,
smooth. offer, immolate, offer up, give, give pleasure; (v) relieve, alleviate.
annoying: (adj) galling, vexatious, up, relinquish; (n) immolation, loss, vexatious: (adj) annoying, pesky,
aggravating, vexing, worrying, forfeiture. troublesome, tiresome, galling,
awkward, trying, bothersome, suspended: (adj) hanging, dormant, irritating, untoward, thorny,
disagreeable; (adj, v) irritating; (n) pendulous, abeyant, dangling, in burdensome, pestiferous, vexing.
annoyance. ANTONYMS: (adj) abeyance, inactive, pendant, in ANTONYMS: (adj) aiding, assisting,
pleasing, delightful, pleasant, suspension, pensile, suspensory. helpful, soothing.
Victor Hugo 383
CHAPTER %II
CONTINUATION OF THE CROWN WHICH WAS

CHANGED INTO A DRY LEAF
After ascending and descending several steps in the corridors, which were so
dark that they were lighted by lamps at mid-day, La Esmeralda, still surrounded
by her lugubrious escort, was thrust by the police into a gloomy chamber. This
chamber, circular in form, occupied the ground floor of one of those great
towers, which, even in our own century, still pierce through the layer of modern
edifices with which modern Paris has covered ancient Paris. There were no
windows to this cellar; no other opening than the entrance, which was low, and
closed by an enormous iron door. Nevertheless, light was not lacking; a furnace
had been constructed in the thickness of the wall; a large fire was lighted there,
which filled the vault with its crimson reflections and deprived a miserable
candle, which stood in one corner, of all radiance. The iron grating which served
to close the oven, being raised at that moment, allowed only a view at the mouth
of the flaming vent-hole in the dark wall, the lower extremity of its bars, like a
row of black and pointed teeth, set flat apart; which made the furnace resemble
one of those mouths of dragons which spout forth flames in ancient legends. By
the light which escaped from it, the prisoner beheld, all about the room, frightful
instruments whose use she did not understand. In the centre lay a leather
Thesaurus
candle: (n) candela, light, taper, deprived: (adj) bereft, poor, destitute, bright, fortunate, hopeful, jubilant,
bougie, CD, candlepower, lamp, wax depressed, needy, broke, bankrupt, luxurious, overjoyed, heavenly.
light, Standard candle; (v) examine, denuded, humble, indigent, oven: (n) furnace, stove, fireplace,
illuminate. insolvent. ANTONYMS: (adj) rich, hearth, broiler, heater, bakery, range,
cellar: (n) basement, cellarage, wine exalted, salubrious. kitchen appliance, boiler, coke oven
cellar, godown, warehouse, winery, legends: (n) tradition, mythology, chamber.
silo, pit, excavation, story, storey. myths. thickness: (n) density, width,
circular: (adj) round, rounded, rotund, miserable: (adj, v) forlorn, wretched, consistency, layer, consistence,
orbicular, circinate, globular, annular, unhappy; (adj) mean, low, abject, heaviness, concentration, bulk,
spherical; (n) handbill, deplorable, downcast, bad, desolate; breadth, compactness, substance.
advertisement, bill. ANTONYMS: (adj, adv) meager. ANTONYMS: (adj) ANTONYMS: (n) slenderness,
(adj) linear, rectangular, straight. happy, generous, cheerful, cheery, smoothness, length, clearness.
mattress, placed almost flat upon the ground, over which hung a strap provided
with a buckle, attached to a brass ring in the mouth of a flat-nosed monster
carved in the keystone of the vault. Tongs, pincers, large ploughshares, filled the
interior of the furnace, and glowed in a confused heap on the coals. The
sanguine light of the furnace illuminated in the chamber only a confused mass of
horrible things.%
This Tartarus was called simply, The Question Chamber.
On the bed, in a negligent attitude, sat Pierrat Torterue, the official torturer.
His underlings, two gnomes with square faces, leather aprons, and linen
breeches, were moving the iron instruments on the coals.
In vain did the poor girl summon up her courage; on entering this chamber
she was stricken with horror.
The sergeants of the bailiff of the courts drew up in line on one side, the
priests of the officiality on the other. A clerk, inkhorn, and a table were in one
corner.
Master Jacques Charmolue approached the gypsy with a very sweet smile.
"My dear child," said he, "do you still persist in your denial?"
"Yes," she replied, in a dying voice.
"In that case," replied Charmolue, "it will be very painful for us to have to
question you more urgently than we should like. Pray take the trouble to seat
yourself on this bed. Master Pierrat, make room for mademoiselle, and close the
door."
Pierrat rose with a growl.
"If I shut the door," he muttered, "my fire will go out."
"Well, my dear fellow," replied Charmolue, "leave it open then."
Meanwhile, la Esmeralda had remained standing. That leather bed on which
so many unhappy wretches had writhed, frightened her. Terror chilled the very
marrow of her bones; she stood there bewildered and stupefied. At a sign from
Charmolue, the two assistants took her and placed her in a sitting posture on the
Thesaurus
chilled: (adj) frozen, freezing, cool, (adj) strict, diligent, conscientious, summon: (v) assemble, convene,
refrigerated, icy, inhibited, careful, dutiful, prompt, prudent, demand, ask, invoke, evoke, invite,
restrained, confined, shivering, iced, responsible, sensible, cautious. muster, page, rally, convoke.
stiff. sanguine: (adj) hopeful, optimistic, ANTONYM: (v) disband.
marrow: (adj, n) gist, pith, bloody, rubicund, confident, crimson, vain: (adj) proud, arrogant, conceited,
quintessence; (n) substance, heart, cheerful, buoyant, sanguineous; (adj, fruitless, idle, empty, abortive,
kernel, core, content, center, n) red, florid. ANTONYMS: (adj) ineffectual, unproductive,
backbone; (adj) quiddity. pessimistic, gloomy, doubtful. narcissistic; (adj, v) useless.
negligent: (adj) neglectful, heedless, stricken: (adj) smitten, struck, beaten, ANTONYMS: (adj) shy, successful,
forgetful, reckless, inattentive, laid low, affected, hurt, low, possible, persuasive, selfless, fruitful,
inadvertent, indifferent, slow, lax, impaired, dotty; (v) heavy laden, humble, useful, responsible,
untidy; (adj, v) remiss. ANTONYMS: victimized. worthwhile, effective.
Victor Hugo 385
bed. They did her no harm; but when these men touched her, when that leather
touched her, she felt all her blood retreat to her heart. She cast a frightened look
around the chamber. It seemed to her as though she beheld advancing from all
quarters towards her, with the intention of crawling up her body and biting and
pinching her, all those hideous implements of torture, which as compared to the
instruments of all sorts she had hitherto seen, were like what bats, centipedes,
and spiders are among insects and birds.%
"Where is the physician?" asked Charmolue.
"Here," replied a black gown whom she had not before noticed.
She shuddered.
"Mademoiselle," resumed the caressing voice of the procucrator of the
Ecclesiastical court, "for the third time, do you persist in denying the deeds of
which you are accused?"
This time she could only make a sign with her head.
"You persist?" said Jacques Charmolue. "Then it grieves me deeply, but I
must fulfil my office."
"Monsieur le Procureur du Roi," said Pierrat abruptly, "How shall we begin?"
Charmolue hesitated for a moment with the ambiguous grimace of a poet in
search of a rhyme.
"With the boot," he said at last.
The unfortunate girl felt herself so utterly abandoned by God and men, that
her head fell upon her breast like an inert thing which has no power in itself.
The tormentor and the physician approached her simultaneously. At the
same time, the two assistants began to fumble among their hideous arsenal.
At the clanking of their frightful irons, the unhappy child quivered like a
dead frog which is being galvanized. "Oh!" she murmured, so low that no one
heard her; "Oh, my Phoebus!" Then she fell back once more into her immobility
and her marble silence. This spectacle would have rent any other heart than
those of her judges. One would have pronounced her a poor sinful soul, being
Thesaurus
centipedes: (n) phylum Arthropoda. indolent, inactive, lifeless, dormant, rhyme: (n) poetry, verse, poem, song,
frog: (n) frogs, toad, chamois, epaulet, flat, inanimate, passive. alliteration, numbers, rhythm; (n, v)
crapaud, batrachian, anuran, aigulet, ANTONYMS: (adj) active, animate, rime, measure; (v) poetize, versify.
grasshopper, Frenchman, shoulder proactive, keen, live, alive, mobile. sinful: (adj) wicked, impious, bad,
knot. irons: (n) fetters, iron, chain, shackles, iniquitous, ungodly, depraved,
fumble: (n, v) muff; (v) botch, grope, fetter, manacles, gyve, bond, bonds, immoral, profane, criminal, wrong,
feel, flounder, finger, paw, bobble, pinion, handcuffs. unholy. ANTONYMS: (adj) pious,
touch; (adj, v) blunder; (adj) boggle. judges: (n) judge, adjudicators, jury. virtuous, moral, right, pure.
implements: (n) equipment, pinching: (adj) biting, niggardly, fresh, tormentor: (n) pest, tormenter,
apparatus, gear, tackle, rigging, piercing, cutting, inclement, keen, torturer, pesterer, annoyer, teaser,
outfit, hardware, trappings. bitter, niveous, bleak; (adv) tease, tantalizer, persecutor, gadfly,
inert: (adj) idle, dead, sluggish, dull, pinchingly. flat.
tortured by Satan beneath the scarlet wicket of hell. The miserable body which
that frightful swarm of saws, wheels, and racks were about to clasp in their
clutches, the being who was about to be manipulated by the harsh hands of
executioners and pincers, was that gentle, white, fragile creature, a poor grain of
millet which human justice was handing over to the terrible mills of torture to
grind. Meanwhile, the callous hands of Pierrat Torterue's assistants had bared
that charming leg, that tiny foot, which had so often amazed the passers-by with
their delicacy and beauty, in the squares of Paris.%
"'Tis a shame!" muttered the tormentor, glancing at these graceful and
delicate forms.
Had the archdeacon been present, he certainly would have recalled at that
moment his symbol of the spider and the fly. Soon the unfortunate girl, through
a mist which spread before her eyes, beheld the boot approach; she soon beheld
her foot encased between iron plates disappear in the frightful apparatus. Then
terror restored her strength.
"Take that off!" she cried angrily; and drawing herself up, with her hair all
dishevelled: "Mercy!"
She darted from the bed to fling herself at the feet of the king's procurator,
but her leg was fast in the heavy block of oak and iron, and she sank down upon
the boot, more crushed than a bee with a lump of lead on its wing.
At a sign from Charmolue, she was replaced on the bed, and two coarse
hands adjusted to her delicate waist the strap which hung from the ceiling.
"For the last time, do you confess the facts in the case?" demanded
Charmolue, with his imperturbable benignity.
"I am innocent."
"Then, mademoiselle, how do you explain the circumstance laid to your
charge?"
"Alas, monseigneur, I do not know."
"So you deny them?"
Thesaurus
apparatus: (n) appliance, device, hard, hardened, hardhearted, drudge; (v) grate, crunch, abrade,
tackle, implement, plant, equipment, indifferent, insensitive. ANTONYMS: chew, scrape, mash; (n) mill.
system, set, machine, organ, gear. (adj) caring, merciful, compassionate, ANTONYMS: (v) blunt, smooth.
bared: (adj) naked, unclothed, sensitive, sympathetic, tender, nice, millet: (n) broomcorn millet, grain,
exposed. thoughtful, affectionate, concerned, hog millet, Panicum miliaceum,
benignity: (n) kindliness, benignancy, flattering. kurakkan, miliary, cereal grass, food
favor, graciousness, tenderness, clasp: (n, v) embrace, hug, grip, grasp, grain, coracan, corakan, stem of
friendliness, amiability, benefaction; squeeze, clutch, buckle, brooch; (adj, maize.
(adj, n) kindness, humanity; (adj) n, v) pin; (v) stick, cling. tortured: (adj) anguished, suffering,
beneficence. ANTONYMS: (v) unbuckle, loose, agonized, excruciate, excruciated,
callous: (adj) heartless, insensible, unclasp, relax, detach. gnarled, hagridden, miserable,
relentless, cruel, brutal, obdurate, grind: (n, v) labor, toil, comminute, woeful, hurt.
Victor Hugo 387
"All!"
"Proceed," said Charmolue to Pierrat.%
Pierrat turned the handle of the screw-jack, the boot was contracted, and the
unhappy girl uttered one of those horrible cries which have no orthography in
any human language.
"Stop!" said Charmolue to Pierrat. "Do you confess?" he said to the gypsy.
"All!" cried the wretched girl. "I confess! I confess! Mercy!"
She had not calculated her strength when she faced the torture. Poor child,
whose life up to that time had been so joyous, so pleasant, so sweet, the first pain
had conquered her!
"Humanity forces me to tell you," remarked the king's procurator, "that in
confessing, it is death that you must expect."
"I certainly hope so!" said she. And she fell back upon the leather bed, dying,
doubled up, allowing herself to hang suspended from the strap buckled round
her waist.
"Come, fair one, hold up a little," said Master Pierrat, raising her. "You have
the air of the lamb of the Golden Fleece which hangs from Monsieur de
Bourgogne's neck."
Jacques Charmolue raised his voice,
"Clerk, write. Young Bohemian maid, you confess your participation in the
feasts, witches' sabbaths, and witchcrafts of hell, with ghosts, hags, and
vampires? Answer."
"Yes," she said, so low that her words were lost in her breathing.
"You confess to having seen the ram which Beelzebub causes to appear in the
clouds to call together the witches' sabbath, and which is beheld by socerers
alone?"
"Yes."
"You confess to having adored the heads of Bophomet, those abominable
idols of the Templars?"
Thesaurus
adored: (adj) loved, respected, confessing: (v) confess. severity, inhumanity, nastiness,
precious, idolized, idolised, conquered: (adj) overcome, selfishness.
acclaimed, blessed, favorite, dearly vanquished, overwhelmed, crushed, orthography: (n) spelling, ideography,
loved, beloved, venerated. subdued, profligate, routed, boustrophedon, cuneiform,
buckled: (v) wreathy, frizzly, crepe; overthrown, done for, under enemy hieroglyph, hieroglyphic, writing,
(adj) warped, misshapen, malformed, control, baffled. ANTONYMS: (adj) writing system, syllabic, syllabary,
distorted, askew, deformed. victorious, liberated. scriptural.
confess: (adj, v) own, allow, admit, humanity: (n) benevolence, mankind, strap: (n, v) lash, whip; (n) strop, leash,
avow; (v) concede, profess, recognize, flesh, human race, human, rein, shoulder strap, band, bar; (v)
divulge, disclose, reveal, receive. humankind; (adj, n) compassion, bind, flog; (adj, n) tie. ANTONYM: (v)
ANTONYMS: (v) suppress, hide, charity, kindness, benignity, untie.
dispute, conceal, repress, harbor. gentleness. ANTONYMS: (n)
"Yes."
"To having had habitual dealings with the devil under the form of a goat
familiar, joined with you in the suit?"
"Yes."
"Lastly, you avow and confess to having, with the aid of the demon, and of
the phantom vulgarly known as the surly monk, on the night of the twenty-ninth
of March last, murdered and assassinated a captain named Phoebus de
Châteaupers?"
She raised her large, staring eyes to the magistrate, and replied, as though
mechanically, without convulsion or agitation,
"Yes."
It was evident that everything within her was broken.%
"Write, clerk," said Charmolue. And, addressing the torturers, "Release the
prisoner, and take her back to the court."
When the prisoner had been "unbooted," the procurator of the ecclesiastical
court examined her foot, which was still swollen with pain. "Come," said he,
"there's no great harm done. You shrieked in good season. You could still dance,
my beauty!"
Then he turned to his acolytes of the officiality,-- "Behold justice enlightened
at last! This is a solace, gentlemen! Madamoiselle will bear us witness that we
have acted with all possible gentleness."
Thesaurus
avow: (v) affirm, assert, declare, disillusioned, progressive, cultured, ANTONYMS: (adj) occasional,
protest, confess, attest, asseverate; aware, informed, learned, lettered; infrequent, mild, irregular,
(adj, v) admit, acknowledge, own; (n, (adj, v) wise; (n, v) savant; (v) shrewd. exceptional, erratic, abnormal,
v) aver. ANTONYMS: (v) disavow, ANTONYMS: (adj) puzzled, innovative.
renounce, refute, disclaim, condemn, unenlightened, uninformed, staring: (adj) conspicuous, garish,
censure. confounded, confused, ignorant, agaze, vivid, noisy, showy, fixed,
convulsion: (adj, n, v) spasm; (n) fit, perplexed, wild, reactionary, opened, glassy; (adv) staringly.
paroxysm, commotion, attack, traditional; (n) uninitiate. vulgarly: (adv) crudely, commonly,
clonus, shake, seizure, upheaval, habitual: (adj, n) common, frequent, plebeianly, grossly, smuttily,
cramp; (adj, n) disturbance. usual; (adj) chronic, conventional, uncouthly, boorishly, cheaply,
ANTONYM: (n) peace. confirmed, accustomed, natural, rudely, vilely, tastelessly.
enlightened: (adj) liberal, commonplace, everyday, ordinary. ANTONYM: (adv) decently.
Victor Hugo 389
CHAPTER III
END OF THE CROWN WHICH WAS TURNED

INTO A DRY LEAF
When she re-entered the audience hall, pale and limping, she was received
with a general murmur of pleasure. On the part of the audience there was the
feeling of impatience gratified which one experiences at the theatre at the end of
the last entr'acte of the comedy, when the curtain rises and the conclusion is
about to begin. On the part of the judges, it was the hope of getting their
suppers sooner.%
The little goat also bleated with joy. He tried to run towards his mistress, but
they had tied him to the bench.
Night was fully set in. The candles, whose number had not been increased,
cast so little light, that the walls of the hall could not be seen. The shadows there
enveloped all objects in a sort of mist. A few apathetic faces of judges alone
could be dimly discerned. Opposite them, at the extremity of the long hail, they
could see a vaguely white point standing out against the sombre background.
This was the accused.
She had dragged herself to her place. When Charmolue had installed himself
in a magisterial manner in his own, he seated himself, then rose and said,
Thesaurus
apathetic: (adj) indifferent, show, clowning, drama, wittiness, dragged: (adj) depressed, dejected,
uninterested, cool, impassive, slapstick, jesting, interlude, hilarity. upset, unhappy, spent, dispirited,
perfunctory, dull, spiritless, ANTONYMS: (n) melodrama, somber, melancholy, gloomy, joyless,
nonchalant, casual, lukewarm, lazy. seriousness, solemnity. low.
ANTONYMS: (adj) enthusiastic, curtain: (n, v) cover; (n) barrier, entr'acte: (n) intermission, intermezzo.
inquisitive, fervent, energetic, drapery, blind, screen, mantle, mask, experiences: (n) life, biography,
concerned, interested, keen, excited, shade, pall, shroud; (v) hide. journal, personal narrative, fortunes.
passionate, ambitious, caring. dimly: (adv) obscurely, darkly, faintly, gratified: (adj) glad, satisfied, pleased,
bench: (n) banquette, chair, dully, duskily, vaguely, shadowily, delighted, happy, thankful, grateful,
workbench, court, terrace, bank, bar, hazily, gloomily, somberly; (adj, adv) content, complacent, comfortable,
judicatory, Ottoman, board, form. palely. ANTONYMS: (adv) clearly, cheerful.
comedy: (n) play, humor, drollery, strongly, distinctly. suppers: (n) supper.
without exhibiting too much self-complacency at his success,-- "The accused has
confessed all."
"Bohemian girl," the president continued, "have you avowed all your deeds
of magic, prostitution, and assassination on Phoebus de Châteaupers."
Her heart contracted. She was heard to sob amid the darkness.%
"Anything you like," she replied feebly, "but kill me quickly!"
"Monsieur, procurator of the king in the ecclesiastical courts," said the
president, "the chamber is ready to hear you in your charge."
Master Charmolue exhibited an alarming note book, and began to read, with
many gestures and the exaggerated accentuation of the pleader, an oration in
Latin, wherein all the proofs of the suit were piled up in Ciceronian periphrases,
flanked with quotations from Plautus, his favorite comic author. We regret that
we are not able to offer to our readers this remarkable piece. The orator
pronounced it with marvellous action. Before he had finished the exordium, the
perspiration was starting from his brow, and his eyes from his bead.
All at once, in the middle of a fine period, he interrupted himself, and his
glance, ordinarily so gentle and even stupid, became menacing.
"Gentlemen," he exclaimed (this time in French, for it was not in his copy
book), "Satan is so mixed up in this affair, that here he is present at our debates,
and making sport of their majesty. Behold!"
So saying, he pointed to the little goat, who, on seeing Charmolue
gesticulating, had, in point of fact, thought it appropriate to do the same, and
had seated himself on his haunches, reproducing to the best of his ability, with
his forepaws and his bearded head the pathetic pantomine of the king's
procurator in the ecclesiastical court. This was, if the reader remembers, one of
his prettiest accomplishments. This incident, this last proof, produced a great
effect. The goat's hoofs were tied, and the king's procurator resumed the thread
of his eloquence.
Thesaurus
accentuation: (n) stress, emphasis, rhetoric, articulateness, expression, language.
inflection, emphasizing, prosody, volubility, persuasiveness, articulacy, orator: (n) elocutionist, speechmaker,
accenting, stressing, intonation, beat, facundity, way with words. speaker, lecturer, Cicero, speechifier,
accent mark. ANTONYM: (n) inarticulateness. demagog, demagogue, eulogist; (v)
accomplishments: (n) benefit, actions, exhibited: (adj) ostensible, avowed, oratrix, oratress.
background, Comings and Goings, apparent, declared. pleader: (n) defender, counselor,
deeds, events, happenings, activities. exhibiting: (n) advertising; (adj) counsel, counsellor, attorney, lawyer,
avowed: (adj) acknowledged, attested, exhibitory, ostensive. conveyancer, equity draftsman,
ostensible, sworn, stated, confirmed, gesticulating: (adj) communicative. protector, special pleader, proponent.
declared, pretended, known, oration: (n) discourse, harangue, reproducing: (adj) fruitful, fecund.
authenticated, apparent. lecture, speech, declamation, homily, wherein: (adv) in what, in which,
eloquence: (n) style, fluency, oratory, tirade, say, recitation, oratory, where.
Victor Hugo 391
It was very long, but the peroration was admirable. Here is the concluding
phrase; let the reader add the hoarse voice and the breathless gestures of Master
Charmolue,
"Ideo, domni, coram stryga demonstrata, crimine patente, intentione criminis
existente, in nornine sanctoe ecclesioe Nostroe- Domince Parisiensis quoe est in saisina
habendi omnimodam altam et bassam justitiam in illa hac intemerata Civitatis insula,
tenore proesentium declaremus nos requirere, primo, aliquamdam pecuniariam
indemnitatem; secundo, amendationem honorabilem ante portalium maximum Nostroe-
Dominoe, ecclesioe cathedralis; tertio, sententiani in virtute cujus ista styrga cum sua
capella, seu in trivio vulgariter dicto la Grève, seu in insula exeunte in fluvio Secanoe,
juxta pointam juardini regalis, executatoe sint!"
He put on his cap again and seated himself.%
"Eheu!" sighed the broken-hearted Gringoire, "bassa latinitas--bastard latin!"
Another man in a black gown rose near the accused; he was her lawyer.-- The
judges, who were fasting, began to grumble.
"Advocate, be brief," said the president.
"Monsieur the President," replied the advocate, "since the defendant has
confessed the crime, I have only one word to say to these gentlemen. Here is a
text from the Salic law; 'If a witch hath eaten a man, and if she be convicted of it,
she shall pay a fine of eight thousand deniers, which amount to two hundred
sous of gold.' May it please the chamber to condemn my client to the fine?"
"An abrogated text," said the advocate extraordinary of the king.
"Nego, I deny it," replied the advocate.
"Put it to the vote!" said one of the councillors; "the crime is manifest, and it is
late."
They proceeded to take a vote without leaving the room. The judges
signified their assent without giving their reasons, they were in a hurry. Their
capped heads were seen uncovering one after the other, in the gloom, at the
lugubrious question addressed to them by the president in a low voice. The poor
Thesaurus
assent: (n) acceptance, acquiescence, shrift, sackcloth and ashes, tirade, tag.
approval, agreement, compliance, maceration, lustration, flagellation, reasons: (n) proof.
admission, approbation; (v) accede, watching one's weight, hunger strike, signified: (n) common sense,
accord, agree; (adj, v) acquiesce. penance; (v) calorie counting. acceptation, good sense, horse sense,
ANTONYMS: (v) resist, disagree, grumble: (n, v) mutter, gripe, growl, mother wit, sensation, sense, sensory
disapprove, reject, refuse; (n) moan, rumble, mumble, groan, roar; faculty, sentience, sentiency; (adj)
disagreement, refusal, resistance. (v) complain, grouch; (n) complaint. implied.
broken-hearted: (adj) despairing. ANTONYMS: (n, v) praise; (v) uncovering: (n) breakthrough,
capella: (n) genus Gallinago, genus compliment, rejoice. detection, revelation, baring, find,
Capella. peroration: (n) harangue, close, denudation, disforestation, espial,
confessed: (adj) known. conclusion, speech, formal speech, catching, husking, stripping.
fasting: (n) abstinence, white sheet, lecture, delivery, epilogue, say,
accused had the appearance of looking at them, but her troubled eye no longer
saw.
Then the clerk began to write; then he handed a long parchment to the
president.%
Then the unhappy girl heard the people moving, the pikes clashing, and a
freezing voice saying to her,-- "Bohemian wench, on the day when it shall seem
good to our lord the king, at the hour of noon, you will be taken in a tumbrel, in
your shift, with bare feet, and a rope about your neck, before the grand portal of
Notre-Dame, and you will there make an apology with a wax torch of the weight
of two pounds in your hand, and thence you will be conducted to the Place de
Grève, where you will be hanged and strangled on the town gibbet; and likewise
your goat; and you will pay to the official three lions of gold, in reparation of the
crimes by you committed and by you confessed, of sorcery and magic,
debauchery and murder, upon the person of the Sieur Phoebus de Châteaupers.
May God have mercy on your soul!"
"Oh! 'tis a dream!" she murmured; and she felt rough hands bearing her
away.
Thesaurus
apology: (n, v) excuse; (n) amends, sweltering, warm, mild, tropical, atonement, indemnity, correction,
regret, defense, justification, reason, torrid, balmy. restoration; (n, v) indemnification,
explanation, vindication, alibi, noon: (n) high noon, noonday, compensation, repair, remuneration,
acknowledgment; (v) apologize. noontide, afternoon, hour, restitution.
ANTONYMS: (n) blame, dinnertime, crest, twelve noon; (adj) thence: (adv) therefore, thus,
reprehension, accusation, meridian, meridional; (adj, n) therefrom, thereof, consequently,
shamelessness, epitome. culmination. then, so, thereafter, thenceforth,
conducted: (adj) directed, guided. parch: (v) desiccate, burn, grill, since, on account of.
freezing: (adj, v) icy, frosty, glacial; dehydrate, sear, scorch, drain, dry, tumbrel: (n) limber, cart, trebucket,
(adj) chilly, arctic, frigid, bitter, chill; broil, inflame, dry up. ANTONYM: tumbler, pontoon, dumpcart, acrobat,
(n) freeze, congelation, refrigeration. (v) swell. pen, coop.
ANTONYMS: (adj) boiling, reparation: (n) redress, recompense,
Victor Hugo 393
CHAPTER %IV
LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA--LEAVE ALL

HOPE BEHIND, YE WHO ENTER HERE
In the Middle Ages, when an edifice was complete, there was almost as much
of it in the earth as above it. Unless built upon piles, like Notre-Dame, a palace,
a fortress, a church, had always a double bottom. In cathedrals, it was, in some
sort, another subterranean cathedral, low, dark, mysterious, blind, and mute,
under the upper nave which was overflowing with light and reverberating with
organs and bells day and night. Sometimes it was a sepulchre. In palaces, in
fortresses, it was a prison, sometimes a sepulchre also, sometimes both together.
These mighty buildings, whose mode of formation and vegetation we have
elsewhere explained, had not simply foundations, but, so to speak, roots which
ran branching through the soil in chambers, galleries, and staircases, like the
construction above. Thus churches, palaces, fortresses, had the earth half way up
their bodies. The cellars of an edifice formed another edifice, into which one
descended instead of ascending, and which extended its subterranean grounds
under the external piles of the monument, like those forests and mountains
which are reversed in the mirror-like waters of a lake, beneath the forests and
mountains of the banks.
Thesaurus
bodies: (n) people, public. inexplicable, obscure, abstruse, dark, reverberating: (adj) resounding,
chambers: (n) bureau, consulting cryptic, secret, arcane. ANTONYMS: reverberant, ringing, resonating,
room, countinghouse, apartment, (adj) known, apparent, normal, open, deep, rumbling, muted,
lodging, suite. explicable, facile, obvious, simple, reverberative, booming, rolling, dull.
forests: (n) country. legible, familiar, transparent. reversed: (adj) converse, inverse,
mighty: (adj) immense, huge, grand, organs: (n) offal, haslet, giblet, chitlins, reverse, upside-down, overturned,
intense, high, big, forcible, strong, chitlings, chitterlings, insides, tongue, opposite, contrary, reversal, upside
large, great; (adj, adv) powerful. variety meat, sweetbread, tripe. down, upturned, on its head.
ANTONYMS: (adj) puny, tiny, weak, piles: (adj, n) hemorrhoids, heaps, lots, vegetation: (n) growth, plants, thicket,
insignificant. loads, plenty; (n) hemorrhoid, stacks, shrubbery, scrub, groundcover,
mysterious: (adj) inscrutable, haemorrhoid, tons; (adj) heartburn, foliage, copse, coppice, chaparral,
incomprehensible, deep, eerie, hernia. brushwood.
At the fortress of Saint-Antoine, at the Palais de Justice of Paris, at the Louvre,

these subterranean edifices were prisons. The stories of these prisons, as they
sank into the soil, grew constantly narrower and more gloomy. They were so
many zones, where the shades of horror were graduated. Dante could never
imagine anything better for his hell. These tunnels of cells usually terminated in
a sack of a lowest dungeon, with a vat-like bottom, where Dante placed Satan,
where society placed those condemned to death. A miserable human existence,
once interred there; farewell light, air, life, ogni speranza-- every hope; it only
came forth to the scaffold or the stake. Sometimes it rotted there; human justice
called this "forgetting." Between men and himself, the condemned man felt a pile
of stones and jailers weighing down upon his head; and the entire prison, the
massive bastille was nothing more than an enormous, complicated lock, which
barred him off from the rest of the world.%
It was in a sloping cavity of this description, in the oubliettes excavated by
Saint-Louis, in the inpace of the Tournelle, that la Esmeralda had been placed on
being condemned to death, through fear of her escape, no doubt, with the
colossal court-house over her head. Poor fly, who could not have lifted even one
of its blocks of stone!
Assuredly, Providence and society had been equally unjust; such an excess of
unhappiness and of torture was not necessary to break so frail a creature.
There she lay, lost in the shadows, buried, hidden, immured. Any one who
could have beheld her in this state, after having seen her laugh and dance in the
sun, would have shuddered. Cold as night, cold as death, not a breath of air in
her tresses, not a human sound in her ear, no longer a ray of light in her eyes;
snapped in twain, crushed with chains, crouching beside a jug and a loaf, on a
little straw, in a pool of water, which was formed under her by the sweating of
the prison walls; without motion, almost without breath, she had no longer the
power to suffer; Phoebus, the sun, midday, the open air, the streets of Paris, the
dances with applause, the sweet babblings of love with the officer; then the
priest, the old crone, the poignard, the blood, the torture, the gibbet; all this did,
indeed, pass before her mind, sometimes as a charming and golden vision,
Thesaurus
bastille: (n, v) jail; (n) prison, dungeon, Travis, stage. transpiration, bodily process; (adj)
fortress, stronghold, bridewell, shades: (n) shade, sunglasses, dark perspiring, sweaty.
lockup, donjon, defense; (v) glasses, shadow, glasses, blind, twain: (n) pair, brace, dyad, deuce,
incarcerate, imprison. awning, roller blind, eyeglasses. twosome, duo, straddle, bitstock,
excavated: (adj) concave, hollow. sloping: (adj, v) oblique, slope; (adj) coupling, braces, yoke.
interred: (adj) buried, inhumed, slanting, inclined, slanted, diagonal, unhappiness: (n) sadness, misery,
hidden. ANTONYM: (adj) unburied. leaning, sloped; (adj, adv) aslope, melancholy, distress, grief, regret,
rotted: (adj) roted, crappy, icky, lousy, aslant; (v) slant. ANTONYMS: (adj) infelicity, woe, sorrowfulness,
rotten, unsound. horizontal, upright. depression, displeasure.
scaffold: (n) frame, scaffolding, sweating: (n) sweat, exudation, ANTONYMS: (n) cheerfulness,
framework, foundation, gallows, diaphoresis, hidrosis, sudation, pleasure, joy, elation, contentment,
stand, transom, summer, trave, extravasation, fermentation, satisfaction, cheer.
Victor Hugo 395
sometimes as a hideous nightmare; but it was no longer anything but a vague

and horrible struggle, lost in the gloom, or distant music played up above
ground, and which was no longer audible at the depth where the unhappy girl
had fallen.%
Since she had been there, she had neither waked nor slept. In that misfortune,
in that cell, she could no longer distinguish her waking hours from slumber,
dreams from reality, any more than day from night. All this was mixed, broken,
floating, disseminated confusedly in her thought. She no longer felt, she no
longer knew, she no longer thought; at the most, she only dreamed. Never had a
living creature been thrust more deeply into nothingness.
Thus benumbed, frozen, petrified, she had barely noticed on two or three
occasions, the sound of a trap door opening somewhere above her, without even
permitting the passage of a little light, and through which a hand had tossed her
a bit of black bread. Nevertheless, this periodical visit of the jailer was the sole
communication which was left her with mankind.
A single thing still mechanically occupied her ear; above her head, the
dampness was filtering through the mouldy stones of the vault, and a drop of
water dropped from them at regular intervals. She listened stupidly to the noise
made by this drop of water as it fell into the pool beside her.
This drop of water falling from time to time into that pool, was the only
movement which still went on around her, the only clock which marked the
time, the only noise which reached her of all the noise made on the surface of the
earth.
To tell the whole, however, she also felt, from time to time, in that cesspool of
mire and darkness, something cold passing over her foot or her arm, and she
shuddered.
How long had she been there? She did not know. She had a recollection of a
sentence of death pronounced somewhere, against some one, then of having
been herself carried away, and of waking up in darkness and silence, chilled to
the heart. She had dragged herself along on her hands. Then iron rings that cut
her ankles, and chains had rattled. She had recognized the fact that all around
Thesaurus
benumbed: (adj) torpid, asleep, stiff, vapor, dankness, drizzle, heat, rattled: (adj) hot and bothered,
insensible, dull, dead, numbed, mugginess. ANTONYMS: (n) perturbed, upset, unsettled, puzzled,
hardened, drugged, uninterested, dryness, smoothness, freshness. disconcerted, discomposed,
cold. disseminated: (adj) dispersed, spread, bewildered, beside oneself, abashed,
cesspool: (n) drain, septic tank, sink, scattered. addled. ANTONYM: (adj) calm.
sump, cistern, latrine, night soil; (adj) filtering: (n) filtration, straining, recollection: (n, v) mind; (n)
cess. refinement; (v) to filter. reminiscence, recall, anamnesis,
chains: (n) fetters, bond, chain, bonds, periodical: (n) journal, magazine, remembrance, recognition, memento,
handcuffs, irons, manacles, shackles, newspaper, review, organ, memorial, commemoration, memoir,
iron, confine, trammel. publication, book; (adj) intermittent, retrospect.
dampness: (n) clamminess, humidity, cyclic, recurrent, annual. waking: (adj) wakeful; (n) awakening,
moistness, moisture, wet, wetness, permitting: (adj) lenient, permitted. wakefulness, consciousness.
her was wall, that below her there was a pavement covered with moisture and a
truss of straw; but neither lamp nor air-hole. Then she had seated herself on that
straw and, sometimes, for the sake of changing her attitude, on the last stone step
in her dungeon. For a while she had tried to count the black minutes measured
off for her by the drop of water; but that melancholy labor of an ailing brain had
broken off of itself in her head, and had left her in stupor.%
At length, one day, or one night, (for midnight and midday were of the same
color in that sepulchre), she heard above her a louder noise than was usually
made by the turnkey when he brought her bread and jug of water. She raised
her head, and beheld a ray of reddish light passing through the crevices in the
sort of trapdoor contrived in the roof of the inpace.
At the same time, the heavy lock creaked, the trap grated on its rusty hinges,
turned, and she beheld a lantern, a hand, and the lower portions of the bodies of
two men, the door being too low to admit of her seeing their heads. The light
pained her so acutely that she shut her eyes.
When she opened them again the door was closed, the lantern was deposited
on one of the steps of the staircase; a man alone stood before her. A monk's black
cloak fell to his feet, a cowl of the same color concealed his face. Nothing was
visible of his person, neither face nor hands. It was a long, black shroud
standing erect, and beneath which something could be felt moving. She gazed
fixedly for several minutes at this sort of spectre. But neither he nor she spoke.
One would have pronounced them two statues confronting each other. Two
things only seemed alive in that cavern; the wick of the lantern, which sputtered
on account of the dampness of the atmosphere, and the drop of water from the
roof, which cut this irregular sputtering with its monotonous splash, and made
the light of the lantern quiver in concentric waves on the oily water of the pool.
At last the prisoner broke the silence.
"Who are you?"
"A priest."
The words, the accent, the sound of his voice made her tremble.
Thesaurus
contrived: (adj) affected, unnatural, monotonic; (adj, v) dry, uninteresting, hide, conceal; (adj, n) shelter; (v)
false, forced, labored, spurious, stupid. ANTONYMS: (adj) exciting, shield, envelop, enshroud; (n)
feigned, unreal, strained, built, varied, stimulating, lively, exotic, covering, mantle, pall. ANTONYM:
artificially formal. ANTONYM: (adj) enthralling, brilliant, flexible. (v) disclose.
sincere. oily: (adj, v) bland, soapy; (adj) fatty, sputtering: (n) splutter, splatter,
cowl: (n) bonnet, cowling, kerchief, fat, oleaginous, unctuous, slick, spattering, spatter, splattering, dab,
protection, helmet, cow, condition, buttery; (adv) unctuously, smoothly, splashing, splash; (adj) spluttering,
chock, soe, tonsure. oleaginously. ANTONYM: (adj) lean. noisy; (v) sizzle.
grated: (v) areolar, streaked; (adj) reddish: (adj) ruddy, rosy, crimson, turnkey: (n) jailer, gaoler, keeper,
barred. cherry, rufescent, rufous, rubicund, warder, jailor, guard, custodian,
monotonous: (adj) dull, flat, boring, scarlet, rubedinous, ruby, colorful. screw, ranger, prison guard, custos.
dreary, tedious, insipid, monotone, shroud: (adj, n, v) cover; (n, v) cloak,
Victor Hugo 397
The priest continued, in a hollow voice,

"Are you prepared?"
"For what?"
"To die."
"Oh!" said she, "will it be soon?"
"To-morrow."
Her head, which had been raised with joy, fell back upon her breast.%
"'Tis very far away yet!" she murmured; "why could they not have done it to-
day?"
"Then you are very unhappy?" asked the priest, after a silence.
"I am very cold," she replied.
She took her feet in her hands, a gesture habitual with unhappy wretches
who are cold, as we have already seen in the case of the recluse of the Tour-
Roland, and her teeth chattered.
The priest appeared to cast his eyes around the dungeon from beneath his
cowl.
"Without light! without fire! in the water! it is horrible!"
"Yes," she replied, with the bewildered air which unhappiness had given her.
"The day belongs to every one, why do they give me only night?"
"Do you know," resumed the priest, after a fresh silence, "why you are here?"
"I thought I knew once," she said, passing her thin fingers over her eyelids, as
though to aid her memory, "but I know no longer."
All at once she began to weep like a child.
"I should like to get away from here, sir. I am cold, I am afraid, and there are
creatures which crawl over my body."
"Well, follow me."
Thesaurus
cast: (n, v) throw, stamp, form, fling, gesture: (n, v) sign, signal, motion; (n) nutmeg grater, grater, file, arrastra,
shape, figure; (v) shed, pitch, chuck; beck, gesticulation, indication, rasp, mill, unguis, tentacle; (n) gear
(n) casting, appearance. movement; (v) gesticulate, beckon, teeth.
ANTONYMS: (v) refuse, receive, wave, bless. unhappy: (adj) gloomy, dismal,
subtract, reject, take, gather, catch, passing: (adj) transient, ephemeral, depressed, melancholy, sad,
retain, keep. momentary, cursory, brief; (n) miserable, sorrowful, distressed,
crawl: (adv, v) grovel, lag; (n, v) overtaking, departure, expiration, disconsolate, infelicitous, low.
clamber, climb; (v) sneak, fawn, decease, passage, death. ANTONYMS: (adj) happy, cheerful,
cringe, teem, swarm, scramble, inch. ANTONYMS: (adj) lasting, thorough, satisfied, pleased, glad, euphoric,
ANTONYMS: (v) fly, rush, hurry, intended, lengthy, long; (n) birth, fortunate, contented, joyful, timely,
hasten, dart, dash, lead, soothe, failing. lucky.
speed. teeth: (v) mortar and pestle, gristmill,
So saying, the priest took her arm. The unhappy girl was frozen to her very
soul. Yet that hand produced an impression of cold upon her.%
"Oh!" she murmured, "'tis the icy hand of death. Who are you?"
The priest threw back his cowl; she looked. It was the sinister visage which
had so long pursued her; that demon's head which had appeared at la
Falourdel's, above the head of her adored Phoebus; that eye which she last had
seen glittering beside a dagger.
This apparition, always so fatal for her, and which had thus driven her on
from misfortune to misfortune, even to torture, roused her from her stupor. It
seemed to her that the sort of veil which had lain thick upon her memory was
rent away. All the details of her melancholy adventure, from the nocturnal scene
at la Falourdel's to her condemnation to the Tournelle, recurred to her memory,
no longer vague and confused as heretofore, but distinct, harsh, clear,
palpitating, terrible. These souvenirs, half effaced and almost obliterated by
excess of suffering, were revived by the sombre figure which stood before her, as
the approach of fire causes letters traced upon white paper with invisible ink, to
start out perfectly fresh. It seemed to her that all the wounds of her heart opened
and bled simultaneously.
"Hah!" she cried, with her hands on her eyes, and a convulsive trembling, "'tis
the priest!"
Then she dropped her arms in discouragement, and remained seated, with
lowered head, eyes fixed on the ground, mute and still trembling.
The priest gazed at her with the eye of a hawk which has long been soaring
in a circle from the heights of heaven over a poor lark cowering in the wheat,
and has long been silently contracting the formidable circles of his flight, and has
suddenly swooped down upon his prey like a flash of lightning, and holds it
panting in his talons.
She began to murmur in a low voice,
"Finish! finish! the last blow!" and she drew her head down in terror between
her shoulders, like the lamb awaiting the blow of the butcher's axe.
Thesaurus
bled: (v) bleed; (n) bulla. shining, scintillating, splendid; (adj, caper, game; (n, v) romp, frolic,
cowering: (adv) cowardly; (adj) adv) aglitter. gambol; (v) rollick.
fawning, squat, subservient. heights: (n) place, elevation, high nocturnal: (adj) nightly, vespertine,
discouragement: (n) dismay, places, high, heaven. nighttime, nocturnals, overnight,
disappointment, despair, determent, heretofore: (adv) formerly, as yet, night, autumnal. ANTONYM: (adj)
depression, deterrent, despondency, before, so far, yet, already, until now, daytime.
check, dejection, dissuasion, alarm. previously, once, hereunto; (adv, n) soaring: (adj) high, towering, flying,
ANTONYMS: (n) incentive, boost, hitherto. eminent, beetling; (n) glide, gliding,
hopefulness. lain: (adj) artless, unsophisticated, sailing, rise, flight, sailplaning.
glittering: (adj, v) brilliant; (adj) unaffected, naive, untutored, simple, ANTONYM: (adj) low.
sparkling, flashing, dazzling, pure, natural, native, inartificial. talons: (v) claws, tenaculum, unguis,
glistering, glistening, glinting, lark: (n) joke, fun, trick, prank, antic, tentacle, teeth; (n) clutches.
Victor Hugo 399
"So I inspire you with horror?" he said at length.%

She made no reply.
"Do I inspire you with horror?" he repeated.
Her lips contracted, as though with a smile.
"Yes," said she, "the headsman scoffs at the condemned. Here he has been
pursuing me, threatening me, terrifying me for months! Had it not been for
him, my God, how happy it should have been! It was he who cast me into this
abyss! Oh heavens! it was he who killed him! my Phoebus!"
Here, bursting into sobs, and raising her eyes to the priest,
"Oh! wretch, who are you? What have I done to you? Do you then, hate me
so? Alas! what have you against me?"
"I love thee!" cried the priest.
Her tears suddenly ceased, she gazed at him with the look of an idiot. He
had fallen on his knees and was devouring her with eyes of flame.
"Dost thou understand? I love thee!" he cried again.
"What love!" said the unhappy girl with a shudder.
He resumed,
"The love of a damned soul."
Both remained silent for several minutes, crushed beneath the weight of their
emotions; he maddened, she stupefied.
"Listen," said the priest at last, and a singular calm had come over him; "you
shall know all I am about to tell you that which I have hitherto hardly dared to
say to myself, when furtively interrogating my conscience at those deep hours of
the night when it is so dark that it seems as though God no longer saw us.
Listen. Before I knew you, young girl, I was happy."
"So was I!" she sighed feebly.
"Do not interrupt me. Yes, I was happy, at least I believed myself to be so. I
was pure, my soul was filled with limpid light. No head was raised more
Thesaurus
feebly: (adv) faintly, exhilarate; (v) encourage, excite, deranged, angered, enraged,
unenthusiastically, dimly, hopelessly, inhale, incite, affect, infuse, hearten, moonstruck, fierce, upset,
unproductively, unpersuasively, actuate. ANTONYMS: (v) extinguish, aggravated, ferocious; (v) frantic.
unconvincingly, uncertainly, disenchant, douse, knock, dampen, pursuing: (n) pursuit, search, hunt;
reluctantly, powerlessly, insipidly. calm, dishearten. (adj) coming, engaged.
ANTONYMS: (adv) robustly, interrogating: (n) interrogation. scoffs: (n) derision, jeering, mocking.
confidently, domineeringly, limpid: (adj) transparent, bright, terrifying: (adj) horrible, frightening,
vehemently, stubbornly, strongly, diaphanous, crystal clear, crystalline, alarming, fearsome, scary, horrifying,
effectively, convincingly, perspicuous, pellucid, lucid, liquid, terrific, appalling, formidable,
competently, admirably, hyaline, glassy. ANTONYM: (adj) ghastly, hideous. ANTONYMS: (adj)
wholeheartedly. opaque. safe, pleasant, reassuring.
inspire: (adj, v) cheer, enliven, maddened: (adj) angry, furious,
proudly and more radiantly than mine. Priests consulted me on chastity;

doctors, on doctrines. Yes, science was all in all to me; it was a sister to me, and a
sister sufficed. Not but that with age other ideas came to me. More than once
my flesh had been moved as a woman's form passed by. That force of sex and
blood which, in the madness of youth, I had imagined that I had stifled forever
had, more than once, convulsively raised the chain of iron vows which bind me,
a miserable wretch, to the cold stones of the altar. But fasting, prayer, study, the
mortifications of the cloister, rendered my soul mistress of my body once more,
and then I avoided women. Moreover, I had but to open a book, and all the
impure mists of my brain vanished before the splendors of science. In a few
moments, I felt the gross things of earth flee far away, and I found myself once
more calm, quieted, and serene, in the presence of the tranquil radiance of
eternal truth. As long as the demon sent to attack me only vague shadows of
women who passed occasionally before my eyes in church, in the streets, in the
fields, and who hardly recurred to my dreams, I easily vanquished him. Alas! if
the victory has not remained with me, it is the fault of God, who has not created
man and the demon of equal force. Listen. One day
Here the priest paused, and the prisoner heard sighs of anguish break from
his breast with a sound of the death rattle.%
He resumed,
"One day I was leaning on the window of my cell. What book was I reading
then? Oh! all that is a whirlwind in my head. I was reading. The window
opened upon a Square. I heard a sound of tambourine and music. Annoyed at
being thus disturbed in my revery, I glanced into the Square. What I beheld,
others saw beside myself, and yet it was not a spectacle made for human eyes.
There, in the middle of the pavement,-- it was midday, the sun was shining
brightly,-- a creature was dancing. A creature so beautiful that God would have
preferred her to the Virgin and have chosen her for his mother and have wished
to be born of her if she had been in existence when he was made man! Her eyes
were black and splendid; in the midst of her black locks, some hairs through
which the sun shone glistened like threads of gold. Her feet disappeared in their
Thesaurus
anguish: (n, v) pain, ache; (n) torment, superciliously, boastfully, vainly, pacific, gentle, cool; (adj, v) tranquil.
agony, torture, distress, misery, splendidly, stately, loftily, snootily, ANTONYMS: (adj) agitated, anxious,
suffering, despair, grief, sorrow. disdainfully, conceitedly. noisy, nervous, impatient, excitable,
ANTONYMS: (n) pleasure, ANTONYMS: (adv) humbly, scatterbrained, harsh, boisterous,
happiness, calm, euphoria, modestly. excited, disturbed.
joyfulness, ecstasy, content, peace, quieted: (adj) composed. threads: (n) duds, clothing, apparel,
hopefulness. radiantly: (adv) effulgently, brightly, clothes, wear, vesture, coat, cords,
midday: (n) noon, noonday, noontide, beamingly, luminously, refulgently, dress, garb, garment.
afternoon, twelve noon, hour; (adj) shiningly, lucidly, sparklingly, vanquished: (adj) beaten,
meridian, meridional; (adj, n) sunnily, beautifully, lustrously. overwhelmed, routed, overcome,
culmination. serene: (adj) peaceful, calm, quiet, overpowered, overthrown, defeated,
proudly: (adv) haughtily, arrogantly, placid, composed, impassive, clear, crushed, tried, tired out, practiced.
Victor Hugo 401
movements like the spokes of a rapidly turning wheel. Around her head, in her
black tresses, there were disks of metal, which glittered in the sun, and formed a
coronet of stars on her brow. Her dress thick set with spangles, blue, and dotted
with a thousand sparks, gleamed like a summer night. Her brown, supple arms
twined and untwined around her waist, like two scarfs. The form of her body
was surprisingly beautiful. Oh! what a resplendent figure stood out, like
something luminous even in the sunlight! Alas, young girl, it was thou!
Surprised, intoxicated, charmed, I allowed myself to gaze upon thee. I looked so
long that I suddenly shuddered with terror; I felt that fate was seizing hold of
me."%
The priest paused for a moment, overcome with emotion. Then he continued,
"Already half fascinated, I tried to cling fast to something and hold myself
back from falling. I recalled the snares which Satan had already set for me. The
creature before my eyes possessed that superhuman beauty which can come only
from heaven or hell. It was no simple girl made with a little of our earth, and
dimly lighted within by the vacillating ray of a woman's soul. It was an angel!
but of shadows and flame, and not of light. At the moment when I was
meditating thus, I beheld beside you a goat, a beast of witches, which smiled as it
gazed at me. The midday sun gave him golden horns. Then I perceived the
snare of the demon, and I no longer doubted that you had come from hell and
that you had come thence for my perdition. I believed it."
Here the priest looked the prisoner full in the face, and added, coldly,
"I believe it still. Nevertheless, the charm operated little by little; your
dancing whirled through my brain; I felt the mysterious spell working within
me. All that should have awakened was lulled to sleep; and like those who die
in the snow, I felt pleasure in allowing this sleep to draw on. All at once, you
began to sing. What could I do, unhappy wretch? Your song was still more
charming than your dancing. I tried to flee. Impossible. I was nailed, rooted to
the spot. It seemed to me that the marble of the pavement had risen to my knees.
I was forced to remain until the end. My feet were like ice, my head was on fire.
At last you took pity on me, you ceased to sing, you disappeared. The reflection
Thesaurus
coronet: (n) corona, chaplet, tiara, clear. ANTONYMS: (adj) dark, snare: (n, v) mesh, gin, ambush, hook;
snood, necklace, circlet, wreath, obscure. (v) catch, ensnare, entrap, entangle,
diadem, cap of maintenance, laurel, operated: (adj) driven. capture, enmesh; (n) lure.
ribbon. perdition: (adj, n) downfall, fall, ruin; sparks: (n) fire.
dotted: (adj) speckled, dappled, (n) hell, inferno, infernal region, vacillating: (adj) indecisive,
specked, spotted, dashed, stippled, nether region, deperdition, bane, changeable, undecided, wavering,
scattered, spotty, dot, mottled, destruction, overthrow. ANTONYM: giddy, vacillant, hesitating, hesitant;
broken. (n) heaven. (adj, v) infirm, debilitated, enfeebled.
doubted: (adj) distrusted, suspected. rooted: (adj, v) fixed; (adj) ingrained, ANTONYMS: (adj) stable, strong,
luminous: (adj) glowing, brilliant, immovable, inveterate, firm, set, consistent, decisive, determined,
lustrous, lucent, sunny, lambent, frozen, riveted, irremovable; (v) resolute.
radiant, light, aglow; (adj, n) lucid, imbedded, posited.
of the dazzling vision, the reverberation of the enchanting music disappeared by

degrees from my eyes and my ears. Then I fell back into the embrasure of the
window, more rigid, more feeble than a statue torn from its base. The vesper
bell roused me. I drew myself up; I fled; but alas! something within me had
fallen never to rise again, something had come upon me from which I could not
flee."
He made another pause and went on,
"Yes, dating from that day, there was within me a man whom I did not know.
I tried to make use of all my remedies. The cloister, the altar, work, books,--
follies! Oh, how hollow does science sound when one in despair dashes against
it a head full of passions! Do you know, young girl, what I saw thenceforth
between my book and me? You, your shade, the image of the luminous
apparition which had one day crossed the space before me. But this image had
no longer the same color; it was sombre, funereal, gloomy as the black circle
which long pursues the vision of the imprudent man who has gazed intently at
the sun.%
"Unable to rid myself of it, since I heard your song humming ever in my
head, beheld your feet dancing always on my breviary, felt even at night, in my
dreams, your form in contact with my own, I desired to see you again, to touch
you, to know who you were, to see whether I should really find you like the ideal
image which I had retained of you, to shatter my dream, perchance, with reality.
At all events, I hoped that a new impression would efface the first, and the first
had become insupportable. I sought you. I saw you once more. Calamity!
When I had seen you twice, I wanted to see you a thousand times, I wanted to
see you always. Then-- how stop myself on that slope of hell?-- then I no longer
belonged to myself. The other end of the thread which the demon had attached
to my wings he had fastened to his foot. I became vagrant and wandering like
yourself. I waited for you under porches, I stood on the lookout for you at the
street corners, I watched for you from the summit of my tower. Every evening I
returned to myself more charmed, more despairing, more bewitched, more lost!
Thesaurus
disappeared: (adj) lost, missing, dolorous, dark, depressing, recoil, boom, reflectivity; (n, v)
extinct, vanished, left. ANTONYM: lugubrious; (v) burial. ANTONYMS: reflection; (v) reflexion. ANTONYM:
(adj) remaining. (adj) cheery, lively, cheerful. (n) silence.
efface: (v) cancel, erase, obliterate, insupportable: (adj, v) insufferable, shatter: (v) fragment, ruin, smash,
destroy, expunge, wipe out, intolerable; (adj) indefensible, destroy, burst, dash, rupture, crash,
suppress, sponge, blot out, blur, raze. unbearable, excruciating, crumble, crack, demolish.
embrasure: (n) porthole, crenel, unjustifiable, unendurable, vagrant: (adj, v) stray, roving, itinerant,
machicolation, recess, window, impossible, unsupportable, heavy, Peripatetic, rambling; (n) tramp,
opening, crenelle, battlement, dent, obnoxious. ANTONYM: (adj) hobo, drifter, wanderer; (v) unsettled,
casement. bearable. erratic. ANTONYM: (n) resident.
funereal: (adj) doleful, dismal, dreary, reverberation: (n) echo, rebound, vesper: (n) evening star, bell; (adj)
somber, gloomy, melancholy, noise, peal, replication, reaction, evening, vesperal.
Victor Hugo 403
"I had learned who you were; an Egyptian, Bohemian, gypsy, zingara. How
could I doubt the magic? Listen. I hoped that a trial would free me from the
charm. A witch enchanted Bruno d'Ast; he had her burned, and was cured. I
knew it. I wanted to try the remedy. First I tried to have you forbidden the
square in front of Notre-Dame, hoping to forget you if you returned no more.
You paid no heed to it. You returned. Then the idea of abducting you occurred
to me. One night I made the attempt. There were two of us. We already had you
in our power, when that miserable officer came up. He delivered you. Thus did
he begin your unhappiness, mine, and his own. Finally, no longer knowing what
to do, and what was to become of me, I denounced you to the official.%
"I thought that I should be cured like Bruno d'Ast. I also had a confused idea
that a trial would deliver you into my hands; that, as a prisoner I should hold
you, I should have you; that there you could not escape from me; that you had
already possessed me a sufficiently long time to give me the right to possess you
in my turn. When one does wrong, one must do it thoroughly. 'Tis madness to
halt midway in the monstrous! The extreme of crime has its deliriums of joy. A
priest and a witch can mingle in delight upon the truss of straw in a dungeon!
"Accordingly, I denounced you. It was then that I terrified you when we met.
The plot which I was weaving against you, the storm which I was heaping up
above your head, burst from me in threats and lightning glances. Still, I
hesitated. My project had its terrible sides which made me shrink back.
"Perhaps I might have renounced it; perhaps my hideous thought would
have withered in my brain, without bearing fruit. I thought that it would always
depend upon me to follow up or discontinue this prosecution. But every evil
thought is inexorable, and insists on becoming a deed; but where I believed
myself to be all powerful, fate was more powerful than I. Alas! 'tis fate which
has seized you and delivered you to the terrible wheels of the machine which I
had constructed doubly. Listen. I am nearing the end.
"One day,-- again the sun was shining brilliantly-- I behold man pass me
uttering your name and laughing, who carries sensuality in his eyes.
Damnation! I followed him; you know the rest."
Thesaurus
discontinue: (v) stop, break, abandon, austere, adamantine, inflexible, the verge of, toward.
desist, break off, terminate, cut off, remorseless, stiff; (adj, v) inevitable. sensuality: (n) sensualism, animalism,
quit, give up, interrupt; (n, v) drop. ANTONYM: (adj) gentle. sensualness, lust, carnality,
ANTONYMS: (v) continue, restart, midway: (adj) middle, center, concupiscence, animal gratification,
resume, start, open, maintain, begin. intermediate, central, median; (n) bodily enjoyment, hedonism,
heed: (n, v) consideration, concern, tract, middle of the road, sensationalism, debauchery.
regard, mind, attention, notice; (n) intermediary, battle of midway; (adv) shrink: (adj, v) recoil; (n, v) flinch,
caution, advertence, advertency; (v) in the middle; (prep) between. wince; (v) contract, shorten, lessen,
attend, hear. ANTONYMS: (n, v) ANTONYM: (adj) extreme. diminish, cower, reduce, quail,
disregard; (n) inattentiveness. nearing: (n) approach; (adj) decrease. ANTONYMS: (v) increase,
inexorable: (adj) adamant, impending, forthcoming, oncoming, enlarge, grow, stretch, swell, bloom,
unrelenting, stern, cruel, relentless, coming, imminent, looming; (prep) on rise, inflate.
He ceased.
The young girl could find but one word:
"Oh, my Phoebus!"
"Not that name!" said the priest, grasping her arm violently. "Utter not that
name! Oh! miserable wretches that we are, 'tis that name which has ruined us!
or, rather we have ruined each other by the inexplicable play of fate! you are
suffering, are you not? you are cold; the night makes you blind, the dungeon
envelops you; but perhaps you still have some light in the bottom of your soul,
were it only your childish love for that empty man who played with your heart,
while I bear the dungeon within me; within me there is winter, ice, despair; I
have night in my soul.%
"Do you know what I have suffered? I was present at your trial. I was seated
on the official's bench. Yes, under one of the priests' cowls, there were the
contortions of the damned. When you were brought in, I was there; when you
were questioned, I was there.--Den of wolves!-- It was my crime, it was my
gallows that I beheld being slowly reared over your head. I was there for every
witness, every proof, every plea; I could count each of your steps in the painful
path; I was still there when that ferocious beast-- oh! I had not foreseen torture!
Listen. I followed you to that chamber of anguish. I beheld you stripped and
handled, half naked, by the infamous hands of the tormentor. I beheld your
foot, that foot which I would have given an empire to kiss and die, that foot,
beneath which to have had my head crushed I should have felt such rapture,-- I
beheld it encased in that horrible boot, which converts the limbs of a living being
into one bloody clod. Oh, wretch! while I looked on at that, I held beneath my
shroud a dagger, with which I lacerated my breast. When you uttered that cry, I
plunged it into my flesh; at a second cry, it would have entered my heart. Look!
I believe that it still bleeds."
He opened his cassock. His breast was in fact, mangled as by the claw of a
tiger, and on his side he had a large and badly healed wound.
The prisoner recoiled with horror.
Thesaurus
claw: (n) chela, unguis, nipper, talon, gentle, mild, tender, tame, straightforward, natural, legible.
hook; (v) clapperclaw, lacerate, tear, nonviolent, kind, calm. infamous: (adj) disreputable, flagrant,
scratch, rip, clutch. ANTONYM: (v) healed: (adj) recovered, heal, recover, notorious, disgraceful,
mend. whole, corned, well, aged. dishonourable, contemptible; (adj, v)
clod: (adj, n) lump; (n) oaf, glebe, ball, inexplicable: (adj) incomprehensible, foul, shameful, base; (adj, n, v)
clay, yokel, gawk, agglomeration, mysterious, unaccountable, scandalous; (adj, adv, v) nefarious.
lout, clump; (adj) block. ANTONYM: inscrutable, unfathomable, enigmatic, ANTONYMS: (adj) reputable,
(n) intellect. baffling, indecipherable, famous.
ferocious: (adj) cruel, brutal, unexplained, incognizable, tiger: (adj) fury, dragon, demon; (n)
barbarous, feral, truculent, atrocious, preternatural. ANTONYMS: (adj) hostler, cat, jockey, ostler, big cat,
fell, bloodthirsty, brutish; (adj, v) understandable, explicable, endangered, Alecto, monster.
fierce, savage. ANTONYMS: (adj) mundane, apparent, explainable,
Victor Hugo 405
"Oh!" said the priest, "young girl, have pity upon me! You think yourself
unhappy; alas! alas! you know not what unhappiness is. Oh! to love a woman! to
be a priest! to be hated! to love with all the fury of one's soul; to feel that one
would give for the least of her smiles, one's blood, one's vitals, one's fame, one's
salvation, one's immortality and eternity, this life and the other; to regret that
one is not a king, emperor, archangel, God, in order that one might place a
greater slave beneath her feet; to clasp her night and day in one's dreams and
one's thoughts, and to behold her in love with the trappings of a soldier and to
have nothing to offer her but a priest's dirty cassock, which will inspire her with
fear and disgust! To be present with one's jealousy and one's rage, while she
lavishes on a miserable, blustering imbecile, treasures of love and beauty! To
behold that body whose form burns you, that bosom which possesses so much
sweetness, that flesh palpitate and blush beneath the kisses of another! Oh
heaven! to love her foot, her arm, her shoulder, to think of her blue veins, of her
brown skin, until one writhes for whole nights together on the pavement of one's
cell, and to behold all those caresses which one has dreamed of, end in torture!
To have succeeded only in stretching her upon the leather bed! Oh! these are the
veritable pincers, reddened in the fires of hell. Oh! blessed is he who is sawn
between two planks, or torn in pieces by four horses! Do you know what that
torture is, which is imposed upon you for long nights by your burning arteries,
your bursting heart, your breaking head, your teeth-knawed hands; mad
tormentors which turn you incessantly, as upon a red-hot gridiron, to a thought
of love, of jealousy, and of despair! Young girl, mercy! a truce for a moment! a
few ashes on these live coals! Wipe away, I beseech you, the perspiration which
trickles in great drops from my brow! Child! torture me with one hand, but
caress me with the other! Have pity, young girl! Have pity upon me!"
The priest writhed on the wet pavement, beating his head against the corners
of the stone steps. The young girl gazed at him, and listened to him.%
When he ceased, exhausted and panting, she repeated in a low voice,
"Oh my Phoebus!"
The priest dragged himself towards her on his knees.
Thesaurus
beseech: (v) beg, crave, implore, ask, noisy, hectoring; (adv) blusteringly. ANTONYMS: (n) finiteness,
request, adjure, pray, sue, appeal, disgust: (n) antipathy, aversion, impermanence.
solicit, plead. ANTONYMS: (v) give, abhorrence, abomination, detestation, gridiron: (v) grill, grating, trellis,
offer, grant, reject. dislike, repugnance; (n, v) shock, grille, tracery, reticle; (n, v) lattice; (n)
blush: (n, v) glow, color; (v) redden, distaste; (v) nauseate, displease. football field, field, andiron, web.
crimson; (n) red, bloom, rosiness, ANTONYMS: (n, v) delight; (n) love, trappings: (n) equipment, rigging,
ruddiness, redness; (adj) bashful; attraction, liking, adoration; (v) caparison, embroidery, trapping,
(adv) blushingly. ANTONYMS: (v) attract, allure, charm, entice, please. tackle, suit, skirt, accouterment,
blanch, pale, blench; (n) paleness. eternity: (n) aeon, afterlife, forever, lappet, flap.
blustering: (adj, v) stormy; (adj) perpetuity, timelessness, endlessness, vitals: (n) bowels, womb, viscera,
raging, blusterous, blustery, everlasting, endless time, belly, entrails, organ, necessity, lap,
turbulent, loud, vaporing, vociferous, everlastingness, everness, existence. intestines, guts, chitterings.
"I beseech you," he cried, "if you have any heart, do not repulse me! Oh! I
love you! I am a wretch! When you utter that name, unhappy girl, it is as
though you crushed all the fibres of my heart between your teeth. Mercy! If you
come from hell I will go thither with you. I have done everything to that end.
The hell where you are, shall he paradise; the sight of you is more charming than
that of God! Oh! speak! you will have none of me? I should have thought the
mountains would be shaken in their foundations on the day when a woman
would repulse such a love. Oh! if you only would! Oh! how happy we might be.
We would flee-- I would help you to flee,-- we would go somewhere, we would
seek that spot on earth, where the sun is brightest, the sky the bluest, where the
trees are most luxuriant. We would love each other, we would pour our two
souls into each other, and we would have a thirst for ourselves which we would
quench in common and incessantly at that fountain of inexhaustible love."
She interrupted with a terrible and thrilling laugh.%
"Look, father, you have blood on your fingers!"
The priest remained for several moments as though petrified, with his eyes
fixed upon his hand.
"Well, yes!" he resumed at last, with strange gentleness, "insult me, scoff at
me, overwhelm me with scorn! but come, come. Let us make haste. It is to be to-
morrow, I tell you. The gibbet on the Grève, you know it? it stands always ready.
It is horrible! to see you ride in that tumbrel! Oh mercy! Until now I have never
felt the power of my love for you.-- Oh! follow me. You shall take your time to
love me after I have saved you. You shall hate me as long as you will. But come.
To-morrow! to-morrow! the gallows! your execution! Oh! save yourself! spare
me!"
He seized her arm, he was beside himself, he tried to drag her away.
She fixed her eye intently on him.
"What has become of my Phoebus?"
"Ah!" said the priest, releasing her arm, "you are pitiless."
"What has become of Phoebus?" she repeated coldly.
Thesaurus
inexhaustible: (adj) indefatigable, install, lose, protect, submit. slight; (n) contempt, derision,
immeasurable, unfailing, infinite, quench: (adj, v) extinguish, allay, mockery. ANTONYMS: (n, v) respect,
boundless, illimitable, unlimited, slake; (v) appease, quash, put out, praise; (v) appreciate, revere, value,
incalculable, unexhaustible, destroy, assuage, annihilate, calm, approve, admire, accept; (n)
unapproachable, unfathomable. chill. ANTONYMS: (v) stimulate, admiration, commendation, humility.
ANTONYMS: (adj) limited, light. thrilling: (adj, n) electric; (adj) exciting,
unproductive. scoff: (n, v) gibe, flout, deride, jibe; (n) sensational, exhilarating, electrifying,
overwhelm: (v) overpower, defeat, mockery, hoot, jeering; (v) mock, emotional, rousing, gripping,
inundate, flood, overthrow, drown, ridicule, sneer, scorn. ANTONYMS: stimulating; (adj, v) impressive; (n, v)
deluge, crush, engulf, astound, (v) approve, nibble. swelling. ANTONYMS: (adj) boring,
overturn. ANTONYMS: (v) scorn: (v) despise, contemn, reject; (n, depressing, discouraging, upsetting,
encourage, amplify, capitulate, incite, v) ridicule, neglect, disregard, deride, uninspiring.
Victor Hugo 407
"He is dead!" cried the priest.

"Dead!" said she, still icy and motionless "then why do you talk to me of
living?"
He was not listening to her.%
"Oh! yes," said he, as though speaking to himself, "he certainly must be dead.
The blade pierced deeply. I believe I touched his heart with the point. Oh! my
very soul was at the end of the dagger!"
The young girl flung herself upon him like a raging tigress, and pushed him
upon the steps of the staircase with supernatural force.
"Begone, monster! Begone, assassin! Leave me to die! May the blood of both
of us make an eternal stain upon your brow! Be thine, priest! Never! never!
Nothing shall unite us! not hell itself! Go, accursed man! Never!"
The priest had stumbled on the stairs. He silently disentangled his feet from
the folds of his robe, picked up his lantern again, and slowly began the ascent of
the steps which led to the door; he opened the door and passed through it.
All at once, the young girl beheld his head reappear; it wore a frightful
expression, and he cried, hoarse with rage and despair,
"I tell you he is dead!"
She fell face downwards upon the floor, and there was no longer any sound
audible in the cell than the sob of the drop of water which made the pool
palpitate amid the darkness.
Thesaurus
ascent: (n) ascension, climb, ceaseless, everlasting, lasting, contained.
ascending, elevation, hill, incline, continual, aeonian, immortal, stain: (n, v) spot, blemish, tarnish, blot,
advance, grade; (n, v) rise; (v) ascend, boundless, deathless, enduring. dye, smear, disgrace, mark, soil, dirt,
uprise. ANTONYMS: (n) fall, drop, ANTONYMS: (adj) mortal, finite, defile. ANTONYMS: (v) enhance,
declivity. brief, ephemeral, fleeting, terminable, dignify, clean.
assassin: (n) assassinator, liquidator, ending, fragile, inconstant. tigress: (n) tiger, shrew.
bravo, assassinate, cutthroat, thug, passed: (adj) accepted, approved, unite: (v) associate, meet, connect,
killer; (v) slayer, butcher, Cain, legal, gone. link, blend, join, coalesce, unify, tie,
sabreur. raging: (adj) hot, angry, fierce, irate, amalgamate; (adj, v) fuse.
downwards: (adv) down, downhill, wild, infuriated, enraged, vehement, ANTONYMS: (v) divide, cut,
downwardly. ANTONYM: (adv) up. heated; (adj, n) mad, rabid. disband, disconnect, diverge,
eternal: (adj) constant, perpetual, ANTONYMS: (adj) calm, mild, segregate, split, undo, unpick.
Victor Hugo 409
CHAPTER %V
THE MOTHER
I do not believe that there is anything sweeter in the world than the ideas
which awake in a mother's heart at the sight of her child's tiny shoe; especially if
it is a shoe for festivals, for Sunday, for baptism, the shoe embroidered to the
very sole, a shoe in which the infant has not yet taken a step. That shoe has so
much grace and daintiness, it is so impossible for it to walk, that it seems to the
mother as though she saw her child. She smiles upon it, she kisses it, she talks to
it; she asks herself whether there can actually be a foot so tiny; and if the child be
absent, the pretty shoe suffices to place the sweet and fragile creature before her
eyes. She thinks she sees it, she does see it, complete, living, joyous, with its
delicate hands, its round head, its pure lips, its serene eyes whose white is blue.
If it is in winter, it is yonder, crawling on the carpet, it is laboriously climbing
upon an ottoman, and the mother trembles lest it should approach the fire. If it
is summer time, it crawls about the yard, in the garden, plucks up the grass
between the paving-stones, gazes innocently at the big dogs, the big horses,
without fear, plays with the shells, with the flowers, and makes the gardener
grumble because he finds sand in the flower-beds and earth in the paths.
Everything laughs, and shines and plays around it, like it, even the breath of air
and the ray of sun which vie with each other in disporting among the silky
Thesaurus
baptism: (n) affusion, aspersion, finesse, refinement, nicety. laughs: (n) diversion, comedy,
chrism, sacrament, immersion, ANTONYMS: (n) inelegance, amusement, sport, recreation,
designation, entrance, introduction, sturdiness, ugliness. merriment, entertainment, levity.
initiation, blessing; (v) baptize. flowers: (n) analecta, anthology. ottoman: (n) hassock, footstool,
climbing: (n) climb, ascension, gardener: (n) horticulturist, farmer, footrest, fauteuil, Osmanli, settle,
mounting, mountain climbing, florist, employee, hedger, Turk, Ottomite, woolsack, fag, pouf.
mountaineering, rock climbing, husbandman, transplanter. paths: (n) path.
acclivity; (v) ascending, uprise, arise; laboriously: (adv) painstakingly, shoe: (n) horseshoe, sandal, shoes,
(adj) scandent. toilsomely, toughly, onerously, moccasin, footgear, footwear, skid,
daintiness: (adj, n) frailty, fragility, arduously, strenuously, heavily, flippers, anklet, flipper, track shoe.
weakness, dainty; (n) fineness, painfully, stiffly, diligently, hard. trembles: (n) animal disease,
loveliness, niceness, fastidiousness, ANTONYMS: (adv) briskly, easily. nervousness.
ringlets of its hair. The shoe shows all this to the mother, and makes her heart
melt as fire melts wax.%
But when the child is lost, these thousand images of joy, of charms, of
tenderness, which throng around the little shoe, become so many horrible things.
The pretty broidered shoe is no longer anything but an instrument of torture
which eternally crushes the heart of the mother. It is always the same fibre
which vibrates, the tenderest and most sensitive; but instead of an angel
caressing it, it is a demon who is wrenching at it.
One May morning, when the sun was rising on one of those dark blue skies
against which Garofolo loves to place his Descents from the Cross, the recluse of
the Tour-Roland heard a sound of wheels, of horses and irons in the Place de
Grève. She was somewhat aroused by it, knotted her hair upon her ears in order
to deafen herself, and resumed her contemplation, on her knees, of the inanimate
object which she had adored for fifteen years. This little shoe was the universe to
her, as we have already said. Her thought was shut up in it, and was destined
never more to quit it except at death. The sombre cave of the Tour-Roland alone
knew how many bitter imprecations, touching complaints, prayers and sobs she
had wafted to heaven in connection with that charming bauble of rose-colored
satin. Never was more despair bestowed upon a prettier and more graceful
thing.
It seemed as though her grief were breaking forth more violently than usual;
and she could be heard outside lamenting in a loud and monotonous voice
which rent the heart.
"Oh my daughter!" she said, "my daughter, my poor, dear little child, so I
shall never see thee more! It is over! It always seems to me that it happened
yesterday! My God! my God! it would have been better not to give her to me
than to take her away so soon. Did you not know that our children are part of
ourselves, and that a mother who has lost her child no longer believes in God?
Ah! wretch that I am to have gone out that day! Lord! Lord! to have taken her
from me thus; you could never have looked at me with her, when I was joyously
warming her at my fire, when she laughed as she suckled, when I made her tiny
Thesaurus
bauble: (adj) gimcrack; (n) trinket, awkward, vigorous, jerky, ugly, rose-colored: (adj) rosy, optimistic,
ornament, trifle, bagatelle, gaud, stilted, heavy, coarse, strenuous. hopeful, rose-coloured.
bangle, novelty; (adj, n) toy, gewgaw, lamenting: (adj) weeping, wailing, satin: (adj) glossy, sleek, velvet, down,
plaything. sad, whining; (adj, n) plaintive; (adj, silky, silklike, silken, satiny, velure;
cave: (n) lair, hole, grotto, hollow, v) bewailing, querulous; (n, v) (n) cloth, fabric.
cove, den, cell, grot, nest; (v) complaining; (n) grief, sorrow; (v) warming: (n) thaw, melt, melting,
undermine, calve. ANTONYMS: (n) dissatisfied. warm, thawing, warmer, heat,
hump; (v) withstand. melt: (v) dissolve, deliquesce, vanish, heating system, temperature change,
graceful: (adj) beautiful, delicate, coalesce, relent, meld, fade, defrost; radiant heating; (adj) calefacient.
amiable, easy, fine, charming, fair, (adj, v) run, liquefy; (n, v) thaw. wrenching: (n) extraction; (adj)
airy, becoming, lovely, lithe. ANTONYMS: (v) freeze, solidify, painful.
ANTONYMS: (adj) inelegant, stocky, cool, set.
Victor Hugo 411
feet creep up my breast to my lips? Oh! if you had looked at that, my God, you
would have taken pity on my joy; you would not have taken from me the only
love which lingered, in my heart! Was I then, Lord, so miserable a creature, that
you could not look at me before condemning me?-- Alas! Alas! here is the shoe;
where is the foot? where is the rest? Where is the child? My daughter! my
daughter! what did they do with thee? Lord, give her back to me. My knees
have been worn for fifteen years in praying to thee, my God! Is not that enough?
Give her back to me one day, one hour, one minute; one minute, Lord! and then
cast me to the demon for all eternity! Oh! if I only knew where the skirt of your
garment trails, I would cling to it with both hands, and you would be obliged to
give me back my child! Have you no pity on her pretty little shoe? Could you
condemn a poor mother to this torture for fifteen years? Good Virgin! good
Virgin of heaven! my infant Jesus has been taken from me, has been stolen from
me; they devoured her on a heath, they drank her blood, they cracked her bones!
Good Virgin, have pity upon me. My daughter, I want my daughter! What is it
to me that she is in paradise? I do not want your angel, I want my child! I am a
lioness, I want my whelp. Oh! I will writhe on the earth, I will break the stones
with my forehead, and I will damn myself, and I will curse you, Lord, if you
keep my child from me! you see plainly that my arms are all bitten, Lord! Has
the good God no mercy?--Oh! give me only salt and black bread, only let me
have my daughter to warm me like a sun! Alas! Lord my God. Alas! Lord my
God, I am only a vile sinner; but my daughter made me pious. I was full of
religion for the love of her, and I beheld you through her smile as through an
opening into heaven. Oh! if I could only once, just once more, a single time, put
this shoe on her pretty little pink foot, I would die blessing you, good Virgin.
Ah! fifteen years! she will be grown up now! -- Unhappy child! what! it is really
true then I shall never see her more, not even in heaven, for I shall not go there
myself. Oh! what misery to think that here is her shoe, and that that is all!"%
The unhappy woman flung herself upon that shoe; her consolation and her
despair for so many years, and her vitals were rent with sobs as on the first day;
because, for a mother who has lost her child, it is always the first day. That grief
Thesaurus
bitten: (adj) stung, rabid, annoyed; (v) devoted, sanctimonious; (adj, v) evil, sorry, revolting, offensive, nasty.
smitten. earnest. ANTONYMS: (adj) impious, ANTONYMS: (adj) attractive, kind,
creep: (v) grovel, sneak, steal, fawn, sinful, profane, blasphemous, nice, lovely, lovable, gentle,
lurk, truckle, cringe; (n) creeping, irreligious, uncommitted, secular, honorable, good, delightful,
crawling, toady, sycophant. irreverent. admirable, noble.
ANTONYMS: (v) race, dash, hasten, praying: (n) prayer. whelp: (n, v) pup; (n) chrysalis,
hurry, speed, fly. sinner: (n) criminal, miscreant, culprit, tadpole, nestling, larva, cur, chicken,
drank: (v) absorb. sinful, trespasser, transgressor, hound, tendril; (v) lay, bear.
lioness: (n) lion, king of beasts. evildoer, magdalen, rascal, villain, writhe: (adj, v) distort, wrest; (v)
pious: (adj, n, v) devout; (adj, n) godly; sinners. contort, wriggle, squirm, wrench,
(adj) religious, holy, saintly, vile: (adj, n) contemptible, dirty, low; worm, coil, wiggle, thrash, warp.
devotional, pure, hypocritical, (adj, v) base; (adj) despicable, ignoble,
never grows old. The mourning garments may grow white and threadbare, the
heart remains dark.%
At that moment, the fresh and joyous cries of children passed in front of the
cell. Every time that children crossed her vision or struck her ear, the poor
mother flung herself into the darkest corner of her sepulchre, and one would
have said, that she sought to plunge her head into the stone in order not to hear
them. This time, on the contrary, she drew herself upright with a start, and
listened eagerly. One of the little boys had just said,
"They are going to hang a gypsy to-day."
With the abrupt leap of that spider which we have seen fling itself upon a fly
at the trembling of its web, she rushed to her air-hole, which opened as the
reader knows, on the Place de Grève. A ladder had, in fact, been raised up
against the permanent gibbet, and the hangman's assistant was busying himself
with adjusting the chains which had been rusted by the rain. There were some
people standing about.
The laughing group of children was already far away. The sacked nun
sought with her eyes some passer-by whom she might question. All at once,
beside her cell, she perceived a priest making a pretext of reading the public
breviary, but who was much less occupied with the "lectern of latticed iron,"
than with the gallows, toward which he cast a fierce and gloomy glance from
time to time. She recognized monsieur the archdeacon of Josas, a holy man.
"Father," she inquired, "whom are they about to hang yonder?"
The priest looked at her and made no reply; she repeated her question. Then
he said,
"I know not."
"Some children said that it was a gypsy," went on the recluse.
"I believe so," said the priest.
Then Paquette la Chantefleurie burst into hyena-like laughter.
"Sister," said the archdeacon, "do you then hate the gypsies heartily?"
Thesaurus
contrary: (adj, n) contradictory, staircase. plummet; (adj, v) immerse.
reverse; (adj) adverse, conflicting, latticed: (adj) interlaced, fretted, ANTONYMS: (n, v) rise; (v) hesitate;
unfavorable, perverse, cross, lattice, reticulate, reticulated, (n) improvement.
disobedient, alien, different, latticelike, tabernacular, having frets, spider: (n) spiders, tarantula,
obstinate. ANTONYMS: (adj) similar, common, reticular. arachnid, mussuk, chatti, lota,
harmonious, helpful, obliging, leap: (n, v) bound, spring, bounce, schooner, wedge ring, spinner, star
compatible, complaisant, concordant, caper, dive, vault, lunge; (v) dance, handle, terrine.
parallel, agreeable, cooperative, hop, start; (n) curvet. ANTONYMS: trembling: (adj, n) shaking; (adj, n, v)
favorable. (n, v) plummet; (v) surface, drop, tremor; (adj) shaky, quaking,
ladder: (n, v) run; (n) stair, stepladder, hesitate; (n) slump. shivering, flutter; (n) palpitation,
steps, stairs, degree, washboard, plunge: (n, v) drop, dive, fall, jump; (v) quiver, vibration, shiver, quake.
flight of stairs, stile, stairway, douse, duck, submerge, crash, dunk, ANTONYMS: (adj) stable, steady.
Victor Hugo 413
"Do I hate them!" exclaimed the recluse, " they are vampires, stealers of
children! They devoured my little daughter, my child, my only child! I have no
longer any heart, they devoured it!"
She was frightful. The priest looked at her coldly.%
"There is one in particular whom I hate, and whom I have cursed," she
resumed; "it is a young one, of the age which my daughter would be if her
mother had not eaten my daughter. Every time that that young viper passes in
front of my cell, she sets my blood in a ferment."
"Well, sister, rejoice," said the priest, icy as a sepulchral statue; "that is the one
whom you are about to see die."
His head fell upon his bosom and he moved slowly away.
The recluse writhed her arms with joy.
"I predicted it for her, that she would ascend thither! Thanks, priest!" she
cried.
And she began to pace up and down with long strides before the grating of
her window, her hair dishevelled, her eyes flashing, with her shoulder striking
against the wall, with the wild air of a female wolf in a cage, who has long been
famished, and who feels the hour for her repast drawing near.
Thesaurus
cage: (n, v) jail; (n) basket, birdcage, antipathy, aversion. ANTONYMS: (n, ANTONYMS: (adj) ugly, ordinary,
hutch, gaol, frame, corral, cell; (v) v) like; (v) adore, cherish, admire; (n) unimpressive, unremarkable,
confine, imprison, enclose. attraction, liking, delight, adoration. inconspicuous, unattractive,
ANTONYMS: (v) release; (n) pace: (n, v) walk, gait, rate, march, uninteresting, plain, insignificant,
freedom, liberation. stride, footstep; (n) speed, tempo, humble, obscure.
drawing: (n) draft, delineation, rapidity, tread, celerity. viper: (n) adder, snake, asp, cerastes,
picture, plan, cartoon, depiction, predicted: (adj) foreseen, expected, reptile, horned viper, asp viper,
draught, draw, draftsmanship, known beforehand. basilisk, beast, brute, cockatrice.
painting, image. striking: (adj) outstanding, dramatic, wolf: (n) philanderer, coyote, brute,
hate: (v) abhor, detest, loathe, spectacular, salient, imposing, skirt chaser, beast; (v) gobble, gorge,
abominate; (n) enmity, abhorrence, conspicuous, vivid, remarkable, guzzle, consume, swallow, bolt.
detestation, hatred, animosity, notable, astonishing; (n) strike.
Victor Hugo 415
CHAPTER VI
THREE HUMAN HEARTS DIFFERENTLY

CONSTRUCTED
Phoebus was not dead, however. Men of that stamp die hard. When Master
Philippe Lheulier, advocate extraordinary of the king, had said to poor
Esmeralda; "He is dying," it was an error or a jest. When the archdeacon had
repeated to the condemned girl; "He is dead," the fact is that he knew nothing
about it, but that he believed it, that he counted on it, that he did not doubt it,
that he devoutly hoped it. It would have been too hard for him to give favorable
news of his rival to the woman whom he loved. Any man would have done the
same in his place.%
It was not that Phoebus's wound had not been serious, but it had not been as
much so as the archdeacon believed. The physician, to whom the soldiers of the
watch had carried him at the first moment, had feared for his life during the
space of a week, and had even told him so in Latin. But youth had gained the
upper hand; and, as frequently happens, in spite of prognostications and
diagnoses, nature had amused herself by saving the sick man under the
physician's very nose. It was while he was still lying on the leech's pallet that he
had submitted to the interrogations of Philippe Lheulier and the official
inquisitors, which had annoyed him greatly. Hence, one fine morning, feeling
Thesaurus
amused: (adj) amusing, smiling, rival: (n) competitor, enemy, foe, soldiers: (n) military, troop, force, the
tickled pink, pleased, diverted. contestant; (adj, n, v) emulate; (n, v) military, troops, defense force,
annoyed: (adj) irritated, vexed, irate, match, contest, corrival; (adj, v) military service, militia, soldiery,
aggravated, angered, cross, competitive; (v) compete, contend. Territorial Army, armed forces.
disgruntled, exasperated, infuriated, ANTONYMS: (adj) allied; (n) partner, stamp: (n, v) print, imprint, mark, seal,
displeased, resentful. ANTONYMS: friend, supporter. brand, impress, cast, punch, shape;
(adj) pleased, unprovoked, smiling, saving: (adj, n) frugal, economical; (v) trample; (n) impression.
patient, unconcerned, contented. (adj) thrifty, save; (n) economy, wound: (n, v) bruise, cut, harm, pain,
condemned: (adj) censured, convicted, conservation, salvation, rescue, damage, scratch, stab, sting; (n)
doomed, destined, appropriated, preservation, cut, retrenchment. injury; (v) offend, injure.
taken, taken over, fated, seized, ANTONYMS: (n) extravagance, ANTONYMS: (v) heal, appease, aid,
predestined; (adj, v) guilty. expenditure; (adj) spendthrift. cure, repair.
himself better, he had left his golden spurs with the leech as payment, and had
slipped away. This had not, however, interfered with the progress of the affair.
Justice, at that epoch, troubled itself very little about the clearness and
definiteness of a criminal suit. Provided that the accused was hung, that was all
that was necessary. Now the judge had plenty of proofs against la Esmeralda.
They had supposed Phoebus to be dead, and that was the end of the matter.%
Phoebus, on his side, had not fled far. He had simply rejoined his company
in garrison at Queue-en-Brie, in the Isle-de-France, a few stages from Paris.
After all, it did not please him in the least to appear in this suit. He had a
vague feeling that be should play a ridiculous figure in it. On the whole, he did
not know what to think of the whole affair. Superstitious, and not given to
devoutness, like every soldier who is only a soldier, when he came to question
himself about this adventure, he did not feel assured as to the goat, as to the
singular fashion in which he had met La Esmeralda, as to the no less strange
manner in which she had allowed him to divine her love, as to her character as a
gypsy, and lastly, as to the surly monk. He perceived in all these incidents much
more magic than love, probably a sorceress, perhaps the devil; a comedy, in
short, or to speak in the language of that day, a very disagreeable mystery, in
which he played a very awkward part, the role of blows and derision. The
captain was quite put out of countenance about it; he experienced that sort of
shame which our La Fontaine has so admirably defined,
Ashamed as a fox who has been caught by a fowl.
Moreover, he hoped that the affair would not get noised abroad, that his
name would hardly be pronounced in it, and that in any case it would not go
beyond the courts of the Tournelle. In this he was not mistaken, there was then
no "Gazette des Tribunaux;" and as not a week passed which had not its
counterfeiter to boil, or its witch to hang, or its heretic to burn, at some one of the
innumerable justices of Paris, people were so accustomed to seeing in all the
squares the ancient feudal Themis, bare armed, with sleeves stripped up,
performing her duty at the gibbets, the ladders, and the pillories, that they
hardly paid any heed to it. Fashionable society of that day hardly knew the
Thesaurus
admirably: (adv) superbly, perfectly, disagreeable: (adj) nasty, offensive, misbeliever, nonconformist,
excellently, admirable, marvellously, uncomfortable, distasteful, dissident, sectarian, heathen, pariah,
heroically, bravely, brilliantly, nicely, cantankerous, cross, ungrateful, outcast, dissenter, renegade.
creditably, ably. ANTONYMS: (adv) abhorrent, horrible, bad, painful. lastly: (adv) eventually, ultimately,
badly, inadequately, dishonorably, ANTONYMS: (adj) pleasant, friendly, latterly, in conclusion, last, at last,
execrably, incompetently, poorly. amiable, inoffensive, acceptable, terminally, latestly, utmostly,
definiteness: (n) certainty, desirable, easygoing, happy, definitively, concludingly.
conclusiveness, accuracy, exactness, pleasing, sweet, nice. ANTONYM: (adv) initially.
finality, decisiveness, definition, fowl: (n) poultry, bird, domestic fowl, leech: (n) parasite, bloodsucker,
predictability, intelligibility, chick, cochin, birds, partlet, poult, physician, doctor, sponger,
resolution, expressness. ANTONYM: hen, fowls, rooster. hirudinean, freeloader, sycophant,
(n) uncertainty. heretic: (n) schismatic, pagan, vampire; (v) bleed, phlebotomize.
Victor Hugo 417
name of the victim who passed by at the corner of the street, and it was the
populace at the most who regaled themselves with this coarse fare. An execution
was an habitual incident of the public highways, like the braising-pan of the
baker or the slaughter-house of the knacker. The executioner was only a sort of
butcher of a little deeper dye than the rest.%
Hence Phoebus's mind was soon at ease on the score of the enchantress
Esmeralda, or Similar, as he called her, concerning the blow from the dagger of
the Bohemian or of the surly monk (it mattered little which to him), and as to the
issue of the trial. But as soon as his heart was vacant in that direction, Fleur-de-
Lys returned to it. Captain Phoebus's heart, like the physics of that day,
abhorred a vacuum.
Queue-en-Brie was a very insipid place to stay at then, a village of farriers,
and cow-girls with chapped hands, a long line of poor dwellings and thatched
cottages, which borders the grand road on both sides for half a league; a tail
(queue), in short, as its name imports.
Fleur-de-Lys was his last passion but one, a pretty girl, a charming dowry;
accordingly, one fine morning, quite cured, and assuming that, after the lapse of
two months, the Bohemian affair must be completely finished and forgotten, the
amorous cavalier arrived on a prancing horse at the door of the Gondelaurier
mansion.
He paid no attention to a tolerably numerous rabble which had assembled in
the Place du Parvis, before the portal of Notre-Dame; he remembered that it was
the month of May; he supposed that it was some procession, some Pentecost,
some festival, hitched his horse to the ring at the door, and gayly ascended the
stairs to his beautiful betrothed.
She was alone with her mother.
The scene of the witch, her goat, her cursed alphabet, and Phoebus's long
absences, still weighed on Fleur-de-Lys's heart. Nevertheless, when she beheld
her captain enter, she thought him so handsome, his doublet so new, his baldrick
so shining, and his air so impassioned, that she blushed with pleasure. The noble
damsel herself was more charming than ever. Her magnificent blond hair was
Thesaurus
abhorred: (adj) disgusted, unpopular. blunt, bawdy; (adj, v) harsh. fiery, burning, passionate, hot, torrid,
blond: (adj, v) fair; (adj, n) blonde; (adj) ANTONYMS: (adj) sophisticated, vehement, keen, zealous; (adj, v)
light, flaxen, pale, creamy; (n) refined, smooth, polite, soft, civil, enthusiastic. ANTONYMS: (adj)
someone, soul, somebody, person; (v) cultured, delicate, fine, genteel, impassive, indifferent, calm.
to stick together. ANTONYM: (adj) gentlemanly. knacker: (n) slaughterer, wrecker,
brunet. dowry: (n) dot, inheritance, gift, butcher.
chapped: (adj) cracked, balmy, alimony, dowery, portion, jointure, lapse: (n, v) decline, drop, mistake;
unsmooth, barmy, bats, batty, grant, share, endowment, heritage. (adj, n, v) fall; (v) expire, elapse,
bonkers, buggy, roughened, coarse, enchantress: (n) siren, Delilah, fairy, collapse, go by; (n) oversight, error,
alligatored. witch, occultist, woman, lamia, sibyl, fault. ANTONYMS: (v) behave, start,
coarse: (adj) vulgar, boorish, rough, vamp, hag, sorceress. rise, renew, improve.
brutal, crude, gross, common, earthy, impassioned: (adj) fervent, fanatical,
plaited in a ravishing manner, she was dressed entirely in that sky blue which
becomes fair people so well, a bit of coquetry which she had learned from
Colombe, and her eyes were swimming in that languor of love which becomes
them still better.%
Phoebus, who had seen nothing in the line of beauty, since he left the village
maids of Queue-en-Brie, was intoxicated with Fleur-de-Lys, which imparted to
our officer so eager and gallant an air, that his peace was immediately made.
Madame de Gondelaurier herself, still maternally seated in her big arm- chair,
had not the heart to scold him. As for Fleur-de-Lys's reproaches, they expired in
tender cooings.
The young girl was seated near the window still embroidering her grotto of
Neptune. The captain was leaning over the back of her chair, and she was
addressing her caressing reproaches to him in a low voice.
"What has become of you these two long months, wicked man?"
"I swear to you," replied Phoebus, somewhat embarrassed by the question,
"that you are beautiful enough to set an archbishop to dreaming."
She could not repress a smile.
"Good, good, sir. Let my beauty alone and answer my question. A fine
beauty, in sooth!"
"Well, my dear cousin, I was recalled to the garrison.
"And where is that, if you please? and why did not you come to say
farewell?"
"At Queue-en-Brie."
Phoebus was delighted with the first question, which helped him to avoid
the second.
"But that is quite close by, monsieur. Why did you not come to see me a
single time?"
Here Phoebus was rather seriously embarrassed.
"Because-- the service-- and then, charming cousin, I have been ill."
Thesaurus
archbishop: (adj, n) primate; (n) coquetry: (v) captation, languor: (adj, n) inactivity, inertia,
metropolitan, bishop, prelate, elder, obsequiousness, sentimentalism, feebleness; (n) lethargy, fatigue,
eminence, clergyman, becket, sycophancy, mock modesty, infirmity, lassitude, weakness,
reverence, minister. minauderie, toadeating, flunkeyism, indifference, ennui; (adj) atony.
charming: (adj) beautiful, lovely, prudery; (n) dalliance, invitation. ANTONYM: (n) energy.
captivating, winning, attractive, embroidering: (n) embellishment, maternally: (adv) parentally,
enchanting, delightful, pleasing, nice, hyperbole. paternally, protectively, motherly.
magic, cute. ANTONYMS: (adj) expired: (adj) lapsed, deceased, scold: (v) reprimand, chide, berate,
repellent, unpleasant, unappealing, invalid, dead, overdue, extinct, rebuke, abuse, lecture, reproach, rail,
repulsive, charmless, disgusting, elapsed, out. grouch; (n, v) nag; (adj, n) shrew.
gross, irritating, offensive, helped: (adj) aided, assisted; (v) ANTONYMS: (v) praise, compliment,
uninteresting, annoying. HALP. approve.
Victor Hugo 419
"Ill!" she repeated in alarm.%

"Yes, wounded!"
"Wounded!"
She poor child was completely upset.
"Oh! do not be frightened at that," said Phoebus, carelessly, "it was nothing.
A quarrel, a sword cut; what is that to you?"
"What is that to me?" exclaimed Fleur-de-Lys, raising her beautiful eyes filled
with tears. "Oh! you do not say what you think when you speak thus. What
sword cut was that? I wish to know all."
"Well, my dear fair one, I had a falling out with Mahè Fédy, you know? the
lieutenant of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and we ripped open a few inches of skin
for each other. That is all."
The mendacious captain was perfectly well aware that an affair of honor
always makes a man stand well in the eyes of a woman. In fact, Fleur-de-Lys
looked him full in the face, all agitated with fear, pleasure, and admiration. Still,
she was not completely reassured.
"Provided that you are wholly cured, my Phoebus!" said she. "I do not know
your Mahè Fédy, but he is a villanous man. And whence arose this quarrel?"
Here Phoebus, whose imagination was endowed with but mediocre power of
creation, began to find himself in a quandary as to a means of extricating himself
for his prowess.
"Oh! how do I know?-- a mere nothing, a horse, a remark! Fair cousin," he
exclaimed, for the sake of changing the conversation, "what noise is this in the
Cathedral Square?"
He approached the window.
"Oh! Mon Dieu, fair cousin, how many people there are on the Place!"
"I know not," said Fleur-de-Lys; "it appears that a witch is to do penance this
morning before the church, and thereafter to be hung."
Thesaurus
lieutenant: (n) captain, assistant, deceitful, untruthful, fraudulent, perplexity; (adj, n) nonplus.
vicegerent, help, helper, first dishonest, insincere, faithless, remark: (n, v) comment, notice, note,
lieutenant, commodore, chancellor, trothless, unveracious, untrue. mention, regard, mind; (adj, n, v)
commander, levetenant, delegate. ANTONYM: (adj) honest. observe; (v) perceive, mark, discern;
mediocre: (adj, n) mean, average; (adj) prowess: (n) bravery, valor, art, (n) observation.
middling, ordinary, commonplace, heroism, proficiency, mastery, ripped: (adj) rent, blasted, lacerated,
fair, passable, indifferent, common, expertise, gallantry, intrepidity, drugged, depressed, desolate,
inferior, intermediate. ANTONYMS: chivalry, skill. ANTONYMS: (n) desolated, deuced, devastated,
(adj) exceptional, excellent, inability, ineptitude. darned, distressed.
impressive, talented, unusual, quandary: (n) predicament, plight, sword: (n) blade, sabre, brand,
exciting, superior, strong. difficulty, puzzle, doubt, problem, broadsword, falchion, cutlass, saber,
mendacious: (adj) false, lying, embarrassment, hole, uncertainty, steel, glaive, backsword, cutlas.
The captain was so thoroughly persuaded that la Esmeralda's affair was

concluded, that he was but little disturbed by Fleur- de-Lys's words. Still, he
asked her one or two questions.%
"What is the name of this witch?"
"I do not know," she replied.
"And what is she said to have done?"
She shrugged her white shoulders.
"I know not."
"Oh, mon Dieu Jesus!" said her mother; "there are so many witches nowadays
that I dare say they burn them without knowing their names. One might as well
seek the name of every cloud in the sky. After all, one may be tranquil. The good
God keeps his register." Here the venerable dame rose and came to the window.
"Good Lord! you are right, Phoebus," said she. "The rabble is indeed great.
There are people on all the roofs, blessed be God! Do you know, Phoebus, this
reminds me of my best days. The entrance of King Charles VII., when, also, there
were many people. I no longer remember in what year that was. When I speak
of this to you, it produces upon you the effect,-- does it not?-- the effect of
something very old, and upon me of something very young. Oh! the crowd was
far finer than at the present day. They even stood upon the machicolations of the
Porte Sainte- Antoine. The king had the queen on a pillion, and after their
highnesses came all the ladies mounted behind all the lords. I remember that
they laughed loudly, because beside Amanyon de Garlande, who was very short
of stature, there rode the Sire Matefelon, a chevalier of gigantic size, who had
killed heaps of English. It was very fine. A procession of all the gentlemen of
France, with their oriflammes waving red before the eye. There were some with
pennons and some with banners. How can I tell? the Sire de Calm with a
pennon; Jean de Châteaumorant with a banner; the Sire de Courcy with a banner,
and a more ample one than any of the others except the Duc de Bourbon. Alas!
'tis a sad thing to think that all that has existed and exists no longer!"
Thesaurus
ample: (adj) abundant, big, broad, fortunate, saintly, lucky, divine. finer: (adj) superior, advanced, bigger,
copious, large, plentiful, heavy, ANTONYMS: (adj) unlucky, higher, more, greater.
liberal, roomy, affluent, considerable. condemned, damned, disapproved, heaps: (adj, n) lots, much; (n) masses,
ANTONYMS: (adj) small, meager, unhappy, unholy, secular. oodles, piles, stacks, many, tons,
insufficient, scarce, sparse, scant, disturbed: (adj, v) concerned; (adj) plenty, lot, accumulation.
cramped, narrow, partial, sketchy, anxious, disquieted, upset, confused, ANTONYM: (adj) inadequate.
slender. worried, restless, disordered, persuaded: (adj) sure, satisfied, easily
banner: (n) flag, title, ensign, emblem, unsettled, distressed, turbulent. affected, impressible, positive,
bunting, headline, streamer, pennon, ANTONYMS: (adj) rational, relaxed, delicate, sensible, intelligent, certain,
pennant, colors, insignia. calm, sane, unaffected, unbroken, in no doubt, definite. ANTONYMS:
blessed: (adj) happy, holy, cursed, peaceful, stable, carefree, (adj) unsure, uncertain.
sacred, damned, hallowed, blasted, unconcerned, untroubled. pillion: (n) saddle, pannel, seat.
Victor Hugo 421
The two lovers were not listening to the venerable dowager. Phoebus had
returned and was leaning on the back of his betrothed's chair, a charming post
whence his libertine glance plunged into all the openings of Fleur-de-Lys's
gorget. This gorget gaped so conveniently, and allowed him to see so many
exquisite things and to divine so many more, that Phoebus, dazzled by this skin
with its gleams of satin, said to himself, "How can any one love anything but a
fair skin?"
Both were silent. The young girl raised sweet, enraptured eyes to him from
time to time, and their hair mingled in a ray of spring sunshine.%
"Phoebus," said Fleur-de-Lys suddenly, in a low voice, "we are to be married
three months hence; swear to me that you have never loved any other woman
than myself."
"I swear it, fair angel!" replied Phoebus, and his passionate glances aided the
sincere tone of his voice in convincing Fleur-de-Lys.
Meanwhile, the good mother, charmed to see the betrothed pair on terms of
such perfect understanding, had just quitted the apartment to attend to some
domestic matter; Phoebus observed it, and this so emboldened the adventurous
captain that very strange ideas mounted to his brain. Fleur-de-Lys loved him, he
was her betrothed; she was alone with him; his former taste for her had re-
awakened, not with all its freshness but with all its ardor; after all, there is no
great harm in tasting one's wheat while it is still in the blade; I do not know
whether these ideas passed through his mind, but one thing is certain, that Fleur-
de-Lys was suddenly alarmed by the expression of his glance. She looked round
and saw that her mother was no longer there.
"Good heavens!" said she, blushing and uneasy, "how very warm I am?"
"I think, in fact," replied Phoebus, "that it cannot be far from midday. The
sun is troublesome. We need only lower the curtains."
"No, no," exclaimed the poor little thing, "on the contrary, I need air."
And like a fawn who feels the breath of the pack of hounds, she rose, ran to
the window, opened it, and rushed upon the balcony.
Thesaurus
adventurous: (adj) unsafe, joyous, enamored. cordial. ANTONYMS: (adj) insincere,
venturesome, enterprising, plucky, exquisite: (adj) beautiful, delicate, dishonest, guarded, flippant,
audacious, bold, courageous, daring, excellent, dainty, gorgeous, affected, disingenuous, hypocritical,
brave, foolhardy, rash. ANTONYMS: admirable, acute, heavenly, choice, cunning, unfaithful, unenthusiastic,
(adj) cautious, prudent, careful, timid. wonderful; (adj, v) delightful. unbelievable.
aided: (adj) power, favored. ANTONYMS: (adj) dull, inferior, troublesome: (adj) difficult, hard,
dowager: (n) matron, Donna Belle, ugly, subdued, rough, poor, coarse, arduous, bothersome, inconvenient,
gammer, goody, dame, widow, wife, mild, imperfect, horrible, flawed. onerous, awkward, annoying,
matriarch, lady, female. gorget: (n) armor plate, armour plate. laborious, tough, heavy.
enraptured: (adj) rapt, rapturous, sincere: (adj, v) earnest, devout; (adj) ANTONYMS: (adj) nice, helpful,
captive, bewitched, rhapsodic, genuine, faithful, heartfelt, honest, useful, advantageous, convenient,
ecstasy, confined, absorbed, jubilant, serious, open, artless, candid; (adj, n) uncomplicated, delightful.
Phoebus, much discomfited, followed her.%

The Place du Parvis Notre-Dame, upon which the balcony looked, as the
reader knows, presented at that moment a singular and sinister spectacle which
caused the fright of the timid Fleur-de-Lys to change its nature.
An immense crowd, which overflowed into all the neighboring streets,
encumbered the Place, properly speaking. The little wall, breast high, which
surrounded the Place, would not have sufficed to keep it free had it not been
lined with a thick hedge of sergeants and hackbuteers, culverines in hand.
Thanks to this thicket of pikes and arquebuses, the Parvis was empty. Its
entrance was guarded by a force of halberdiers with the armorial bearings of the
bishop. The large doors of the church were closed, and formed a contrast with
the innumerable windows on the Place, which, open to their very gables, allowed
a view of thousands of heads heaped up almost like the piles of bullets in a park
of artillery.
The surface of this rabble was dingy, dirty, earthy. The spectacle which it
was expecting was evidently one of the sort which possess the privilege of
bringing out and calling together the vilest among the populace. Nothing is so
hideous as the noise which was made by that swarm of yellow caps and dirty
heads. In that throng there were more laughs than cries, more women than men.
From time to time, a sharp and vibrating voice pierced the general clamor.
"Ohé! Mahiet Baliffre! Is she to be hung yonder?"
"Fool! t'is here that she is to make her apology in her shift! the good God is
going to cough Latin in her face! That is always done here, at midday. If 'tis the
gallows that you wish, go to the Grève."
"I will go there, afterwards."
"Tell me, la Boucanbry? Is it true that she has refused a confessor?"
"It appears so, La Bechaigne."
"You see what a pagan she is!"
Thesaurus
bearings: (n) bearing, direction, crest, earthy: (adj) coarse, mundane, earthly, (n) idolater, infidel, paynim, heretic;
position. realistic, vulgar, worldly, gross, (adj) heathenish, irreligious, ethnical,
cough: (v) clear the throat, to cough, terrestrial, natural, terrene, rude. profane.
spit up, cough up, expectorate; (n) ANTONYMS: (adj) sophisticated, thousands: (n) myriad, much, many.
expiration, exhalation, symptom, cultured, clean. timid: (adj) shy, afraid, diffident, coy,
sneeze, breathing out. guarded: (adj) wary, careful, chary, bashful, nervous, frightened,
dingy: (adj) dark, black, drab, dull, circumspect, cagey, vigilant, apprehensive, modest; (adj, adv)
muddy, impure, dim, seedy, dowdy, watchful, conditional, discreet, cowardly; (adj, n) cautious.
unclean, grimy. ANTONYMS: (adj) gingerly, conservative. ANTONYMS: ANTONYMS: (adj, n) brave; (adj)
immaculate, spotless, sparkling, (adj) frank, careless, trusting, reckless, confident, bold, fearless, resolute,
bright, neat, brilliant, interesting, open, unwary, natural. forward, daring, brazen, extrovert,
smart. pagan: (adj, n) gentile, ethnic, agnostic; brash, talkative.
Victor Hugo 423
"'Tis the custom, monsieur. The bailiff of the courts is bound to deliver the
malefactor ready judged for execution if he be a layman, to the provost of Paris;
if a clerk, to the official of the bishopric."
"Thank you, sir."
"Oh, God!" said Fleur-de-Lys, "the poor creature!"
This thought filled with sadness the glance which she cast upon the populace.
The captain, much more occupied with her than with that pack of the rabble, was
amorously rumpling her girdle behind. She turned round, entreating and
smiling.%
"Please let me alone, Phoebus! If my mother were to return, she would see
your hand!"
At that moment, midday rang slowly out from the clock of Notre-Dame. A
murmur of satisfaction broke out in the crowd. The last vibration of the twelfth
stroke had hardly died away when all heads surged like the waves beneath a
squall, and an immense shout went up from the pavement, the windows, and
the roofs,
"There she is!"
Fleur-de-Lys pressed her hands to her eyes, that she might not see.
"Charming girl," said Phoebus, "do you wish to withdraw?"
"No," she replied; and she opened through curiosity, the eyes which she had
closed through fear.
A tumbrel drawn by a stout Norman horse, and all surrounded by cavalry in
violet livery with white crosses, had just debouched upon the Place through the
Rue Saint-Pierre- aux-Boeufs. The sergeants of the watch were clearing a passage
for it through the crowd, by stout blows from their clubs. Beside the cart rode
several officers of justice and police, recognizable by their black costume and
their awkwardness in the saddle. Master Jacques Charmolue paraded at their
head.
Thesaurus
amorously: (adv) fondly, lovingly, assurance, liveliness, confidence, clothing, accouterment, uniform,
erotically, tenderly, affectionately, cooperation. complexion, legal transfer, color, hue,
romanticly, amatorily, romantically, entreating: (adj) beseeching, dye, bailment.
dotingly, amatively, adoringly. imploring, suppliant, begging, malefactor: (adj, n) felon, culprit,
awkwardness: (n) embarrassment, supplicant, imploratory, asking convict; (n) crook, delinquent,
stiffness, unwieldiness, submissively, pleading, piteous. outlaw, hood, hoodlum, evildoer,
inconvenience, gawkiness, layman: (n) commoner, layperson, lawbreaker, miscreant.
inelegance, troublesomeness, laic, laymen, laity, lay person, rang: (n) rung.
ineptitude, ineptness, gaucherie; (adj, outsider, common man, civilian, lay squall: (n, v) cry; (v) shriek, howl,
n) delicacy. ANTONYMS: (n) reader, common person. ANTONYM: scream, screech, shrill, bawl, holler;
gracefulness, grace, comfort, (n) clergyman. (n) gust, blast, gale.
coordination, pride, urbanity, ease, livery: (adj) liverish, bilious; (n) twelfth: (adj) dozenth.
In the fatal cart sat a young girl with her arms tied behind her back, and with
no priest beside her. She was in her shift; her long black hair (the fashion then
was to cut it off only at the foot of the gallows) fell in disorder upon her half-
bared throat and shoulders.%
Athwart that waving hair, more glossy than the plumage of a raven, a thick,
rough, gray rope was visible, twisted and knotted, chafing her delicate collar-
bones and twining round the charming neck of the poor girl, like an earthworm
round a flower. Beneath that rope glittered a tiny amulet ornamented with bits
of green glass, which had been left to her no doubt, because nothing is refused to
those who are about to die. The spectators in the windows could see in the
bottom of the cart her naked legs which she strove to hide beneath her, as by a
final feminine instinct. At her feet lay a little goat, bound. The condemned girl
held together with her teeth her imperfectly fastened shift. One would have said
that she suffered still more in her misery from being thus exposed almost naked
to the eyes of all. Alas! modesty is not made for such shocks.
"Jesus!" said Fleur-de-Lys hastily to the captain. "Look fair cousin, 'tis that
wretched Bohemian with the goat."
So saying, she turned to Phoebus. His eyes were fixed on the tumbrel. He
was very pale.
"What Bohemian with the goat?" he stammered.
"What!" resumed Fleur-de-Lys, "do you not remember?"
Phoebus interrupted her.
"I do not know what you mean."
He made a step to re-enter the room, but Fleur-de-Lys, whose jealousy,
previously so vividly aroused by this same gypsy, had just been re-awakened,
Fleur-de-Lys gave him a look full of penetration and distrust. She vaguely
recalled at that moment having heard of a captain mixed up in the trial of that
witch.
"What is the matter with you?" she said to Phoebus, "one would say, that this
woman had disturbed you."
Thesaurus
cart: (n) car, carriage, handcart, badly, deficiently, incompletely, decadence, boldness.
barrow, applecart, wagon; (v) haul, partially, poorly, inadequately, plumage: (n) feather, plume,
drag, bear, take, transfer. sketchily, incorrectly, halfway. feathering, quill, aftershaft, alula,
chafing: (n) abrasion, soreness, ANTONYMS: (adv) perfectly, marabou, finery, animal material;
tenderness, rubbing, resistance, flawlessly, correctly, well. (adj) plumosity, alular.
roughness; (v) irritate, to chafe; (adj) modesty: (n) reserve, bashfulness, re-enter: (v) return, come back.
impatient. humility, diffidence, humbleness, vividly: (adv) brightly, lively,
earthworm: (n) crawler, dew worm, demureness, coyness, gentleness, intensely, clearly, brilliantly,
oligochaete, worm, night crawler, red continence; (adj, n) decency, honesty. graphically, strikingly, dramatically,
worm, fishing worm, dewworm, ANTONYMS: (n) arrogance, colorfully, glowingly, severely.
nightcrawler, wiggler, fishworm. immodesty, spectacle, flamboyance, ANTONYMS: (adv) blandly,
imperfectly: (adv) faultily, defectively, abandon, bigheadedness, pretension, modestly, vaguely.
Victor Hugo 425
Phoebus forced a sneer,

"Me! Not the least in the world! Ah! yes, certainly!"
"Remain, then!" she continued imperiously, "and let us see the end."
The unlucky captain was obliged to remain. He was somewhat reassured by
the fact that the condemned girl never removed her eyes from the bottom of the
cart. It was but too surely la Esmeralda. In this last stage of opprobrium and
misfortune, she was still beautiful; her great black eyes appeared still larger,
because of the emaciation of her cheeks; her pale profile was pure and sublime.
She resembled what she had been, in the same degree that a virgin by Masaccio,
resembles a virgin of Raphael,--weaker, thinner, more delicate.%
Moreover, there was nothing in her which was not shaken in some sort, and
which with the exception of her modesty, she did not let go at will, so
profoundly had she been broken by stupor and despair. Her body bounded at
every jolt of the tumbrel like a dead or broken thing; her gaze was dull and
imbecile. A tear was still visible in her eyes, but motionless and frozen, so to
speak.
Meanwhile, the lugubrious cavalcade has traversed the crowd amid cries of
joy and curious attitudes. But as a faithful historian, we must state that on
beholding her so beautiful, so depressed, many were moved with pity, even
among the hardest of them.
The tumbrel had entered the Parvis.
It halted before the central portal. The escort ranged themselves in line on
both sides. The crowd became silent, and, in the midst of this silence full of
anxiety and solemnity, the two leaves of the grand door swung back, as of
themselves, on their hinges, which gave a creak like the sound of a fife. Then
there became visible in all its length, the deep, gloomy church, hung in black,
sparely lighted with a few candles gleaming afar off on the principal altar,
opened in the midst of the Place which was dazzling with light, like the mouth of
a cavern. At the very extremity, in the gloom of the apse, a gigantic silver cross
was visible against a black drapery which hung from the vault to the pavement.
Thesaurus
bounded: (adj) restricted, limited, magisterially, dictatorially, (n) joy, bonus, opportunity, privilege,
delimited, encircled, enclosed, masterfully, haughtily, imperatively, success, happiness.
confined, leap, spring, bordered, authoritatively, domineeringly, opprobrium: (n) infamy, dishonor,
circumscribed, constrained. insolently. ANTONYMS: (adv) disgrace, defamation, reproach; (n, v)
ANTONYMS: (adj) unbounded, meekly, feebly. insult, abuse, invective, contumely;
unconfined, unlimited, free. jolt: (n, v) jerk, shake, jog, jar, bump, (adj, n) obloquy, odium. ANTONYM:
emaciation: (n) gauntness, maceration, push, knock, thrust, shock; (n) hustle; (n) fame.
thinness, leanness, consumption; (v) (v) agitate. sparely: (adv) sparingly,
tabes, collapse, tabefaction, misfortune: (n) accident, hardship, superfluously, savingly,
marasmus; (adj) macilency, marcor. misadventure, disaster, calamity, supernumerarily, scantily, thinly,
imperiously: (adv) overbearingly, mischance, catastrophe, mishap, bad savely, meagerly, supererogatorily,
arrogantly, commandingly, luck, misery, affliction. ANTONYMS: frugally, stingily.
The whole nave was deserted. But a few heads of priests could be seen moving
confusedly in the distant choir stalls, and, at the moment when the great door
opened, there escaped from the church a loud, solemn, and monotonous
chanting, which cast over the head of the condemned girl, in gusts, fragments of
melancholy psalms,
"Non timebo millia populi circumdantis me: exsurge, Domine; salvum me fac, Deus!"
"Salvum me fac, Deus, quoniam intraverunt aquoe usque ad animam meam.%
"Infixus sum in limo profundi; et non est substantia."
At the same time, another voice, separate from the choir, intoned upon the
steps of the chief altar, this melancholy offertory,-
"Qui verbum meum audit, et credit ei qui misit me, habet vitam oeternam et in
judicium non venit; sed transit a morte im vitam."
This chant, which a few old men buried in the gloom sang from afar over that
beautiful creature, full of youth and life, caressed by the warm air of spring,
inundated with sunlight was the mass for the dead.
The people listened devoutly.
The unhappy girl seemed to lose her sight and her consciousness in the
obscure interior of the church. Her white lips moved as though in prayer, and
the headsman's assistant who approached to assist her to alight from the cart,
heard her repeating this word in a low tone,-- "Phoebus."
They untied her hands, made her alight, accompanied by her goat, which had
also been unbound, and which bleated with joy at finding itself free: and they
made her walk barefoot on the hard pavement to the foot of the steps leading to
the door. The rope about her neck trailed behind her. One would have said it
was a serpent following her.
Then the chanting in the church ceased. A great golden cross and a row of
wax candles began to move through the gloom. The halberds of the motley
beadles clanked; and, a few moments later, a long procession of priests in
chasubles, and deacons in dalmatics, marched gravely towards the condemned
girl, as they drawled their song, spread out before her view and that of the
Thesaurus
alight: (v) light, land, perch, dismount, automobile, Berlin, big car, car, auto. transit: (n) passage, travel,
get down, settle, get off, descend; solemn: (adj, n, v) serious; (adj, v) conveyance, movement,
(adj) ablaze, burning, blazing. sober, important, sedate, devout, transportation, transport, transfer,
ANTONYM: (v) mount. formal, demure; (adj) heavy, public transit, lockage; (v) pass
barefoot: (adj) shoeless, unshod, bare dignified, sacred; (adj, n) earnest. across, pass over.
footed. ANTONYM: (adj) shoed. ANTONYMS: (adj) frivolous, untied: (adj) unfastened, unchained,
chant: (v) cantillate, sing, recite, cheerful, unceremonious, funny, unshackled, unlaced, unbound,
intone, intonate, utter, vocalize; (n) playful, flippant, relaxed. unfettered, free, unsewed, open,
hymn, song, melody; (n, v) chaunt. stalls: (n) auditorium, auditory, horse unconnected, rambling.
chanting: (n) cantillation, vocalizing, barn, boxes, pit, stables, seating, ANTONYMS: (adj) tied, laced.
sing, singing, intonation. seats, seating room, seating area,
limo: (n) motorcar, machine, parquet.
Victor Hugo 427
crowd. But her glance rested on the one who marched at the head, immediately
after the cross-bearer.%
"Oh!" she said in a low voice, and with a shudder, "'tis he again! the priest!"
It was in fact, the archdeacon. On his left he had the sub- chanter, on his
right, the chanter, armed with his official wand. He advanced with head thrown
back, his eyes fixed and wide open, intoning in a strong voice,
"De ventre inferi clamavi, et exaudisti vocem meam.

Et projecisti me in profundum in corde mans, et flumem circumdedit me."
At the moment when he made his appearance in the full daylight beneath the
lofty arched portal, enveloped in an ample cope of silver barred with a black
cross, he was so pale that more than one person in the crowd thought that one of
the marble bishops who knelt on the sepulchral stones of the choir had risen and
was come to receive upon the brink of the tomb, the woman who was about to
die.
She, no less pale, no less like a statue, had hardly noticed that they had
placed in her hand a heavy, lighted candle of yellow wax; she had not heard the
yelping voice of the clerk reading the fatal contents of the apology; when they
told her to respond with Amen, she responded Amen. She only recovered life
and force when she beheld the priest make a sign to her guards to withdraw, and
himself advance alone towards her.
Then she felt her blood boil in her head, and a remnant of indignation
flashed up in that soul already benumbed and cold.
The archdeacon approached her slowly; even in that extremity, she beheld
him cast an eye sparkling with sensuality, jealousy, and desire, over her exposed
form. Then he said aloud,
"Young girl, have you asked God's pardon for your faults and shortcomings?"
He bent down to her ear, and added (the spectators supposed that he was
receiving her last confession): "Will you have me? I can still save you!"
Thesaurus
barred: (adj) prohibited, forbidden, cool, chill, assuage, appease, ice, chorister, ensemble.
barricaded, barry, banned, illicit, calm. jealousy: (n) suspicion, jealous,
streaked; (v) striated, areolar, veined; brink: (n, v) edge; (n) border, hem, jealousness, envy, envious, alertness,
(n) Bart. ANTONYMS: (adj) threshold, boundary, brim, shore, distrust, contention, competition,
admissible, legitimate, eligible, open. periphery, lip, margin, limit. scruple, qualm.
blood: (n) birth, gore, nature, origin, ANTONYMS: (n) middle, interior, mans: (n) mankind.
kindred, lineage, descent, family, end. sparkling: (adj, v) effervescent; (adj)
beau, pedigree; (adj) juice. chanter: (n) pipe, vocalist, songster, bright, brilliant, radiant, glittery,
boil: (adj, n, v) seethe; (v) bubble, chantor, melody pipe. bubbly, glittering, scintillating,
churn, ferment, burn, fume; (adj, n) choir: (n) quire, chancel, choral shining, scintillant; (n) sparkle.
abscess; (adj, v) simmer; (n) furuncle, society, choral group, crypt, ANTONYMS: (adj) dull, dirty,
blister, pimple. ANTONYMS: (v) Golgotha, nave, transept, vestry, lifeless, lethargic.
She looked intently at him: "Begone, demon, or I will denounce you!"

He gave vent to a horrible smile: "You will not be believed. You will only add
a scandal to a crime. Reply quickly! Will you have me?"
"What have you done with my Phoebus?"
"He is dead!" said the priest.%
At that moment the wretched archdeacon raised his head mechanically and
beheld at the other end of the Place, in the balcony of the Gondelaurier mansion,
the captain standing beside Fleur-de-Lys. He staggered, passed his hand across
his eyes, looked again, muttered a curse, and all his features were violently
contorted.
"Well, die then!" he hissed between his teeth. "No one shall have you." Then,
raising his hand over the gypsy, he exclaimed in a funereal voice:-- "I nunc, anima
anceps, et sit tibi Deus misenicors!"
This was the dread formula with which it was the custom to conclude these
gloomy ceremonies. It was the signal agreed upon between the priest and the
executioner.
The crowd knelt.
"Kyrie eleison," said the priests, who had remained beneath the arch of the
portal.
"Kyrie eleison," repeated the throng in that murmur which runs over all heads,
like the waves of a troubled sea.
"Amen," said the archdeacon.
He turned his back on the condemned girl, his head sank upon his breast
once more, he crossed his hands and rejoined his escort of priests, and a moment
later he was seen to disappear, with the cross, the candles, and the copes, beneath
the misty arches of the cathedral, and his sonorous voice was extinguished by
degrees in the choir, as he chanted this verse of despair,
"Omnes gurgites tui et fluctus tui super me transierunt."
Thesaurus
arch: (n, v) curve, bow, bend; (n) support. ANTONYMS: (adj) clear, distinct.
dome, curvature, acute; (adj) wily, dread: (n, v) apprehension, fear, panic; staggered: (adj) dumbfounded,
shrewd, sly; (v) vault; (adj, n, v) (n) anxiety, awe, consternation, astonished, flabbergasted, astounded,
round. ANTONYMS: (adj) smallest, alarm, trepidation, dismay, stunned, bewildered, surprised,
petty, modest, minor, frank, least, foreboding, terror. ANTONYMS: thunderstruck, angular, dizzy, taken
lesser, inferior, forthright, guileless, (adj) pleasing, welcomed, pleasant; aback.
humble. (v) welcome, want; (n) reassurance, vent: (n) exit, opening, flue, chimney,
denounce: (v) censure, decry, accuse, fearlessness, confidence, security, escape, blowhole; (n, v) discharge,
brand, criticize, damn, reproach, ease, calm. air, release; (v) emit, ventilate.
excoriate, betray, arraign, scold. misty: (adj) hazy, foggy, cloudy, ANTONYMS: (n) door, closure; (v)
ANTONYMS: (v) commend, brumous, dim, indistinct, nebulous, block, suppress.
compliment, honor, laud, approve, fuzzy, dark, dull, blurred.
Victor Hugo 429
At the same time, the intermittent clash of the iron butts of the beadles'
halberds, gradually dying away among the columns of the nave, produced the
effect of a clock hammer striking the last hour of the condemned.%
The doors of Notre-Dame remained open, allowing a view of the empty
desolate church, draped in mourning, without candles, and without voices.
The condemned girl remained motionless in her place, waiting to be
disposed of. One of the sergeants of police was obliged to notify Master
Charmolue of the fact, as the latter, during this entire scene, had been engaged in
studying the bas-relief of the grand portal which represents, according to some,
the sacrifice of Abraham; according to others, the philosopher's alchemical
operation: the sun being figured forth by the angel; the fire, by the fagot; the
artisan, by Abraham.
There was considerable difficulty in drawing him away from that
contemplation, but at length he turned round; and, at a signal which he gave,
two men clad in yellow, the executioner's assistants, approached the gypsy to
bind her hands once more.
The unhappy creature, at the moment of mounting once again the fatal cart, and
proceeding to her last halting-place, was seized, possibly, with some poignant
clinging to life. She raised her dry, red eyes to heaven, to the sun, to the silvery
clouds, cut here and there by a blue trapezium or triangle; then she lowered
them to objects around her, to the earth, the throng, the houses; all at once, while
the yellow man was binding her elbows, she uttered a terrible cry, a cry of joy.
Yonder, on that balcony, at the corner of the Place, she had just caught sight of
him, of her friend, her lord, Phoebus, the other apparition of her life!
The judge had lied! the priest had lied! it was certainly he, she could not
doubt it; he was there, handsome, alive, dressed in his brilliant uniform, his
plume on his head, his sword by his side!
"Phoebus!" she cried, "my Phoebus!"
And she tried to stretch towards him arms trembling with love and rapture,
but they were bound.
Thesaurus
alchemical: (adj) spagyrical, chemical. disposed: (adj) prone, apt, ready, impart.
artisan: (n) craftsman, artist, operative, subject, prepared, liable, game, plume: (n) feather, plumage, quill,
machinist, journeyman, worker, inclined, fain, likely, minded. panache, aigrette, crest, feathering;
workman, Wright, carpenter, ANTONYMS: (adj) ailing, (v) pride, pluck, dress, preen.
tradesman; (adj) mechanic. indisposed, unlikely, disinclined, poignant: (adj, v) acrid, biting, harsh,
desolate: (adj, v) desert, forlorn; (adj) reluctant, impervious. painful, penetrating, brisk; (adj)
bare, barren, alone, bleak, deserted, figured: (adj) figurative, glyptic, acute, cutting, moving, affecting; (adj,
cheerless, disconsolate; (v) devastate, conjectural, implied. n) piquant. ANTONYMS: (adj)
destroy. ANTONYMS: (adj) cheerful, lied: (n) song, hymn. unemotional, cheerful, emotionless.
inhabited, happy, sheltered, mobbed, notify: (v) acquaint, advertise, instruct, silvery: (adj) silvern, argent, bright,
overcrowded, ecstatic, hopeful; (v) inform, announce, warn, white, gray, rich, silverish,
create, construct, build. communicate, apprise, alert, tell, melodious, fair, Argentine, clear.
Then she saw the captain frown, a beautiful young girl who was leaning
against him gazed at him with disdainful lips and irritated eyes; then Phoebus
uttered some words which did not reach her, and both disappeared precipitately
behind the window opening upon the balcony, which closed after them.%
"Phoebus!" she cried wildly, "can it be you believe it?" A monstrous thought
had just presented itself to her. She remembered that she had been condemned
to death for murder committed on the person of Phoebus de Châteaupers.
She had borne up until that moment. But this last blow was too harsh. She
fell lifeless on the pavement.
"Come," said Charmolue, "carry her to the cart, and make an end of it."
No one had yet observed in the gallery of the statues of the kings, carved
directly above the arches of the portal, a strange spectator, who had, up to that
time, observed everything with such impassiveness, with a neck so strained, a
visage so hideous that, in his motley accoutrement of red and violet, he might
have been taken for one of those stone monsters through whose mouths the long
gutters of the cathedral have discharged their waters for six hundred years. This
spectator had missed nothing that had taken place since midday in front of the
portal of Notre-Dame. And at the very beginning he had securely fastened to
one of the small columns a large knotted rope, one end of which trailed on the
flight of steps below. This being done, he began to look on tranquilly, whistling
from time to time when a blackbird flitted past. Suddenly, at the moment when
the superintendent's assistants were preparing to execute Charmolue's
phlegmatic order, he threw his leg over the balustrade of the gallery, seized the
rope with his feet, his knees and his hands; then he was seen to glide down the
façade, as a drop of rain slips down a windowpane, rush to the two
executioners with the swiftness of a cat which has fallen from a roof, knock them
down with two enormous fists, pick up the gypsy with one hand, as a child
would her doll, and dash back into the church with a single bound, lifting the
young girl above his head and crying in a formidable voice,
"Sanctuary!"
Thesaurus
blackbird: (n) ousel, merle, European dreary, tedious, inert, lackluster. impulsively, foolhardily,
blackbird, Turdus Merula, oriole, ANTONYMS: (adj) lively, stiff, alive, prematurely; (adj, adv) headlong.
thrush, grackle, bean, cowbird, new interesting, awake, moving, upright, ANTONYM: (adv) deliberately.
world blackbird, redwing. bright, brilliant, firm, inspiring. slips: (n) pad.
impassiveness: (n) indifference, phlegmatic: (adj) indifferent, listless, violet: (adj, n) mauve, lavender; (adj)
emotionlessness, impassivity, stolid, unconcerned, phlegmatical, empurpled, lilac, purplish; (n) viola,
unemotionality, insensibility, lethargic, passive, inert, nonchalant, purpleness, indigo, sweet violet,
phlegm, stolidity, unconcern, cold, careless. ANTONYM: (adj) reddish blue, pansy.
coldness, nonchalance, torpor. demonstrative. whistling: (n) whistle, sound, tin
ANTONYM: (n) involvement. precipitately: (adv) rashly, whistle, music, pennywhistle, sign,
lifeless: (adj) inanimate, dull, insipid, immediately, instantly, passionately, signal, signaling.
defunct, inactive, flat, exanimate, rapidly, precipitously, impetuously,
Victor Hugo 431
This was done with such rapidity, that had it taken place at night, the whole
of it could have been seen in the space of a single flash of lightning.%
"Sanctuary! Sanctuary!" repeated the crowd; and the clapping of ten
thousand hands made Quasimodo's single eye sparkle with joy and pride.
This shock restored the condemned girl to her senses. She raised her eyelids,
looked at Quasimodo, then closed them again suddenly, as though terrified by
her deliverer.
Charmolue was stupefied, as well as the executioners and the entire escort.
In fact, within the bounds of Notre-Dame, the condemned girl could not be
touched. The cathedral was a place of refuge. All temporal jurisdiction expired
upon its threshold.
Quasimodo had halted beneath the great portal, his huge feet seemed as solid
on the pavement of the church as the heavy Roman pillars. His great, bushy
head sat low between his shoulders, like the heads of lions, who also have a
mane and no neck. He held the young girl, who was quivering all over,
suspended from his horny hands like a white drapery; but he carried her with as
much care as though he feared to break her or blight her. One would have said
that he felt that she was a delicate, exquisite, precious thing, made for other
hands than his. There were moments when he looked as if not daring to touch
her, even with his breath. Then, all at once, he would press her forcibly in his
arms, against his angular bosom, like his own possession, his treasure, as the
mother of that child would have done. His gnome's eye, fastened upon her,
inundated her with tenderness, sadness, and pity, and was suddenly raised filled
with lightnings. Then the women laughed and wept, the crowd stamped with
enthusiasm, for, at that moment Quasimodo had a beauty of his own. He was
handsome; he, that orphan, that foundling, that outcast, he felt himself august
and strong, he gazed in the face of that society from which he was banished, and
in which he had so powerfully intervened, of that human justice from which he
had wrenched its prey, of all those tigers whose jaws were forced to remain
empty, of those policemen, those judges, those executioners, of all that force of
Thesaurus
bushy: (adj) dense, shagged, shaggy, outcast: (n) exile, castaway, leper, (n) apathy, dullness, lifelessness.
hairy, bearded, brushy, gross, expatriate, outlaw, vagabond, lown, temporal: (adj) secular, earthly,
bushies, pilous, pappous, hispid. loon, refugee; (adj, n) derelict; (adj) profane, lay, carnal, mortal, fleeting,
ANTONYMS: (adj) bald, neat, homeless. ANTONYM: (n) native. temporary, transient, impermanent,
unhealthy, tidy, thin, sparse, sleek. quivering: (adj, n) trembling, tremor, mundane. ANTONYMS: (adj)
deliverer: (n) saviour, deliveryman, quaking, trepidation; (n) palpitation, spiritual, otherworldly, mental,
redeemer, rescuer, bailor, Christ, quiver, vibration; (adj) flutter, permanent, perpetual, lasting.
individual, human, somebody, quavering, shivering, tremulous. tigers: (n) raccoons, snow leopards,
person, helper. ANTONYM: (adj) steady. Carnivora, skunks, Tamil tigers,
mane: (n) encolure, head of hair, crest, sparkle: (n, v) flicker, flash, shimmer, bears, cheetahs, cats, order
wool, tresses; (adj) brush, beard, spark, shine, blaze, fizz, gleam, Carnivora, dogs, jackals.
ringlet, whisker, tress, moustache. glitter; (v) blink, glare. ANTONYMS: wrenched: (adj) strained, weakened.
the king which he, the meanest of creatures, had just broken, with the force of
God.%
And then, it was touching to behold this protection which had fallen from a
being so hideous upon a being so unhappy, a creature condemned to death
saved by Quasimodo. They were two extremes of natural and social
wretchedness, coming into contact and aiding each other.
Meanwhile, after several moments of triumph, Quasimodo had plunged
abruptly into the church with his burden. The populace, fond of all prowess,
sought him with their eyes, beneath the gloomy nave, regretting that he had so
speedily disappeared from their acclamations. All at once, he was seen to re-
appear at one of the extremities of the gallery of the kings of France; he traversed
it, running like a madman, raising his conquest high in his arms and shouting:
"Sanctuary!" The crowd broke forth into fresh applause. The gallery passed, he
plunged once more into the interior of the church. A moment later, he re-
appeared upon the upper platform, with the gypsy still in his arms, still running
madly, still crying, "Sanctuary!" and the throng applauded. Finally, he made his
appearance for the third time upon the summit of the tower where hung the
great bell; from that point he seemed to be showing to the entire city the girl
whom he had saved, and his voice of thunder, that voice which was so rarely
heard, and which he never heard himself, repeated thrice with frenzy, even to
the clouds: "Sanctuary! Sanctuary! Sanctuary!"
"Noel! Noel!" shouted the populace in its turn; and that immense
acclamation flew to astonish the crowd assembled at the Grève on the other
bank, and the recluse who was still waiting with her eyes riveted on the gibbet.
Thesaurus
aiding: (adj) healthy, subventitious, frenzy: (n) fury, anger, insanity, poignant, pitiful, pathetic, adjacent,
subsidiary, serviceable, auxiliary, mania, hysteria; (adj, n) distraction, adjoining, emotional; (n) touch,
convenient. aberration, alienation, phrensy, contact; (prep) concerning, about.
assembled: (adj) amassed, collected, derangement; (n, v) craze. ANTONYMS: (adj) unaffecting,
collective, concentrated, united, ANTONYMS: (n) calmness, calm, everyday, heartwarming, unmoving,
gather, assembling, gathered, order. heartbreaking, emotionless,
massed, built, aggregate. meanest: (adj) last, least. unemotional, impassive.
conquest: (n) defeat, triumph, noel: (n) Yule, Christmas, Xmas, wretchedness: (n) unhappiness, grief,
conquering, achievement, reduction, Christmas Day, Christmastide, distress, desolation, woe, sorrow,
coup, rout, overthrow, subjection, Christmastime. anguish, infelicity, tribulation,
mastery, success. ANTONYMS: (n) thrice: (adv) three times, thirdly. affliction, misfortune.
failure, defeat, loss, victory. touching: (adj, v) affecting; (adj)
Victor Hugo 433
BOOK IX
Victor Hugo 435
CHAPTER I
DELIRIUM
Claude Frollo was no longer in Notre-Dame when his adopted son so

abruptly cut the fatal web in which the archdeacon and the gypsy were
entangled. On returning to the sacristy he had torn off his alb, cope, and stole,
had flung all into the hands of the stupefied beadle, had made his escape
through the private door of the cloister, had ordered a boatman of the Terrain to
transport him to the left bank of the Seine, and had plunged into the hilly streets
of the University, not knowing whither he was going, encountering at every step
groups of men and women who were hurrying joyously towards the Pont Saint-
Michel, in the hope of still arriving in time to see the witch hung there,-- pale,
wild, more troubled, more blind and more fierce than a night bird let loose and
pursued by a troop of children in broad daylight. He no longer knew where he
was, what he thought, or whether he were dreaming. He went forward,
walking, running, taking any street at haphazard, making no choice, only urged
ever onward away from the Grève, the horrible Grève, which he felt confusedly,
to be behind him.%
In this manner he skirted Mount Sainte-Geneviève, and finally emerged from
the town by the Porte Saint-Victor. He continued his flight as long as he could
see, when he turned round, the turreted enclosure of the University, and the rare
Thesaurus
boatman: (n) rower, ferryman, (adv) casually. ANTONYMS: (adj) backward.
gondolier, oarsman, boater, methodical, discerning, planned, sacristy: (n) sacristanry , altar, holy of
longshoreman, lighterman, worker, organized, meticulous, regular, Holies, room, sanctuary, sanctum
sailor, shipman, punter. careful, deliberate. sanctorum, sextary, sextry, shrine.
dreaming: (n) reverie, ambition, hurrying: (n) hastening, speed, stole: (n) wrap, stolen, scarf, stolon,
nightmare, conception, castle in the quickening, rushing, early, speeding, stealing, robe, alb, tunicle, surplice,
air; (adj) absent-minded, asleep, speeding up, stepping up, alba, cassock.
visionary, vacant, wistful, rapt. amphetamine, forward, eager. troop: (n) group, corps, gang, crowd,
haphazard: (adj, n) chance; (adj) onward: (adv) ahead, forwards, before, band, brigade, crew, herd, swarm,
careless, fortuitous, contingent, forth, onwards, along, in advance, horde; (n, v) flock.
random, casual, indiscriminate, frontward, forrader; (adv, prep) on; turreted: (adj) fortified.
occasional, slipshod, adventitious; (adj) progressive. ANTONYM: (adv)
houses of the suburb; but, when, at length, a rise of ground had completely
concealed from him that odious Paris, when he could believe himself to be a
hundred leagues distant from it, in the fields, in the desert, he halted, and it
seemed to him that he breathed more freely.%
Then frightful ideas thronged his mind. Once more he could see clearly into
his soul, and he shuddered. He thought of that unhappy girl who had destroyed
him, and whom he had destroyed. He cast a haggard eye over the double,
tortuous way which fate had caused their two destinies to pursue up to their
point of intersection, where it had dashed them against each other without
mercy. He meditated on the folly of eternal vows, on the vanity of chastity, of
science, of religion, of virtue, on the uselessness of God. He plunged to his
heart's content in evil thoughts, and in proportion as he sank deeper, he felt a
Satanic laugh burst forth within him.
And as he thus sifted his soul to the bottom, when he perceived how large a
space nature had prepared there for the passions, he sneered still more bitterly.
He stirred up in the depths of his heart all his hatred, all his malevolence; and,
with the cold glance of a physician who examines a patient, he recognized the
fact that this malevolence was nothing but vitiated love; that love, that source of
every virtue in man, turned to horrible things in the heart of a priest, and that a
man constituted like himself, in making himself a priest, made himself a demon.
Then he laughed frightfully, and suddenly became pale again, when he
considered the most sinister side of his fatal passion, of that corrosive, venomous
malignant, implacable love, which had ended only in the gibbet for one of them
and in hell for the other; condemnation for her, damnation for him.
And then his laughter came again, when he reflected that Phoebus was alive;
that after all, the captain lived, was gay and happy, had handsomer doublets
than ever, and a new mistress whom he was conducting to see the old one
hanged. His sneer redoubled its bitterness when he reflected that out of the
living beings whose death he had desired, the gypsy, the only creature whom he
did not hate, was the only one who had not escaped him.
Thesaurus
corrosive: (adj) acid, erosive, acrid, atrociously, horrendously, awful. fruitfulness, skill, utility, worthiness,
biting, sarcastic, destructive, vitriolic, malignant: (adj) malevolent, worth, ability; (adj) purposeful.
acerbic, bitter, stringent, acrimonious. malicious, evil, malefic, fatal, spiteful, venomous: (adj) poisonous, toxic,
ANTONYMS: (adj) supporting, virulent, sinister, mischievous, noxious, malicious, virulent, spiteful,
fortifying, gentle. pernicious, venomous. bitter, deadly, baneful, caustic,
damnation: (n) damn, condemnation, uselessness: (n) inutility, fruitlessness, vicious. ANTONYMS: (adj) kind,
anathema, state, curse, execration, pointlessness, impracticableness, praising, loving, gentle.
judgment, oath, imprecation, impracticability, unusefulness, vitiated: (adj, v) tainted; (adj) corrupt,
denunciation, denouncement. vanity, idleness, ineffectualness, diminished, depraved, perverted,
frightfully: (adv) awfully, ghastly, senselessness; (adj) useless. corrupted, lessened, profligate,
dreadfully, fearfully, hideously, ANTONYMS: (n) value, competence, adulterate, faded; (v) morbid.
terribly, gruesomely, terrifically, helpfulness, effectiveness,
Victor Hugo 437
Then from the captain, his thought passed to the people, and there came to
him a jealousy of an unprecedented sort. He reflected that the people also, the
entire populace, had had before their eyes the woman whom he loved exposed
almost naked. He writhed his arms with agony as he thought that the woman
whose form, caught by him alone in the darkness would have been supreme
happiness, had been delivered up in broad daylight at full noonday, to a whole
people, clad as for a night of voluptuousness. He wept with rage over all these
mysteries of love, profaned, soiled, laid bare, withered forever. He wept with
rage as he pictured to himself how many impure looks had been gratified at the
sight of that badly fastened shift, and that this beautiful girl, this virgin lily, this
cup of modesty and delight, to which he would have dared to place his lips only
trembling, had just been transformed into a sort of public bowl, whereat the
vilest populace of Paris, thieves, beggars, lackeys, had come to quaff in common
an audacious, impure, and depraved pleasure.%
And when he sought to picture to himself the happiness which he might have
found upon earth, if she had not been a gypsy, and if he had not been a priest, if
Phoebus had not existed and if she had loved him; when he pictured to himself
that a life of serenity and love would have been possible to him also, even to him;
that there were at that very moment, here and there upon the earth, happy
couples spending the hours in sweet converse beneath orange trees, on the banks
of brooks, in the presence of a setting sun, of a starry night; and that if God had
so willed, he might have formed with her one of those blessed couples,-- his
heart melted in tenderness and despair.
Oh! she! still she! It was this fixed idea which returned incessantly, which
tortured him, which ate into his brain, and rent his vitals. He did not regret, he
did not repent; all that he had done he was ready to do again; he preferred to
behold her in the hands of the executioner rather than in the arms of the captain.
But he suffered; he suffered so that at intervals he tore out handfuls of his hair to
see whether it were not turning white.
Among other moments there came one, when it occurred to him that it was
perhaps the very minute when the hideous chain which he had seen that
Thesaurus
agony: (n) torture, suffering, torment, twilight, darkness, nightfall. unclean.
distress, misery, passion, pain, grief, depraved: (adj) bad, immoral, base, transformed: (adj) changed,
pang, sorrow, throe. ANTONYMS: abandoned, debauched, vicious, malformed, rehabilitated, bewitched,
(n) pleasure, joy, euphoria, bliss, wicked, degenerate, evil, perverse, misshapen, distorted, reformed.
happiness, ecstasy, peace, content. perverted. ANTONYMS: (adj) good, unprecedented: (adj) singular,
brooks: (n) streams, Brookes, van virtuous, just, chaste, noble, pure, unexampled, extraordinary, unique,
Wyck Brooks. righteous, upright, ethical, innocent. new, undescribed, remarkable,
daylight: (n) dawn, daybreak, light, pictured: (adj) envisioned, portrayed, exceptional, almost unheard of,
morning, sunrise, clearance, sunup, graphic, delineate, delineated, uncommon, unheard-of.
daytime, broad daylight, first light, impictured, unreal, visualised, ANTONYMS: (adj) usual,
afternoon. ANTONYMS: (n) night, visualized, impressed. unexceptional, unremarkable.
sunset, dusk, dark, sundown, profaned: (adj) defiled, impure, whereat: (adv) upon which.
morning, was pressing its iron noose closer about that frail and graceful neck.
This thought caused the perspiration to start from every pore.%
There was another moment when, while laughing diabolically at himself, he
represented to himself la Esmeralda as he had seen her on that first day, lively,
careless, joyous, gayly attired, dancing, winged, harmonious, and la Esmeralda
of the last day, in her scanty shift, with a rope about her neck, mounting slowly
with her bare feet, the angular ladder of the gallows; he figured to himself this
double picture in such a manner .that he gave vent to a terrible cry.
While this hurricane of despair overturned, broke, tore up, bent, uprooted
everything in his soul, he gazed at nature around him. At his feet, some
chickens were searching the thickets and pecking, enamelled beetles ran about
in the sun; overhead, some groups of dappled gray clouds were floating across
the blue sky; on the horizon, the spire of the Abbey Saint-Victor pierced the ridge
of the hill with its slate obelisk; and the miller of the Copeaue hillock was
whistling as he watched the laborious wings of his mill turning. All this active,
organized, tranquil life, recurring around him under a thousand forms, hurt him.
He resumed his flight.
He sped thus across the fields until evening. This flight from nature, life,
himself, man, God, everything, lasted all day long. Sometimes he flung himself
face downward on the, earth, and tore up the young blades of wheat with his
nails. Sometimes he halted in the deserted street of a village, and his thoughts
were so intolerable that he grasped his head in both hands and tried to tear it
from his shoulders in order to dash it upon the pavement.
Towards the hour of sunset, he examined himself again, and found himself
nearly mad. The tempest which had raged within him ever since the instant
when he had lost the hope and the will to save the gypsy,-- that tempest had not
left in his conscience a single healthy idea, a single thought which maintained its
upright position. His reason lay there almost entirely destroyed. There
remained but two distinct images in his mind, la Esmeralda and the gallows; all
the rest was blank. Those two images united, presented to him a frightful group;
and the more he concentrated what attention and thought was left to him, the
Thesaurus
beetles: (n) Coleoptera. infernally, satanically, wickedly, recurring: (adj) frequent, intermittent,
chickens: (n) Galliformes, order hellishly, demonically, deucedly, cyclic, periodic, periodical, repeated,
Galliformes. unholy, atrociously, devilish, repetitive, customary, accustomed,
clouds: (n) exhaust, fumes, gas, smoke, brutally. memorable, chronic. ANTONYMS:
vapors. obelisk: (n) dagger, monument, (adj) irregular, intermittent,
dappled: (adj) speckled, motley, monolith, pinnacle, minaret, graphic spasmodic, unusual, rare, occasional.
flecked, dapple, freckled, spotty, symbol; (adj, n) column, pillar; (adj) scanty: (adj) insufficient, few,
spotted, dotted, multicolored, spire, steeple, turret. inadequate, bare, deficient, poor,
brindled, brindle. ANTONYMS: (adj) overturned: (adj) upturned, upside narrow, scant, light; (adj, v) spare,
sunny, spotless, monochrome, down, inverted, reversed, wrong way lean. ANTONYMS: (adj) generous,
uniform. up, confused, broken, wrong side up, abundant, ample, strong.
diabolically: (adv) fiendishly, topsy-turvy, disturbed, disquieted. sped: (v) done for.
Victor Hugo 439
more he beheld them grow, in accordance with a fantastic progression, the one
in grace, in charm, in beauty, in light, the other in deformity and horror; so that
at last la Esmeralda appeared to him like a star, the gibbet like an enormous,
fleshless arm.%
One remarkable fact is, that during the whole of this torture, the idea of dying
did not seriously occur to him. The wretch was made so. He clung to life.
Perhaps he really saw hell beyond it.
Meanwhile, the day continued to decline. The living being which still existed
in him reflected vaguely on retracing its steps. He believed himself to be far
away from Paris; on taking his bearings, he perceived that he had only circled the
enclosure of the University. The spire of Saint-Sulpice, and the three lofty
needles of Saint Germain-des-Prés, rose above the horizon on his right. He
turned his steps in that direction. When he heard the brisk challenge of the men-
at-arms of the abbey, around the crenelated, circumscribing wall of Saint-
Germain, he turned aside, took a path which presented itself between the abbey
and the lazar-house of the bourg, and at the expiration of a few minutes found
himself on the verge of the Pré-aux-Clercs. This meadow was celebrated by
reason of the brawls which went on there night and day; it was the hydra of the
poor monks of Saint-Germain: quod mouachis Sancti-Germaini pratensis hydra fuit,
clericis nova semper dissidiorum capita suscitantibus. The archdeacon was afraid of
meeting some one there; he feared every human countenance; he had just
avoided the University and the Bourg Saint-Germain; he wished to re-enter the
streets as late as possible. He skirted the Pré-aux-Clercs, took the deserted path
which separated it from the Dieu-Neuf, and at last reached the water's edge.
There Dom Claude found a boatman, who, for a few farthings in Parisian
coinage, rowed him up the Seine as far as the point of the city, and landed him
on that tongue of abandoned land where the reader has already beheld Gringoire
dreaming, and which was prolonged beyond the king's gardens, parallel to the
Ile du Passeur-aux-Vaches.
The monotonous rocking of the boat and the ripple of the water had, in some
sort, quieted the unhappy Claude. When the boatman had taken his departure,
Thesaurus
brisk: (adj) bracing, agile, alive, bright, battlemented, castled, crenelate, quod: (n) bilboes, Bastille, prison,
lively, acute, alert, energetic, indented, fancy, embattled, stocks.
sprightly; (adj, v) quick, smart. crenellate, cleft, fancier. ripple: (v) bubble, murmur, gurgle,
ANTONYMS: (adj) soporific, meadow: (n) hayfield, lea, mead, billow, surge, burble, cockle; (n, v)
sluggish, hesitant, tedious, grassland, plain, lawn, sward, wave, swell, riffle, purl.
temperate, inactive, civil, torpid, grazing land, greensward, pasturage, rocking: (adj) vivacious, merry,
slack, serious, lethargic. paddock. spirited, spry, festive; (n) metalling,
coinage: (n) currency, money, progression: (n) advance, headway, convulsion.
mintage, coins, specie, invention, chain, course, train, development, verge: (n, v) edge, skirt; (n) boundary,
coining, word, contrivance, series, sequence; (n, v) improvement, brink, margin, limit, rim, bound,
fabrication, formation. advancement, furtherance. brim, side; (v) bend. ANTONYMS:
crenelated: (adj) crenellated, ANTONYM: (n) decay. (n) end, middle; (v) retreat.
he remained standing stupidly on the strand, staring straight before him and
perceiving objects only through magnifying oscillations which rendered
everything a sort of phantasmagoria to him. The fatigue of a great grief not
infrequently produces this effect on the mind.%
The sun had set behind the lofty Tour-de-Nesle. It was the twilight hour.
The sky was white, the water of the river was white. Between these two white
expanses, the left bank of the Seine, on which his eyes were fixed, projected its
gloomy mass and, rendered ever thinner and thinner by perspective, it plunged
into the gloom of the horizon like a black spire. It was loaded with houses, of
which only the obscure outline could be distinguished, sharply brought out in
shadows against the light background of the sky and the water. Here and there
windows began to gleam, like the holes in a brazier. That immense black obelisk
thus isolated between the two white expanses of the sky and the river, which was
very broad at this point, produced upon Dom Claude a singular effect,
comparable to that which would be experienced by a man who, reclining on his
back at the foot of the tower of Strasburg, should gaze at the enormous spire
plunging into the shadows of the twilight above his head. Only, in this case, it
was Claude who was erect and the obelisk which was lying down; but, as the
river, reflecting the sky, prolonged the abyss below him, the immense
promontory seemed to be as boldly launched into space as any cathedral spire;
and the impression was the same. This impression had even one stronger and
more profound point about it, that it was indeed the tower of Strasbourg, but the
tower of Strasbourg two leagues in height; something unheard of, gigantic,
immeasurable; an edifice such as no human eye has ever seen; a tower of Babel.
The chimneys of the houses, the battlements of the walls, the faceted gables of
the roofs, the spire of the Augustines, the tower of Nesle, all these projections
which broke the profile of the colossal obelisk added to the illusion by displaying
in eccentric fashion to the eye the indentations of a luxuriant and fantastic
sculpture.
Claude, in the state of hallucination in which he found himself, believed that
he saw, that he saw with his actual eyes, the bell tower of hell; the thousand
Thesaurus
immeasurable: (adj) endless, immense, not often, intermittently. pitching, headfirst; (adj) precipitous,
infinite, huge, enormous, illimitable, ANTONYMS: (adv) often, regularly, low, plummeting; (n) descent.
unmeasurable, incalculable, commonly. promontory: (n) cape, headland, mull,
inestimable, innumerable, objects: (n) things, stuff, matter, point, ness, head, bluff, foreland,
interminable. ANTONYMS: (adj) material, substance. projection, peninsula, cliff.
limited, minute, finite, shallow, phantasmagoria: (n) hallucination, reclining: (adj, v) leaning; (adj)
slight, negligible, tiny, few, minor, representation, light show, dissolving recumbent, decumbent, accumbent,
small. views, optical illusion, lying, lying down, obligatory, idle,
infrequently: (adv) uncommonly, phantasmagory, mental prone, prostrate; (n) relaxation.
occasionally, sparsely, scarcely, representation, internal unheard: (adj) aspirated, atonic, deaf,
sporadically, unfrequently, representation. indistinct, involving surds, nonvocal,
unusually, from time to time, hardly, plunging: (adv) diving, headlong, radical, sharp, silent, surd, irrational.
Victor Hugo 441
lights scattered over the whole height of the terrible tower seemed to him so
many porches of the immense interior furnace; the voices and noises which
escaped from it seemed so many shrieks, so many death groans. Then he became
alarmed, he put his hands on his ears that he might no longer hear, turned his
back that he might no longer see, and fled from the frightful vision with hasty
strides.%
But the vision was in himself.
When he re-entered the streets, the passers-by elbowing each other by the
light of the shop-fronts, produced upon him the effect of a constant going and
coming of spectres about him. There were strange noises in his ears;
extraordinary fancies disturbed his brain. He saw neither houses, nor
pavements, nor chariots, nor men and women, but a chaos of indeterminate
objects whose edges melted into each other. At the corner of the Rue de la
Barillerie, there was a grocer's shop whose porch was garnished all about,
according to immemorial custom, with hoops of tin from which hung a circle of
wooden candles, which came in contact with each other in the wind, and rattled
like castanets. He thought he heard a cluster of skeletons at Montfauçon
clashing together in the gloom.
"Oh!" he muttered, "the night breeze dashes them against each other, and
mingles the noise of their chains with the rattle of their bones! Perhaps she is
there among them!"
In his state of frenzy, he knew not whither he was going. After a few strides
he found himself on the Pont Saint- Michel. There was a light in the window of a
ground-floor room; he approached. Through a cracked window he beheld a
mean chamber which recalled some confused memory to his mind. In that room,
badly lighted by a meagre lamp, there was a fresh, light-haired young man, with
a merry face, who amid loud bursts of laughter was embracing a very
audaciously attired young girl; and near the lamp sat an old crone spinning and
singing in a quavering voice. As the young man did not laugh constantly,
fragments of the old woman's ditty reached the priest; it was something
unintelligible yet frightful,
Thesaurus
cluster: (n, v) clump, bundle, huddle, cloud. ANTONYMS: (n) brightness, indeterminate: (adj) inconclusive,
group, crowd; (n) batch, happiness, cheerfulness, glee, ecstasy, indefinite, equivocal, vague, neutral,
agglomeration, gang, collection, tuft; joy, optimism, cheer. indistinct, obscure, undetermined,
(v) collect. ANTONYMS: (v) hasty: (adj) fast, abrupt, cursory, fleet, indecisive, inexact, adventitious.
dissemble, scatter; (n) individual. sudden, rash, impetuous, careless, ANTONYMS: (adj) quantifiable,
embracing: (n) embrace, hugging, speedy, hurried, quick. ANTONYMS: definite, determinate, specific, exact,
kissing, taking on, implementation, (adj) deliberate, considered, leisurely, certain, strong.
espousal, clutches; (adj) twining, sensible, gradual, thorough, cautious, lights: (n) illumination, burn, lung,
osculant, grasping, close. careful, roundabout, prudent, spacing material.
gloom: (n) desolation, dark, darkness, patient. quavering: (adj) trembling, tremulous,
blackness, depression, dimness, dusk, hoops: (n) basketball game, earrings, unsteady, shaky, shivering, shaking,
dreariness, despair, dejection; (n, v) studs, jewelry, basketball. decrepit, doddery, doddering.
"Grève, aboie, Grève, grouille!

File, file, ma quenouille,
File sa corde au bourreau,
Qui siffle dans le preau,
Grève, aboie, Grève, grouille!
"La belle corde de chanvre!

Semez d'Issy jusqu'á Vanvre
Du chanvre et non pas du ble.%
Le voleur n'a pas vole
La belle corde de chanvre.
"Grève, grouille, Grève, aboie!

Pour voir la fille de joie,
Prendre au gibet chassieux,
Les fenêtres sont des yeux.
Grève, grouille, Grève, aboie!"
Thereupon the young man laughed and caressed the wench. The crone was la
Falourdel; the girl was a courtesan; the young man was his brother Jehan.
He continued to gaze. That spectacle was as good as any other.
He saw Jehan go to a window at the end of the room, open it, cast a glance on
the quay, where in the distance blazed a thousand lighted casements, and he
heard him say as he closed the sash,
"'Pon my soul! How dark it is; the people are lighting their candles, and the
good God his stars."
Then Jehan came back to the hag, smashed a bottle standing on the table,
exclaiming,
Thesaurus
belle: (n) beauty, fille, girl, miss, fille: (n) maiden, miss, lassie, lass, cummerbund, baldric, framing,
missy. wench, girl, belle, chick, doll, dame, waistband, framework, frame, fillet,
bottle: (n) container, jug, flask, cruet, maid. fascia.
vial, pot, phial, jar, decanter, carboy; lighting: (n) light, kindling, ignition, smashed: (adj) drunk, inebriated,
(n, v) can. firing, inflammation, burning, intoxicated, broken, sloshed,
courtesan: (n) mistress, paramour, combustion, setup, the illumination plastered, crushed, tipsy, blotto,
prostitute, concubine, advoutress, supplied by lights, illume, illuminate. besotted, tight.
fille de joie, punk, fancy woman, pour: (v) gush, shed, decant, scatter, vole: (n) woodrat, pine mouse,
harlot, strumpet, amorosa. stream, flow, pelt, discharge, teem, grasshopper mouse, meadow mouse,
exclaiming: (n) deuce, Dickens, infuse; (n, v) overflow. ANTONYMS: fieldmouse, phenacomys, redback
ejaculation, exclaim, devil, (v) drizzle, trickle. vole, pine vole, prairie vole, meadow
interjection, ecphonesis. sash: (n) girdle, cincture, band, vole.
Victor Hugo 443
"Already empty, cor-boeuf! and I have no more money! Isabeau, my dear, I

shall not be satisfied with Jupiter until he has changed your two white nipples
into two black bottles, where I may suck wine of Beaune day and night."
This fine pleasantry made the courtesan laugh, and Jehan left the room.%
Dom Claude had barely time to fling himself on the ground in order that he
might not be met, stared in the face and recognized by his brother. Luckily, the
street was dark, and the scholar was tipsy. Nevertheless, he caught sight of the
archdeacon prone upon the earth in the mud.
"Oh! oh!" said he; "here's a fellow who has been leading a jolly life, to-day."
He stirred up Dom Claude with his foot, and the latter held his breath.
"Dead drunk," resumed Jehan. "Come, he's full. A regular leech detached
from a hogshead. He's bald," he added, bending down, "'tis an old man!
Fortunate senex!"
Then Dom Claude heard him retreat, saying,
"'Tis all the same, reason is a fine thing, and my brother the archdeacon is
very happy in that he is wise and has money."
Then the archdeacon rose to his feet, and ran without halting, towards Notre-
Dame, whose enormous towers he beheld rising above the houses through the
gloom.
At the instant when he arrived, panting, on the Place du Parvis, he shrank
back and dared not raise his eyes to the fatal edifice.
"Oh!" he said, in a low voice, "is it really true that such a thing took place
here, to-day, this very morning?"
Still, he ventured to glance at the church. The front was sombre; the sky
behind was glittering with stars. The crescent of the moon, in her flight upward
from the horizon, had paused at the moment, on the summit of the light hand
tower, and seemed to have perched itself, like a luminous bird, on the edge of the
balustrade, cut out in black trefoils.
Thesaurus
arrived: (adv) here, at home; (adj) pleasantry: (n) joke, wit, jocularity, ANTONYMS: (n) raid, development,
accepted. jest, fancy, waggery, drollery, esprit, extension, arrival, company; (v)
crescent: (n) circus, carve, arch, arcade, banter, sport, jocosity. progress, remain.
bow, peristyle, lunule; (adj) prone: (adj) liable, apt, inclined, shrank: (v) minify.
semilunar, falcate; (adj, n) convex, disposed, subject, flat, predisposed, tipsy: (adj) tight, intoxicated, soused,
concave. ANTONYMS: (adj) likely, prostrate, procumbent, blotto, inebriated, fuddled, taut,
uncoiled, straight, unbent, unbowed. susceptible. ANTONYMS: (adj) stringent, loaded, besotted, close.
jolly: (adj) gay, cheerful, happy, upright, immune, resistant, upward: (adv) upwards, upwardly,
festive, genial, bright, cheery, merry, unwilling, impervious, disinclined. aloft; (adj) overhead, rising, upper,
jocund; (v) chaff; (adv) lively. retreat: (v) retire, withdraw, depart; (n) increasing, open, vertical, mounting,
ANTONYMS: (adj) gloomy, refuge, departure, asylum, den, lair, upright. ANTONYMS: (adj)
miserable, serious. retirement; (n, v) resort, return. descending, downward; (adv) down.
The cloister door was shut; but the archdeacon always carried with him the
key of the tower in which his laboratory was situated. He made use of it to enter
the church.%
In the church he found the gloom and silence of a cavern. By the deep
shadows which fell in broad sheets from all directions, he recognized the fact
that the hangings for the ceremony of the morning had not yet been removed.
The great silver cross shone from the depths of the gloom, powdered with some
sparkling points, like the milky way of that sepulchral night. The long windows
of the choir showed the upper extremities of their arches above the black
draperies, and their painted panes, traversed by a ray of moonlight had no
longer any hues but the doubtful colors of night, a sort of violet, white and blue,
whose tint is found only on the faces of the dead. The archdeacon, on perceiving
these wan spots all around the choir, thought he beheld the mitres of damned
bishops. He shut his eyes, and when he opened them again, he thought they
were a circle of pale visages gazing at him.
He started to flee across the church. Then it seemed to him that the church
also was shaking, moving, becoming endued with animation, that it was alive;
that each of the great columns was turning into an enormous paw, which was
beating the earth with its big stone spatula, and that the gigantic cathedral was
no longer anything but a sort of prodigious elephant, which was breathing and
marching with its pillars for feet, its two towers for trunks and the immense
black cloth for its housings.
This fever or madness had reached such a degree of intensity that the external
world was no longer anything more for the unhappy man than a sort of
Apocalypse,- visible, palpable, terrible.
For one moment, he was relieved. As he plunged into the side aisles, he
perceived a reddish light behind a cluster of pillars. He ran towards it as to a
star. It was the poor lamp which lighted the public breviary of Notre-Dame
night and day, beneath its iron grating. He flung himself eagerly upon the holy
book in the hope of finding some consolation, or some encouragement there.
The hook lay open at this passage of Job, over which his staring eye glanced,
Thesaurus
animation: (adj, n) life, vivacity; (n) aggravation. spots: (n) damp, drifter, floater,
liveliness, vitality, activity, spirit, milky: (adj) milk, cloudy, lacteal, floating policy, muscae volitantes,
exhilaration, dash, energy, buoyancy; white, muddy, pearly, milklike, Musca volitans.
(adj) alacrity. ANTONYMS: (n) opalescent, lacteous, tender, mild. tint: (n, v) color, tinge, hue, stain, dye,
lethargy, lifelessness, inertness, powdered: (adj) powdery, fine, tinct; (n) shade, tincture, tone, cast;
inertia, sluggishness, boredom. crushed, milled, ground, broken up, (v) paint. ANTONYMS: (n) white,
consolation: (n) comfort, relief, balm, finer, minced, pulverised; (n) pallor; (v) whiten, pale.
succor, ease, cheer, solacement, punctated, milk. trunks: (n) short pants, pants, luggage,
encouragement, sympathy, spatula: (n) palette knife, shovel, Jockey shorts, Jamaica shorts,
alleviation, express sympathy. trowel, thimble, watch glass, Bermuda shorts, bathing trunks,
ANTONYMS: (n) grief, sorrow, tablespoon, putty knife, dipper, bathing suit, costume, drawers,
distress, discouragement, filling knife, food turner, hand tool. swimming trunks.
Victor Hugo 445
"And a spirit passed before my face, and I heard a small voice, and the hair of
my flesh stood up."
On reading these gloomy words, he felt that which a blind man feels when he
feels himself pricked by the staff which he has picked up. His knees gave way
beneath him, and he sank upon the pavement, thinking of her who had died that
day. He felt so many monstrous vapors pass and discharge themselves in his
brain, that it seemed to him that his head had become one of the chimneys of
hell.%
It would appear that he remained a long time in this attitude, no longer
thinking, overwhelmed and passive beneath the hand of the demon. At length
some strength returned to him; it occurred to him to take refuge in his tower
beside his faithful Quasimodo. He rose; and, as he was afraid, he took the lamp
from the breviary to light his way. It was a sacrilege; but he had got beyond
heeding such a trifle now.
He slowly climbed the stairs of the towers, filled with a secret fright which
must have been communicated to the rare passers-by in the Place du Parvis by
the mysterious light of his lamp, mounting so late from loophole to loophole of
the bell tower.
All at once, he felt a freshness on his face, and found himself at the door of
the highest gallery. The air was cold; the sky was filled with hurrying clouds,
whose large, white flakes drifted one upon another like the breaking up of river
ice after the winter. The crescent of the moon, stranded in the midst of the
clouds, seemed a celestial vessel caught in the ice-cakes of the air.
He lowered his gaze, and contemplated for a moment, through the railing of
slender columns which unites the two towers, far away, through a gauze of mists
and smoke, the silent throng of the roofs of Paris, pointed, innumerable, crowded
and small like the waves of a tranquil sea on a summer night.
The moon cast a feeble ray, which imparted to earth and heaven an ashy hue.
At that moment the clock raised its shrill, cracked voice. Midnight rang out.
The priest thought of midday; twelve o'clock had come back again.
Thesaurus
ashy: (adj) wan, ashen, pale, sallow, impudence, insolence, newness, respectfulness, reverence,
pallid, grey, livid, gray, cadaverous, viridity, originality, crust, crispness. consecration.
pasty, white. ANTONYMS: (n) oldness, clutter, shrill: (adj) piercing, penetrating,
celestial: (adj) ethereal, divine, humidity, mustiness. strident, keen, shrewd; (v) shriek,
supernal, angelic, holy, sacred, lowered: (adj) lower, reduced, cheap, screech, scream, yell; (adj, v) high,
astronomical, unworldly, bated, humbled. ANTONYM: (adj) sharp. ANTONYMS: (adj) low, quiet,
superlunary, from on high; (n) raised. resonant.
heaven. ANTONYMS: (adj) sacrilege: (n) profanity, profanation, stranded: (adj, v) beached, wrecked;
mundane, secular, terrestrial, mortal. violation, curse, defilement, (adj) abandoned, marooned, isolated,
flakes: (n) dust. sacrilegiousness, impiety, vulgarity; shipwrecked, stuck; (v) devoted,
freshness: (adj) coolness; (n) (adj, n) blasphemy, desecration; (v) grounded; (n) graveled, nonplussed.
impertinence, gall, greenness, violate. ANTONYMS: (n) piety,
"Oh!" he said in a very low tone, "she must be cold now."

All at once, a gust of wind extinguished his lamp, and almost at the same
instant, he beheld a shade, a whiteness, a form, a woman, appear from the
opposite angle of the tower. He started. Beside this woman was a little goat,
which mingled its bleat with the last bleat of the clock.%
He had strength enough to look. It was she.
She was pale, she was gloomy. Her hair fell over her shoulders as in the
morning; but there was no longer a rope on her neck, her hands were no longer
bound; she was free, she was dead.
She was dressed in white and had a white veil on her head.
She came towards him, slowly, with her gaze fixed on the sky. The
supernatural goat followed her. He felt as though made of stone and too heavy
to flee. At every step which she took in advance, he took one backwards, and
that was all. In this way he retreated once more beneath the gloomy arch of the
stairway. He was chilled by the thought that she might enter there also; had she
done so, he would have died of terror.
She did arrive, in fact, in front of the door to the stairway, and paused there
for several minutes, stared intently into the darkness, but without appearing to
see the priest, and passed on. She seemed taller to him than when she had been
alive; he saw the moon through her white robe; he heard her breath.
When she had passed on, he began to descend the staircase again, with the
slowness which he had observed in the spectre, believing himself to be a spectre
too, haggard, with hair on end, his extinguished lamp still in his hand; and as he
descended the spiral steps, he distinctly heard in his ear a voice laughing and
repeating,
"A spirit passed before my face, and I heard a small voice, and the hair of my
flesh stood up."
Thesaurus
appearing: (adj) seeming, beseen, ANTONYMS: (adv) inaudibly, slowness: (n) dilatoriness, lethargy,
emergent, accomplished; (n) coming faintly, vaguely, silently, lateness, backwardness,
into court; (prep) liking; (adj, adv) imperceptibly, poorly. awkwardness, deliberation, dullness,
prima facie. instant: (adj, n) present; (adj) sluggishness, stupidity, indolence;
believing: (adj) faith, believe, faithful, immediate, prompt; (n) flash, minute, (adj, n) delay. ANTONYMS: (n) haste,
basic cognitive process, gullible, jiffy, point, second; (adj, v) exigent; quickness, rapidity, intelligence,
Catholic, religious, loyal, certain, (adj, n, v) pressing, urgent. cleverness, nimbleness, speediness,
Christian, credent. ANTONYMS: (n) age, eternity; (adj) promptness, punctuality, vigor.
distinctly: (adv) clearly, particularly, considered, delayed, slow. stairway: (n) ladder, stairs, flight, stair,
evidently, expressly, obviously, rope: (n, v) lasso, leash, tie, tape; (n) steps, flight of steps, companionway,
markedly, definitely, precisely, lariat, noose, hawser, line, string, roadway, backstairs, escalator,
manifestly, separately, decidedly. cord, thread. pathway.
Victor Hugo 447
CHAPTER II
HUNCHBACKED, ONE EYED, LAME
Every city during the Middle Ages, and every city in France down to the time
of Louis XII. had its places of asylum. These sanctuaries, in the midst of the
deluge of penal and barbarous jurisdictions which inundated the city, were a
species of islands which rose above the level of human justice. Every criminal
who landed there was safe. There were in every suburb almost as many places
of asylum as gallows. It was the abuse of impunity by the side of the abuse of
punishment; two bad things which strove to correct each other. The palaces of
the king, the hotels of the princes, and especially churches, possessed the right of
asylum. Sometimes a whole city which stood in need of being repeopled was
temporarily created a place of refuge. Louis XI. made all Paris a refuge in 1467.%
His foot once within the asylum, the criminal was sacred; but he must
beware of leaving it; one step outside the sanctuary, and he fell back into the
flood. The wheel, the gibbet, the strappado, kept good guard around the place of
refuge, and lay in watch incessantly for their prey, like sharks around a vessel.
Hence, condemned men were to be seen whose hair had grown white in a
cloister, on the steps of a palace, in the enclosure of an abbey, beneath the porch
of a church; in this manner the asylum was a prison as much as any other. It
sometimes happened that a solemn decree of parliament violated the asylum
Thesaurus
beware: (v) look out, caution, be parch, dry, dehydrate. strappado: (v) gantlet, fustigation,
careful, guard, pay attention, take impunity: (n) impune, come off, flagellation, estrapade, stick law,
care, watch out, mind, keep, care, freedom, immunity, permission, argumentum baculinum, bastinado,
careful. ANTONYMS: (v) risk, forgiveness. ANTONYM: (n) liability. rap on the knuckles.
disregard, invite. landed: (adj) land, territorial, allodial, suburb: (n) suburbia, neighborhood,
deluge: (adj, v) inundate; (n) predial. addition, community, satellite,
cataclysm, downpour, cloudburst, penal: (adj, n) punitive, corrective; (adj) environs, faubourg, outskirt, village,
torrent, debacle; (v) overrun, punishable, castigatory, punitory, place, commune.
overwhelm; (n, v) overflow, surge, illegal, disciplinary, penalizing. violated: (adj) profaned, seduced,
stream. ANTONYMS: (n) drought, sharks: (n) Elasmobranchii, rays, dishonored; (v) strained, disunited,
abatement, trickle, lack; (v) drain, Selachii, subclass Elasmobranchii, ruined financially, subjugated, rough,
capitulate, desiccate, surrender, subclass Selachii. not continuous, humbled, fractured.
and restored the condemned man to the executioner; but this was of rare
occurrence. Parliaments were afraid of the bishops, and when there was friction
between these two robes, the gown had but a poor chance against the cassock.
Sometimes, however, as in the affair of the assassins of Petit-Jean, the headsman
of Paris, and in that of Emery Rousseau, the murderer of Jean Valleret, justice
overleaped the church and passed on to the execution of its sentences; but unless
by virtue of a decree of Parliament, woe to him who violated a place of asylum
with armed force! The reader knows the manner of death of Robert de Clermont,
Marshal of France, and of Jean de Châlons, Marshal of Champagne; and yet the
question was only of a certain Perrin Marc, the clerk of a money-changer, a
miserable assassin; but the two marshals had broken the doors of St. Méry.
Therein lay the enormity.%
Such respect was cherished for places of refuge that, according to tradition,
animals even felt it at times. Aymoire relates that a stag, being chased by
Dagobert, having taken refuge near the tomb of Saint-Denis, the pack of hounds
stopped short and barked.
Churches generally had a small apartment prepared for the reception of
supplicants. In 1407, Nicolas Flamel caused to be built on the vaults of Saint-
Jacques de la Boucherie, a chamber which cost him four livres six sous, sixteen
farthings, parisis.
At Notre-Dame it was a tiny cell situated on the roof of the side aisle, beneath
the flying buttresses, precisely at the spot where the wife of the present janitor of
the towers has made for herself a garden, which is to the hanging gardens of
Babylon what a lettuce is to a palm-tree, what a porter's wife is to a Semiramis.
It was here that Quasimodo had deposited la Esmeralda, after his wild and
triumphant course. As long as that course lasted, the young girl had been unable
to recover her senses, half unconscious, half awake, no longer feeling anything,
except that she was mounting through the air, floating in it, flying in it, that
something was raising her above the earth. From time to time she heard the loud
laughter, the noisy voice of Quasimodo in her ear; she half opened her eyes; then
below her she confusedly beheld Paris checkered with its thousand roofs of slate
Thesaurus
aisle: (n) thoroughfare, path, nave, conflict, dissension, rubbing, clash; lettuce: (n) celtuce, folding money,
corridor, gangway, lane, route, (n, v) resistance. ANTONYMS: (n) cabbage, dough, cos, leaf lettuce,
runway, access, glade, vista. smoothness, agreement, concord, boodle, bread, kale, iceberg lettuce,
asylum: (n) shelter, sanctuary, haven, ease. Chicago.
retreat, home, madhouse, insane gown: (n) robe, clothing, cassock, murderer: (n) assassin, cutthroat,
asylum, institution, cover, harbor, vestment, wrapper, overclothes, killer, manslayer, murderess,
protection. outerwear, uniform, tunic, clothes; (v) executioner, thug, liquidator; (v)
decree: (n, v) command, award, rule, clothe. butcher; (n, v) slayer, terrorist.
act, will, dictate; (v) decide, enact, janitor: (n) caretaker, concierge, stag: (v) spy, peach, denounce; (n)
ordain; (n) edict, decision. gatekeeper, porter, warden, buck, dog, boar, cock, deer, roe, doe,
friction: (n) discord, attrition, rub, custodian, doorman, commissionaire, reynard.
dispute, abrasion, disagreement, guardian, beadle, janitress. therein: (adv) in this, in there.
Victor Hugo 449
and tiles, like a red and blue mosaic, above her head the frightful and joyous face
of Quasimodo. Then her eyelids drooped again; she thought that all was over,
that they had executed her during her swoon, and that the misshapen spirit
which had presided over her destiny, had laid hold of her and was bearing her
away. She dared not look at him, and she surrendered herself to her fate. 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. She saw that she was in Notre-Dame; she
remembered having been torn from the hands of the executioner; that Phoebus
was alive, that Phoebus loved her no longer; and as these two ideas, one of which
shed so much bitterness over the other, presented themselves simultaneously to
the poor condemned girl; she turned to Quasimodo, who was standing in front
of her, and who terrified her; she said to him,-- "Why have you saved me?"
He gazed at her with anxiety, as though seeking to divine what she was
saying to him. She repeated her question. Then he gave her a profoundly
sorrowful glance and fled. She was astonished.%
A few moments later he returned, bearing a package which he cast at her feet.
It was clothing which some charitable women had left on the threshold of the
church for her.
Then she dropped her eyes upon herself and saw that she was almost naked,
and blushed. Life had returned.
Quasimodo appeared to experience something of this modesty. He covered
his eyes with his large hand and retired once more, but slowly.
She made haste to dress herself. The robe was a white one with a white veil,-
- the garb of a novice of the Hôtel-Dien.
She had barely finished when she beheld Quasimodo returning. He carried a
basket under one arm and a mattress under the other. In the basket there was a
bottle, bread, and some provisions. He set the basket on the floor and said, "Eat!"
He spread the mattress on the flagging and said, "Sleep."
Thesaurus
cord: (n) band, bond, tie, twine, tape, apprentice, greenhorn, newcomer, mournful. ANTONYMS: (adj)
whipcord, thread, yarn, lace, rope, neophyte, amateur, freshman, cheerful, content, joyful, successful.
leash. novitiate, tyro, initiate. ANTONYMS: surrendered: (adj) given.
mattress: (n) bedding, bed, featherbed, (n) expert, veteran, teacher, trainer. swoon: (adj, n, v) faint; (adj, n)
pad, blinding, brush gully plug, profoundly: (adv) thoroughly, collapse; (n) fainting, syncope,
feather bed, futon, paillasse, pallet, extremely, intensely, exhaustively, prostration, deliquium; (v) conk,
palliasse. greatly, sincerely, gravely, deep, black out, pass out, die; (adj) puff.
mosaic: (n) tesserae, strigae, air photo heavily, weightily, very. threshold: (n) brink, beginning, outset,
mosaic, tessellation, medley; (adj) ANTONYMS: (adv) lightly, mildly. entrance, entry, doorsill, doorstep,
tessellated, heterogeneous, complex, sorrowful: (adj) melancholy, doleful, doorway, edge, vestibule, border.
variegated; (v) plaid, tesselated. sad, rueful, lugubrious, gloomy, ANTONYM: (n) end.
novice: (n) learner, beginner, dreary, grievous, piteous, unhappy, tiles: (n) floor covering, flooring.
It was his own repast, it was his own bed, which the bellringer had gone in
search of.%
The gypsy raised her eyes to thank him, but she could not articulate a word.
She dropped her head with a quiver of terror.
Then he said to her. -
"I frighten you. I am very ugly, am I not? Do not look at me; only listen to
me. During the day you will remain here; at night you can walk all over the
church. But do not leave the church either by day or by night. You would be
lost. They would kill you, and I should die."
She was touched and raised her head to answer him. He had disappeared.
She found herself alone once more, meditating upon the singular words of this
almost monstrous being, and struck by the sound of his voice, which was so
hoarse yet so gentle.
Then she examined her cell. It was a chamber about six feet square, with a
small window and a door on the slightly sloping plane of the roof formed of flat
stones. Many gutters with the figures of animals seemed to be bending down
around her, and stretching their necks in order to stare at her through the
window. Over the edge of her roof she perceived the tops of thousands of
chimneys which caused the smoke of all the fires in Paris to rise beneath her
eyes. A sad sight for the poor gypsy, a foundling, condemned to death, an
unhappy creature, without country, without family, without a hearthstone.
At the moment when the thought of her isolation thus appeared to her more
poignant than ever, she felt a bearded and hairy head glide between her hands,
upon her knees. She started (everything alarmed her now) and looked. It was
the poor goat, the agile Djali, which had made its escape after her, at the moment
when Quasimodo had put to flight Charmolue's brigade, and which had been
lavishing caresses on her feet for nearly an hour past, without being able to win a
glance. The gypsy covered him with kisses.
"Oh! Djali!" she said, "how I have forgotten thee! And so thou still thinkest of
me! Oh! thou art not an ingrate!"
Thesaurus
brigade: (n) army, division, legion, fuzzy, shaggy, fluffy. ANTONYMS: champion, elite, fabulous, leading,
battalion, corps, contingent, (adj) hairless, safe, tidy, sleek. outstanding, uppermost, superb,
organization, squadron, squad; (v) stare: (n, v) gaze, look; (v) gape, glare, superlative.
organize, aggroup. ANTONYMS: (n) peer, squint, goggle, see, outface; (n) ugly: (adj, adv) surly; (adj) nasty,
individual, one. regard, contemplation. ANTONYM: repulsive, frightful, forbidding,
frighten: (v) cow, alarm, daunt, terrify, (v) glance. disagreeable, hideous, gruesome,
appall, scare, affright, intimidate, stretching: (n) tension, stretch, evil, offensive, shocking.
terrorize, appal; (n, v) fright. expansion, workout, reach, ANTONYMS: (adj) attractive,
ANTONYMS: (v) comfort, reassure, amplification, stretchiness, flowing, ornamental, nice, lovely,
soothe, calm. enlargement; (adj) stretched, long; (v) pleasant, safe, kind, gentle,
hairy: (adj) hirsute, bushy, dangerous, extend. appealing, agreeable.
downy, woolly, bristly, fleecy, rough, tops: (n) apex, pinnacle, pick; (adj)
Victor Hugo 451
At the same time, as though an invisible hand had lifted the weight which
had repressed her tears in her heart for so long, she began to weep, and, in
proportion as her tears flowed, she felt all that was most acrid and bitter in her
grief depart with them.%
Evening came, she thought the night so beautiful that she made the circuit of
the elevated gallery which surrounds the church. It afforded her some relief, so
calm did the earth appear when viewed from that height.
Thesaurus
acrid: (adj, v) pungent; (adj) bitter, agreeable, gentle. joy, happiness, comfort, content,
acerbic, caustic, sour, sharp, acerb, calm: (adj, n, v) assuage, appease, lull; peace.
corrosive, hot, harsh, tart. (adj, v) cool, pacify, peaceful, easy, invisible: (adj) obscure, hidden,
ANTONYMS: (adj) mild, savory, steady; (adj, adv, n, v) still; (n, v) allay; inconspicuous, intangible, sightless,
palatable, nice, flattering, delicious, (v) mollify. ANTONYMS: (adj) concealed, impalpable, occult,
kind, complimentary, amicable. agitated, wild, stormy, nervous, indiscernible, inappreciable, unseen.
bitter: (adj, v) acrimonious, acrid; (adj) angry, scared, terrified, tense; (v) ANTONYMS: (adj) obvious,
sharp, acid, malicious, caustic, agitate, provoke; (adj, v) upset. conspicuous, noticeable, palpable.
virulent, sour, resentful, keen, grief: (adj, n, v) affliction; (n) dolor, repressed: (adj) inhibited, suppressed,
acerbic. ANTONYMS: (adj) mild, anguish, distress, agony, pain, pent-up, forgotten, subconscious,
charitable, hot, sugary, kind, wound, chagrin, concern; (n, v) inner, composed, reserved,
wonderful, warm, pleasant, nice, regret; (adj) sore. ANTONYMS: (n) unconscious.
Victor Hugo 453
CHAPTER III
DEAF
On the following morning, she perceived on awaking, that she had been
asleep. This singular thing astonished her. She had been so long unaccustomed
to sleep! A joyous ray of the rising sun entered through her window and
touched her face. At the same time with the sun, she beheld at that window an
object which frightened her, the unfortunate face of Quasimodo. She
involuntarily closed her eyes again, but in vain; she fancied that she still saw
through the rosy lids that gnome's mask, one-eyed and gap-toothed. Then,
while she still kept her eyes closed, she heard a rough voice saying, very gently,
"Be not afraid. I am your friend. I came to watch you sleep. It does not hurt
you if I come to see you sleep, does it? What difference does it make to you if I
am here when your eyes are closed! Now I am going. Stay, I have placed myself
behind the wall. You can open your eyes again."%
There was something more plaintive than these words, and that was the
accent in which they were uttered. The gypsy, much touched, opened her eyes.
He was, in fact, no longer at the window. She approached the opening, and
beheld the poor hunchback crouching in an angle of the wall, in a sad and
resigned attitude. She made an effort to surmount the repugnance with which
he inspired her. "Come," she said to him gently. From the movement of the
Thesaurus
accent: (v) emphasize, emphasise, reluctantly, accidentally, automaticly, nausea, revulsion, loathing,
punctuate, accentuate; (n) dialect, unwillingly. ANTONYMS: (adv) detestation, aversion, hate.
emphasis, idiom, importance, speech, voluntarily, consciously, willingly, ANTONYMS: (n) pleasantness, love,
articulation, pronunciation. purposely. attractiveness, adoration, liking.
ANTONYMS: (v) attenuate, lids: (n) lid. unaccustomed: (adj) new, strange,
downplay, hide, ignore, lessen, mask: (n, v) cover, veil, hide, conceal, unusual, inexperienced, unseasoned,
minimize, slight. disguise, screen, camouflage; (v) unacquainted, uncustomary, rare,
awaking: (n) waking, awakening. dissemble; (n) guise, blind, curtain. unfamiliar, unwonted; (adj, v)
involuntarily: (adv) unconsciously, ANTONYMS: (v) unmask, enhance, untrained. ANTONYMS: (adj)
unintentionally, inadvertently, reinforce, reveal, expose, amplify. familiar, normal, ready, usual,
automatically, forcedly, repugnance: (n) horror, hatred, prepared, knowledgeable,
mechanically, unthinkingly, antipathy, inconsistency, repulsion, customary.
gypsy's lips, Quasimodo thought that she was driving him away; then he rose
and retired limping, slowly, with drooping head, without even daring to raise to
the young girl his gaze full of despair. "Do come," she cried, but he continued to
retreat. Then she darted from her cell, ran to him, and grasped his arm. On
feeling her touch him, Quasimodo trembled in every limb. He raised his
suppliant eye, and seeing that she was leading him back to her quarters, his
whole face beamed with joy and tenderness. She tried to make him enter the cell;
but he persisted in remaining on the threshold. "No, no," said he; "the owl enters
not the nest of the lark."
Then she crouched down gracefully on her couch, with her goat asleep at her
feet. Both remained motionless for several moments, considering in silence, she
so much grace, he so much ugliness. Every moment she discovered some fresh
deformity in Quasimodo. Her glance travelled from his knock knees to his
humped back, from his humped back to his only eye. She could not comprehend
the existence of a being so awkwardly fashioned. Yet there was so much
sadness and so much gentleness spread over all this, that she began to become
reconciled to it.%
He was the first to break the silence. "So you were telling me to return?"
She made an affirmative sign of the head, and said, "Yes."
He understood the motion of the head. "Alas!" he said, as though hesitating
whether to finish, "I am-- I am deaf."
"Poor man!" exclaimed the Bohemian, with an expression of kindly pity.
He began to smile sadly.
"You think that that was all that I lacked, do you not? Yes, I am deaf, that is
the way I am made. 'Tis horrible, is it not? You are so beautiful!"
There lay in the accents of the wretched man so profound a consciousness of
his misery, that she had not the strength to say a word. Besides, he would not
have heard her. He went on,
"Never have I seen my ugliness as at the present moment. When I compare
myself to you, I feel a very great pity for myself, poor unhappy monster that I
Thesaurus
affirmative: (adj) positive, affirmatory, elegantly, usefully, urbanely, repose; (adj) recline.
assertive, ratifying, concurring; (adv) contentedly, coherently, calmly, fashioned: (adj) formed, featured,
yes; (n) affirmation, avowal, conveniently, agilely, expertly, fictitious, intentional, bent, wrought.
assenting; (adj, v) predicatory, amenably. hesitating: (adj) indecisive, irresolute,
declaratory. ANTONYMS: (adj) comprehend: (v) grasp, catch, see, undecided, doubtful, hesitate,
dissenting; (n) no. comprise, appreciate, feel, sense, reluctant, faltering, unwilling,
awkwardly: (adv) gawkily, ineptly, apperceive, read; (adj, v) understand; hesitancy, backward, hesitatingly.
ungracefully, embarrassingly, (n, v) embrace. ANTONYMS: (v) reconciled: (adj) consistent, resigned,
maladroitly, stiffly, gracelessly, mistake, misapprehend, exclude, serene, meet; (v) made friends,
inopportunely, bunglingly, misunderstand, misconceive. affriended. ANTONYM: (adj)
inelegantly, unwieldily. couch: (n) bed, sofa, settee, divan; (adj, unreconciled.
ANTONYMS: (adv) gracefully, v) lie; (v) express, put, frame, lower, travelled: (adj) cosmopolitan.
Victor Hugo 455
am! Tell me, I must look to you like a beast. You, you are a ray of sunshine, a
drop of dew, the song of a bird! I am something frightful, neither man nor
animal, I know not what, harder, more trampled under foot, and more
unshapely than a pebble stone!"
Then he began to laugh, and that laugh was the most heartbreaking thing in
the world. He continued,
"Yes, I am deaf; but you shall talk to me by gestures, by signs. I have a
master who talks with me in that way. And then, I shall very soon know your
wish from the movement of your lips, from your look."
"Well!" she interposed with a smile, "tell me why you saved me."
He watched her attentively while she was speaking.%
"I understand," he replied. "You ask me why I saved you. You have
forgotten a wretch who tried to abduct you one night, a wretch to whom you
rendered succor on the following day on their infamous pillory. A drop of water
and a little pity,-- that is more than I can repay with my life. You have forgotten
that wretch; but he remembers it."
She listened to him with profound tenderness. A tear swam in the eye of the
bellringer, but did not fall. He seemed to make it a sort of point of honor to
retain it.
"Listen," he resumed, when he was no longer afraid that the tear would
escape; "our towers here are very high, a man who should fall from them would
be dead before touching the pavement; when it shall please you to have me fall,
you will not have to utter even a word, a glance will suffice."
Then he rose. Unhappy as was the Bohemian, this eccentric being still
aroused some compassion in her. She made him a sign to remain.
"No, no," said he; "I must not remain too long. I am not at my ease. It is out
of pity that you do not turn away your eyes. I shall go to some place where I can
see you without your seeing me: it will be better so."
He drew from his pocket a little metal whistle.
Thesaurus
abduct: (v) kidnap, abduce, hijack, coldness, roughness, inhumanity. unfortunate, catastrophic.
ravish, pull, crimp, draw, force, steal, eccentric: (adj, n) odd; (adj) wacky, ANTONYMS: (adj) comforting,
take, seize. ANTONYMS: (v) release, bizarre, abnormal, crazy, strange, unemotional, happy, cheerful,
adduct, free, restore, return. outlandish, anomalous, cranky, heartwarming, joyous.
compassion: (adj, n) clemency, erratic; (n) character. ANTONYMS: saved: (adj) protected, economized,
kindness; (n) mercy, charity, (adj) normal, ordinary, conventional, rescued, blessed.
sympathy, commiseration, remorse, usual, concentric, common, sane, succor: (n, v) relief, support, comfort,
tenderness, forgiveness, feeling, dull, orthodox; (n) conformer, aid, assistance, succour, ease; (v)
grace. ANTONYMS: (n) indifference, traditionalist. assist, relieve; (n) ministration,
disregard, unconcern, severity, heartbreaking: (adj) poignant, tragic, consolation. ANTONYM: (n) distress.
nastiness, harshness, depressing, distressing, grievous, unshapely: (adj) unsightly, deformed,
incomprehension, malevolence, pathetic, deplorable, moving, pitiful, misshapen, baggy.
"Here," said he, "when you have need of me, when you wish me to come,
when you will not feel too ranch horror at the sight of me, use this whistle. I can
hear this sound."
He laid the whistle on the floor and fled.%
Thesaurus
feel: (v) experience, finger, handle, hark, learn, try, examine, listen; (adj) cattle ranch, cattle farm, Arado,
consider, find; (n, v) sense, sound; (n) heard. merestead, plantation, paste; (v) farm,
feeling, texture, atmosphere, air. horror: (n) abomination, abhorrence, raunch.
ANTONYMS: (v) observe, doubt, dismay, fear, fright, revulsion, alarm, whistle: (v) sing, twitter, hiss, warble,
question, mistrust, ignore, disregard, repulsion, anxiety; (adj, n) dread, tweet, cheep, chirp, wheeze; (n, v)
disbelieve, challenge. terror. ANTONYMS: (n) delight, cry; (n) whistling, tin whistle.
floor: (n, v) level; (n) layer, earth, base, attraction, proclivity, bravery, calm, wish: (adv, n, v) will; (n, v) want, hope,
bottom, soil, platform; (v) stun, confidence, security. need, inclination, longing, aspiration,
dump, deck; (adj, v) prostrate. laid: (adj) layed, lay, place, placed, put, aim; (v) like, choose; (n) pleasure.
ANTONYMS: (v) clarify; (n) ceiling. situated, arranged, determined, ANTONYMS: (n, v) dislike, hate; (n)
hear: (int, v) attend; (v) find out, dictated, hardened, ordered. hatred, coercion, disinclination,
discover, understand, apprehend, ranch: (n) estate, property, spread, aversion.
Victor Hugo 457
CHAPTER IV
EARTHENWARE AND CRYSTAL
Day followed day. Calm gradually returned to the soul of la Esmeralda.

Excess of grief, like excess of joy is a violent thing which lasts but a short time.
The heart of man cannot remain long in one extremity. The gypsy had suffered
so much, that nothing was left her but astonishment. With security, hope had
returned to her. She was outside the pale of society, outside the pale of life, but
she had a vague feeling that it might not be impossible to return to it. She was
like a dead person, who should hold in reserve the key to her tomb.%
She felt the terrible images which had so long persecuted her, gradually
departing. All the hideous phantoms, Pierrat Torterue, Jacques Charmolue, were
effaced from her mind, all, even the priest.
And then, Phoebus was alive; she was sure of it, she had seen him. To her the
fact of Phoebus being alive was everything. After the series of fatal shocks which
had overturned everything within her, she had found but one thing intact in her
soul, one sentiment,--her love for the captain. Love is like a tree; it sprouts forth
of itself, sends its roots out deeply through our whole being, and often continues
to flourish greenly over a heart in ruins.
Thesaurus
astonishment: (n) admiration, flourish: (n, v) display; (v) thrive, unripely, recently, youthfully,
wonder, wonderment, surprise, prosper, boast, wave, brag, wield, unsophisticatedly, lushly.
marvel, stupefaction, confusion, boom, grow; (adj, v) bloom; (adv, v) intact: (adj) full, entire, whole, integral,
consternation, awe, alarm, startle. shake. ANTONYMS: (v) decline, undamaged, perfect, untouched,
ANTONYMS: (n) calmness, belief, struggle, deteriorate, wilt, pine, fade, unbroken, uninjured, sound,
contempt. flounder, decrease, dwindle. thorough. ANTONYMS: (adj)
fatal: (adj) deadly, pestilent, lethal, forth: (adv) away, along, onward, damaged, hurt, injured, used,
disastrous, destructive, dangerous, ahead, before, on, off, on the high incomplete, marred.
deathly, fateful, murderous, critical; road, on the road, on the way, under persecuted: (adj) downtrodden,
(adj, v) mortal. ANTONYMS: (adj) way. aggrieved, laden, mistreated,
harmless, nourishing, healthful, greenly: (adv) youngly, verdantly, wronged.
benign, uncritical, mild. immaturely, rawly, freshly, naively, sprouts: (n) sprouting, Combes.
And the inexplicable point about it is that the more blind is this passion, the
more tenacious it is. It is never more solid than when it has no reason in it.%
La Esmeralda did not think of the captain without bitterness, no doubt. No
doubt it was terrible that he also should have been deceived; that he should have
believed that impossible thing, that he could have conceived of a stab dealt by
her who would have given a thousand lives for him. But, after all, she must not
be too angry with him for it; had she not confessed her crime? had she not
yielded, weak woman that she was, to torture? The fault was entirely hers. She
should have allowed her finger nails to be torn out rather than such a word to be
wrenched from her. In short, if she could but see Phoebus once more, for a single
minute, only one word would be required, one look, in order to undeceive him,
to bring him back. She did not doubt it. She was astonished also at many
singular things, at the accident of Phoebus's presence on the day of the penance,
at the young girl with whom he had been. She was his sister, no doubt. An
unreasonable explanation, but she contented herself with it, because she needed
to believe that Phoebus still loved her, and loved her alone. Had he not sworn it
to her? What more was needed, simple and credulous as she was? And then, in
this matter, were not appearances much more against her than against him?
Accordingly, she waited. She hoped.
Let us add that the church, that vast church, which surrounded her on every
side, which guarded her, which saved her, was itself a sovereign tranquillizer.
The solemn lines of that architecture, the religious attitude of all the objects
which surrounded the young girl, the serene and pious thoughts which
emanated, so to speak, from all the pores of that stone, acted upon her without
her being aware of it. The edifice had also sounds fraught with such benediction
and such majesty, that they soothed this ailing soul. 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
Thesaurus
benediction: (n, v) blessing; (n) grace, untrusting, shrewd, rational, smart, thunderous: (adj) earsplitting,
orison, thanks, communion, mistrustful. deafening, loud, booming, roaring,
doxology, hosanna, invocation, hives: (n) urticaria, rash, efflorescence, terrific, shrill, boisterous,
supplication, beatitude; (v) bless. eruption, urtication, skin complaint. unpropitious, turbulent, thriving.
ANTONYMS: (n) damning, inarticulate: (adj) unintelligible, silent, tranquillizer: (n) tranquilliser,
malediction, anathema. vague, muffled, incoherent, mute, sedative, antianxiety agent, ataractic,
credulous: (adj) gullible, unsuspecting, incomprehensible, unarticulate, ataractic drug, downer, hydroxyzine
simple, unsuspicious, unquestioning, speechless, guttural, fuzzy. hydrochloride, ataractic agent,
green, trusting, unwary, innocent, ANTONYMS: (adj) articulate, ataraxic, ataraxic drug,
believing, illogical. ANTONYMS: eloquent, fluent, distinct, talkative. benzodiazepine.
(adj) suspicious, wary, disbelieving, pores: (n) voids. undeceive: (v) unbeguile, unbefool,
suspecting, skeptical, cynical, soothed: (adj) composed. disabuse, inform.
Victor Hugo 459
that of one bell, dulled her memory, her imagination, her grief. The bells, in
particular, lulled her. It was something like a powerful magnetism which those
vast instruments shed over her in great waves.%
Thus every sunrise found her more calm, breathing better, less pale. In
proportion as her inward wounds closed, her grace and beauty blossomed once
more on her countenance, but more thoughtful, more reposeful. Her former
character also returned to her, somewhat even of her gayety, her pretty pout, her
love for her goat, her love for singing, her modesty. She took care to dress herself
in the morning in the corner of her cell for fear some inhabitants of the
neighboring attics might see her through the window.
When the thought of Phoebus left her time, the gypsy sometimes thought of
Quasimodo. He was the sole bond, the sole connection, the sole communication
which remained to her with men, with the living. Unfortunate girl! she was
more outside the world than Quasimodo. She understood not in the least the
strange friend whom chance had given her. She often reproached herself for not
feeling a gratitude which should close her eyes, but decidedly, she could not
accustom herself to the poor bellringer. He was too ugly.
She had left the whistle which he had given her lying on the ground. This
did not prevent Quasimodo from making his appearance from time to time
during the first few days. She did her best not to turn aside with too much
repugnance when he came to bring her her basket of provisions or her jug of
water, but he always perceived the slightest movement of this sort, and then he
withdrew sadly.
Once he came at the moment when she was caressing Djali. He stood
pensively for several minutes before this graceful group of the goat and the
gypsy; at last he said, shaking his heavy and ill-formed head,
"My misfortune is that I still resemble a man too much. I should like to be
wholly a beast like that goat."
She gazed at him in amazement.
He replied to the glance,
Thesaurus
dulled: (adj) dull, blunted, benumbed, glamour, magic, magnet, pull; (adj) daylight, aurora, first light,
duller, blunt, uninterested, rounded, gravity. ANTONYMS: (n) dayspring, twilight, dawning, break
jaded, grayed, colorless, deadened. repulsiveness, ugliness. of day, crack of dawn. ANTONYMS:
gratitude: (n) appreciation, thanks, pensively: (adv) thoughtfully, (n) sunset, sundown, nightfall.
thank, acknowledgement, reflectively, wistfully, thoughtful: (adj, v) serious, solemn,
acknowledgment, appreciativeness, contemplatively, sadly, ponderingly, grave; (adj) kind, careful, pensive,
feeling, appreciate, grateful, musingly, mournfully, abstractedly, heedful, attentive, discreet, sensible,
thanksgiving, kindness. dreamily, broodingly. ANTONYMS: courteous. ANTONYMS: (adj)
ANTONYMS: (n) ingratitude, (adv) rashly, unthinkingly, alertly. thoughtless, careless, heedless,
ungratefulness. reposeful: (adj) restful, relaxing, calm, uncaring, unkind, tactless,
magnetism: (n) attraction, charisma, quieter. superficial, stupid, negligent, idiotic,
charm, allure, magnetics, appeal, sunrise: (n) dawn, sunup, daybreak, unthinking.
"Oh! I well know why," and he went away.%

On another occasion he presented himself at the door of the cell (which he
never entered) at the moment when la Esmeralda was singing an old Spanish
ballad, the words of which she did not understand, but which had lingered in
her ear because the gypsy women had lulled her to sleep with it when she was a
little child. At the sight of that villanous form which made its appearance so
abruptly in the middle of her song, the young girl paused with an involuntary
gesture of alarm. The unhappy bellringer fell upon his knees on the threshold,
and clasped his large, misshapen hands with a suppliant air. "Oh!" he said,
sorrowfully, "continue, I implore you, and do not drive me away." She did not
wish to pain him, and resumed her lay, trembling all over. By degrees, however,
her terror disappeared, and she yielded herself wholly to the slow and
melancholy air which she was singing. He remained on his knees with hands
clasped, as in prayer, attentive, hardly breathing, his gaze riveted upon the
gypsy's brilliant eyes.
On another occasion, he came to her with an awkward and timid air.
"Listen," he said, with an effort; "I have something to say to you." She made him
a sign that she was listening. Then he began to sigh, half opened his lips,
appeared for a moment to be on the point of speaking, then he looked at her
again, shook his head, and withdrew slowly, with his brow in his hand, leaving
the gypsy stupefied. Among the grotesque personages sculptured on the wall,
there was one to whom he was particularly attached, and with which he often
seemed to exchange fraternal glances. Once the gypsy heard him saying to it,
"Oh! why am not I of stone, like you!"
At last, one morning, la Esmeralda had advanced to the edge of the roof, and
was looking into the Place over the pointed roof of Saint-Jean le Rond.
Quasimodo was standing behind her. He had placed himself in that position in
order to spare the young girl, as far as possible, the displeasure of seeing him.
All at once the gypsy started, a tear and a flash of joy gleamed simultaneously in
her eyes, she knelt on the brink of the roof and extended her arms towards the
Place with anguish, exclaiming: "Phoebus! come! come! a word, a single word in
Thesaurus
awkward: (adj) inconvenient, clumsy, respiratory, alive, above ground; (v) coincidently, coincidentally,
embarrassing, uncomfortable, breathe, respire; (n) respiration, headlong.
ungainly, untoward, crude, inept, instant, moment. ANTONYMS: (adj) sorrowfully: (adv) dolefully,
sticky, left-handed, heavy. inanimate, breathless, dead. mournfully, gloomily, woefully,
ANTONYMS: (adj) graceful, easy, implore: (v) beg, beseech, supplicate, unhappily, sorrily, ruefully,
adroit, manageable, straightforward, ask, conjure, crave, pray, importune, dejectedly, grievously, forlornly,
simple, dexterous, rotund, appeal, plead, solicit. ANTONYMS: contritely. ANTONYMS: (adv)
convenient, helpful, skillful. (v) demand, grant, reject. happily, unrepentantly, joyfully,
ballad: (n) song, folk song, carol, simultaneously: (adv) at the same cheerfully.
poem, ballade, recitative, solfeggio, time, contemporaneously, started: (adv) happening, in progress,
pastoral, recitativo, ditty, bravura. synchronously, all at once, directly, ongoing; (v) stert, leaped.
breathing: (adj) animate, live, living, meanwhile, meantime, together, yielded: (v) yold, yolden.
Victor Hugo 461
the name of heaven! Phoebus! Phoebus!" Her voice, her face, her gesture, her
whole person bore the heartrending expression of a shipwrecked man who is
making a signal of distress to the joyous vessel which is passing afar off in a ray
of sunlight on the horizon.%
Quasimodo leaned over the Place, and saw that the object of this tender and
agonizing prayer was a young man, a captain, a handsome cavalier all glittering
with arms and decorations, prancing across the end of the Place, and saluting
with his plume a beautiful lady who was smiling at him from her balcony.
However, the officer did not hear the unhappy girl calling him; he was too far
away.
But the poor deaf man heard. A profound sigh heaved his breast; he turned
round; his heart was swollen with all the tears which he was swallowing; his
convulsively-clenched fists struck against his head, and when he withdrew them
there was a bunch of red hair in each hand.
The gypsy paid no heed to him. He said in a low voice as he gnashed his
teeth,
"Damnation! That is what one should be like! 'Tis only necessary to be
handsome on the outside!"
Meanwhile, she remained kneeling, and cried with extraordinary agitation,-
- "Oh! there he is alighting from his horse! He is about to enter that house!--
Phoebus!-- He does not hear me! Phoebus!-- How wicked that woman is to
speak to him at the same time with me! Phoebus! Phoebus!"
The deaf man gazed at her. He understood this pantomime. The poor
bellringer's eye filled with tears, but he let none fall. All at once he pulled her
gently by the border of her sleeve. She turned round. He had assumed a
tranquil air; he said to her,
"Would you like to have me bring him to you?"
She uttered a cry of joy.
"Oh! go! hasten! run! quick! that captain! that captain! bring him to me! I will
love you for it!"
Thesaurus
agonizing: (adj, v) excruciating; (adj) decorations: (n) flags, badges, wristband, collar, socket, skin,
painful, harrowing, poignant, streamers, bunting, insignia, sheath; (v) plexus, skein.
grievous, agonising, torturous, streamer. swallowing: (adj) absorptive,
heartbreaking, sore, anguished, pantomime: (n, v) gesture; (n) dumb unsuspecting, absorbent, absorbing;
aching. ANTONYMS: (adj) restful, show, mummery, acting, playacting, (n) consumption.
painless, enjoyable, easy, bearable, performing, playing, pantomimist; swollen: (adj, v) inflated, distended;
wonderful, unemotional. (v) mimic, roleplay, playact. (adj) bombastic, puffy, turgid, puffed,
bunch: (n, v) crowd, clump, pack, shipwrecked: (adj, v) stranded; (adj) high, egotistic, bulging; (v) blown;
bundle, group, huddle; (n) batch, lot, castaway, stuck, rejected, high and (adj, prep) pompous. ANTONYMS:
band, troop, gang. ANTONYMS: (v) dry; (v) wrecked, cast away, capsized, (adj) contracted, shrunken.
spread, separate, scatter; (n) grounded, foundered, swamped.
individual. sleeve: (n) arm, liner, cover, cuff,
She clasped his knees. He could not refrain from shaking his head sadly.%
"I will bring him to you," he said, in a weak voice. Then he turned his head
and plunged down the staircase with great strides, stifling with sobs.
When he reached the Place, he no longer saw anything except the handsome
horse hitched at the door of the Gondelaurier house; the captain had just entered
there.
He raised his eyes to the roof of the church. La Esmeralda was there in the
same spot, in the same attitude. He made her a sad sign with his head; then he
planted his back against one of the stone posts of the Gondelaurier porch,
determined to wait until the captain should come forth.
In the Gondelaurier house it was one of those gala days which precede a
wedding. Quasimodo beheld many people enter, but no one come out. He cast a
glance towards the roof from time to time; the gypsy did not stir any more than
himself. A groom came and unhitched the horse and led it to the stable of the
house.
The entire day passed thus, Quasimodo at his post, la Esmeralda on the roof,
Phoebus, no doubt, at the feet of Fleur-de-Lys.
At length night came, a moonless night, a dark night. Quasimodo fixed his
gaze in vain upon la Esmeralda; soon she was no more than a whiteness amid
the twilight; then nothing. All was effaced, all was black.
Quasimodo beheld the front windows from top to bottom of the
Gondelaurier mansion illuminated; he saw the other casements in the Place
lighted one by one, he also saw them extinguished to the very last, for he
remained the whole evening at his post. The officer did not come forth. When
the last passers-by had returned home, when the windows of all the other houses
were extinguished, Quasimodo was left entirely alone, entirely in the dark.
There were at that time no lamps in the square before Notre-Dame.
Meanwhile, the windows of the Gondelaurier mansion remained lighted,
even after midnight. Quasimodo, motionless and attentive, beheld a throng of
lively, dancing shadows pass athwart the many-colored painted panes. Had he
Thesaurus
dancing: (n) choreography, inactive, unexciting, lifeless, sweltering, stuffy, heavy, hot, torrid,
Terpsichore, saltation, break dancing, awkward, sad, gentle, tired, insipid, sticky; (n) crushing, quelling,
ceremonial dance, galloping, hoofing, subdued. suppression. ANTONYMS: (adj)
Pavan; (adj) morrice; (adv) adance; (v) precede: (v) lead, head, forego, fresh, airy, cool, temperate.
saltant. antecede, antedate, anticipate, stir: (adj, n, v) move, bustle; (v) rouse,
gala: (n) fete, celebration, party, introduce, forerun, pass, preface, go. arouse, affect, agitate, inspire; (adj, n)
festivity, carnival, feast, holiday; (adj) ANTONYMS: (v) succeed, postdate. movement; (n) commotion,
festive, gay, merry, festal. shaking: (adj, n) quivering, tremor, excitement, disturbance.
lively: (adj, adv) jolly, sprightly; (adj, v) jarring; (n) quiver, palpitation, quake; ANTONYMS: (v) dampen, retire,
active, cheerful; (adj) energetic, agile, (adj) quaking, shaky, flutter, stultify, bore, steady, stifle, suppress;
keen, busy, gay, fresh, jovial. unsteady, shivering. (n) quiet, peace; (n, v) calm.
ANTONYMS: (adj) lethargic, listless, stifling: (adj) close, oppressive,
Victor Hugo 463
not been deaf, he would have heard more and more distinctly, in proportion as
the noise of sleeping Paris died away, a sound of feasting, laughter, and music in
the Gondelaurier mansion.%
Towards one o'clock in the morning, the guests began to take their leave.
Quasimodo, shrouded in darkness watched them all pass out through the porch
illuminated with torches. None of them was the captain.
He was filled with sad thoughts; at times he looked upwards into the air, like
a person who is weary of waiting. Great black clouds, heavy, torn, split, hung
like crape hammocks beneath the starry dome of night. One would have
pronounced them spiders' webs of the vault of heaven.
In one of these moments he suddenly beheld the long window on the
balcony, whose stone balustrade projected above his head, open mysteriously.
The frail glass door gave passage to two persons, and closed noiselessly behind
them; it was a man and a woman.
It was not without difficulty that Quasimodo succeeded in recognizing in the
man the handsome captain, in the woman the young lady whom he had seen
welcome the officer in the morning from that very balcony. The place was
perfectly dark, and a double crimson curtain which had fallen across the door the
very moment it closed again, allowed no light to reach the balcony from the
apartment.
The young man and the young girl, so far as our deaf man could judge,
without hearing a single one of their words, appeared to abandon themselves to
a very tender tête-a-tête. The young girl seemed to have allowed the officer to
make a girdle for her of his arm, and gently repulsed a kiss.
Quasimodo looked on from below at this scene which was all the more
pleasing to witness because it was not meant to be seen. He contemplated with
bitterness that beauty, that happiness. After all, nature was not dumb in the poor
fellow, and his human sensibility, all maliciously contorted as it was, quivered
no less than any other. He thought of the miserable portion which Providence
had allotted to him; that woman and the pleasure of love, would pass forever
before his eyes, and that he should never do anything but behold the felicity of
Thesaurus
allotted: (adj) agreed, chosen, fixed, mysteriously: (adv) enigmatically, protrusive, sticking, sticking out,
selected. strangely, obscurely, secretly, likely, anticipated, expected.
crape: (n, v) curl; (n) French pancake, uncannily, mystically, darkly, sensibility: (adj, n, v) feeling, notion;
hotcake, flapcake, flapjack, puzzlingly, weirdly, abstrusely, (n, v) sensation, appreciation, sense;
griddlecake, pancake, battercake; occultly. ANTONYM: (adv) normally. (n) emotion, sensitivity,
(adj, v) crimp; (adj) deep mourning, noiselessly: (adv) silently, soundlessly, consciousness, perceptivity,
weeds. stilly, softly, mutely, delicately, awareness; (adj, n) sentiment.
felicity: (n) happiness, bliss, wordlessly, gently, speechlessly; (adj, ANTONYM: (n) insensitivity.
blessedness, beatitude, luck, adv) stealthily; (adj) noiseless. shrouded: (adj) hidden, covered,
felicitousness, joy, fortune, ecstasy, ANTONYMS: (adv) heavily, audibly. veiled, cloaked, secret, wearing a veil,
enjoyment, appropriateness. projected: (adj) proposed, jutting, unseen, ulterior, masked, enclosed,
ANTONYM: (n) infelicity. planned, deliberate, protruding, misty.
others. But that which rent his heart most in this sight, that which mingled
indignation with his anger, was the thought of what the gypsy would suffer
could she behold it. It is true that the night was very dark, that la Esmeralda, if
she had remained at her post (and he had no doubt of this), was very far away,
and that it was all that he himself could do to distinguish the lovers on the
balcony. This consoled him.%
Meanwhile, their conversation grew more and more animated. The young
lady appeared to be entreating the officer to ask nothing more of her. Of all this
Quasimodo could distinguish only the beautiful clasped hands, the smiles
mingled with tears, the young girl's glances directed to the stars, the eyes of the
captain lowered ardently upon her.
Fortunately, for the young girl was beginning to resist but feebly, the door of
the balcony suddenly opened once more and an old dame appeared; the beauty
seemed confused, the officer assumed an air of displeasure, and all three
withdrew.
A moment later, a horse was champing his bit under the porch, and the
brilliant officer, enveloped in his night cloak, passed rapidly before Quasimodo.
The bellringer allowed him to turn the corner of the street, then he ran after
him with his ape-like agility, shouting: "Hey there! captain!"
The captain halted.
"What wants this knave with me?" he said, catching sight through the gloom
of that hipshot form which ran limping after him.
Meanwhile, Quasimodo had caught up with him, and had boldly grasped his
horse's bridle: "Follow me, captain; there is one here who desires to speak with
you!
"Cornemahom!" grumbled Phoebus, "here's a villanous; ruffled bird which I
fancy I have seen somewhere. Holà master, will you let my horse's bridle alone?"
"Captain," replied the deaf man, "do you not ask me who it is?"
Thesaurus
bridle: (n, v) curb, check, control, confounded, deranged, incoherent, disastrously, unluckily,
snaffle, rein, leash; (n) arrest, reins, disjointed, indistinct. ANTONYMS: inauspiciously, negatively.
brake; (v) inhibit, contain. (adj) enlightened, orderly, alert, grew: (v) become, develop; (adj)
ANTONYMS: (v) unbridle, clearheaded, organized, oriented, grown.
unharness, release. precise, systematic, ordered, ruffled: (adj) rippled, frilly, frilled,
catching: (adj) communicable, unimpressed, methodical. upset, disordered, excited,
infectious, epidemic, gripping, fortunately: (adv) happily, disconcerted, decorated, tousled,
transferable, zymotic; (n) discovery, prosperously, propitiously, tangled, turbulent.
take, playing, uncovering, getting. fortuitously, providentially, shouting: (adj, n) yelling; (adj) crying,
ANTONYM: (adj) noncommunicable. successfully, auspiciously, howling, vociferous; (n) clamor,
confused: (adj) abashed, baffled, opportunely, felicitously, blessedly, calling, noise, cheering, vociferation,
befuddled, bemused, dizzy, chaotic, advantageously. ANTONYMS: (adv) tumult; (v) bawl.
Victor Hugo 465
"I tell you to release my horse," retorted Phoebus, impatiently. "What means
the knave by clinging to the bridle of my steed? Do you take my horse for a
gallows?"
Quasimodo, far from releasing the bridle, prepared to force him to retrace his
steps. Unable to comprehend the captain's resistance, he hastened to say to him,
"Come, captain, 'tis a woman who is waiting for you." He added with an
effort: "A woman who loves you."
"A rare rascal!" said the captain, "who thinks me obliged to go to all the
women who love me! or who say they do. And what if, by chance, she should
resemble you, you face of a screech-owl? Tell the woman who has sent you that I
am about to marry, and that she may go to the devil!"
"Listen," exclaimed Quasimodo, thinking to overcome his hesitation with a
word, "come, monseigneur! 'tis the gypsy whom you know!"
This word did, indeed, produce a great effect on Phoebus, but not of the kind
which the deaf man expected. It will be remembered that our gallant officer had
retired with Fleur- de-Lys several moments before Quasimodo had rescued the
condemned girl from the hands of Charmolue. Afterwards, in all his visits to the
Gondelaurier mansion he had taken care not to mention that woman, the
memory of whom was, after all, painful to him; and on her side, Fleur-de-Lys
had not deemed it politic to tell him that the gypsy was alive. Hence Phoebus
believed poor "Similar" to be dead, and that a month or two had elapsed since
her death. Let us add that for the last few moments the captain had been
reflecting on the profound darkness of the night, the supernatural ugliness, the
sepulchral voice of the strange messenger; that it was past midnight; that the
street was deserted, as on the evening when the surly monk had accosted him;
and that his horse snorted as it looked at Quasimodo.%
"The gypsy!" he exclaimed, almost frightened. "Look here, do you come from
the other world?"
And he laid his hand on the hilt of his dagger.
Thesaurus
clinging: (adj) adhering, sticky, hastily, avidly, uneasily, cute, chary. ANTONYMS: (adj)
adherent, devoted, adhering closely, enthusiastically, edgily, fidgetily, injudicious, unwise, impolitic,
affectionate, dependent, tenacious, restively. ANTONYMS: (adv) foolish.
osculant; (n) coherence. uncomplainingly, calmly, releasing: (adj) cathartic, purgative,
deserted: (adj) desert, solitary, empty, unenthusiastically, lightly. psychotherapeutic, evacuant,
lonely, isolated, forsaken, lonesome, messenger: (n, v) herald; (n) harbinger, emotionally purging, emotional; (n)
desolate, bleak, vacant; (adj, v) runner, emissary, bearer, acquittal.
forlorn. ANTONYMS: (adj) occupied, ambassador, precursor, courier, rescued: (adj) saved, protected.
packed, crowded, mobbed, carrier, apostle, errand. steed: (n) horse, mount, charger,
populated, populous, overcrowded. politic: (adj, v) tactful; (adj) discreet, knight, courser, warhorse, pony,
impatiently: (adv) petulantly, judicious, circumspect, shrewd, stallion, mare.
restlessly, keenly, intolerantly, prudent, suave, calculating, tricky,
"Quick, quick," said the deaf man, endeavoring to drag the horse along; "this
way!"
Phoebus dealt him a vigorous kick in the breast.%
Quasimodo's eye flashed. He made a motion to fling himself on the captain.
Then he drew himself up stiffly and said,
"Oh! how happy you are to have some one who loves you!"
He emphasized the words "some one," and loosing the horse's bridle,
"Begone!"
Phoebus spurred on in all haste, swearing. Quasimodo watched him
disappear in the shades of the street.
"Oh!" said the poor deaf man, in a very low voice; "to refuse that!"
He re-entered Notre-Dame, lighted his lamp and climbed to the tower again.
The gypsy was still in the same place, as he had supposed.
She flew to meet him as far off as she could see him. "Alone!" she cried,
clasping her beautiful hands sorrowfully.
"I could not find him," said Quasimodo coldly.
"You should have waited all night," she said angrily.
He saw her gesture of wrath, and understood the reproach.
"I will lie in wait for him better another time," he said, dropping his head.
"Begone!" she said to him.
He left her. She was displeased with him. He preferred to have her abuse
him rather than to have afflicted her. He had kept all the pain to himself.
From that day forth, the gypsy no longer saw him. He ceased to come to her
cell. At the most she occasionally caught a glimpse at the summit of the towers,
of the bellringer's face turned sadly to her. But as soon as she perceived him, he
disappeared.
Thesaurus
afflicted: (adj) miserable, distressed, sinking, dropping of the launcher strongly, formally, stringently,
stricken, pitiful, sorrowful, ill, stages, dispatching. clumsily, strictly. ANTONYM: (adv)
woeful, dejected, sorry; (v) afflict, emphasized: (adj) accentuated, loosely.
displeased. accented, stressed, emphatic. vigorous: (adj, n) robust, hardy,
drag: (v) attract, draw, lug, cart, heave, glimpse: (n, v) look, peek; (v) blink, powerful, brave; (adj) energetic,
tow; (n, v) pull, puff; (adv, v) trail; (n) see, notice, spy, spot, espy; (n) coup strenuous, mighty, hearty, athletic;
bother; (adj) dragging. ANTONYMS: d'oeil, view, peep. ANTONYMS: (n) (adj, v) lively, brisk. ANTONYMS:
(n) pleasure; (v) hasten, hurry, shove, scrutiny, observation, perusal; (v) (adj) feeble, weak, dull, inactive,
speed, rush, propel, fly. scrutinize, survey, Miss, study. impotent, enervated, unwell,
dropping: (adj) dropped, down, loosing: (adj) disengaging, detaching. uncommitted, unfit, weary, slow.
fatigued, plunging, plummeting, stiffly: (adv) firmly, stiff, awkwardly,
dipping; (n) sagging, reducing, unbendingly, difficultly, woodenly,
Victor Hugo 467
We must admit that she was not much grieved by this voluntary absence on
the part of the poor hunchback. At the bottom of her heart she was grateful to
him for it. Moreover, Quasimodo did not deceive himself on this point.%
She no longer saw him, but she felt the presence of a good genius about her.
Her provisions were replenished by an invisible hand during her slumbers. One
morning she found a cage of birds on her window. There was a piece of
sculpture above her window which frightened her. She had shown this more
than once in Quasimodo's presence. One morning, for all these things happened
at night, she no longer saw it, it had been broken. The person who had climbed
up to that carving must have risked his life.
Sometimes, in the evening, she heard a voice, concealed beneath the wind
screen of the bell tower, singing a sad, strange song, as though to lull her to
sleep. The lines were unrhymed, such as a deaf person can make.
Ne regarde pas la figure,

Jeune fille, regarde le coeur.
Le coeur d'un beau jeune homme est souvent difforme.
Il y a des coeurs ou l'amour ne se conserve pas.
Jeune fille, le sapin n'est pas beau,

N'est pas beau comme le peuplier,
Mais il garde son feuillage l'hiver.
Hélas! a quoi bon dire cela?

Ce qui n'est pas beau a tort d'être;
La beauté n'aime que la beauté,
Avril tourne le dos a Janvier.
La beauté est parfaite,

La beauté peut tout,
La beauté est la seule chose qui n'existe pàs a demi.
Thesaurus
beau: (adj, n) admirer, lover, follower; deceive: (v) cheat, circumvent, lull: (n, v) calm, quiet, hush, rest,
(n) swain, fop, dude, coxcomb, bamboozle, pretend, hoax, fool, pause; (adj, v) assuage, pacify,
boyfriend, chap, love, dandy. cozen, trick, beguile; (n, v) dupe; (n) tranquilize; (v) allay, still; (n) peace.
beaut: (n) example, exemplar, stunner, fraud. ANTONYMS: (v) guide, ANTONYMS: (v) waken; (n) activity,
looker, paragon; (adj) praiseworthy, inform, undeceive, protect. intensification.
attractive, gorgeous. genius: (adj, n) capacity, ability, tout: (v) bluster, brag, advertise, boast,
conserve: (v) economize, keep, save, endowment, faculty, gift, cleverness; canvass, blow, gas, bespeak,
embalm, protect, husband, maintain, (n) flair, brain, prodigy, bent, gasconade, swash; (n) hotel runner.
defend; (n) jam, conserves; (adj) aptitude. ANTONYM: (n) amateur. ANTONYMS: (v) conceal, understate.
conserving. ANTONYMS: (v) waste, grieved: (adj) sore, sad, sorry, unrhymed: (adj) rimeless, not in verse,
spend, use, damage, exhaust, sorrowful, upset, woeful, pained, in prose, unrimed. ANTONYM: (adj)
squander, destroy; (n, v) expend. affected, brokenhearted. rhymed.
Le corbeau ne vole que le jour,

Le hibou ne vole que la nuit,
Le cygne vole la nuit et le jour.%
One morning, on awaking, she saw on her window two vases filled with
flowers. One was a very beautiful and very brilliant but cracked vase of glass. It
had allowed the water with which it had been filled to escape, and the flowers
which it contained were withered. The other was an earthenware pot, coarse and
common, but which had preserved all its water, and its flowers remained fresh
and crimson.
I know not whether it was done intentionally, but La Esmeralda took the
faded nosegay and wore it all day long upon her breast.
That day she did not hear the voice singing in the tower.
She troubled herself very little about it. She passed her days in caressing
Djali, in watching the door of the Gondelaurier house, in talking to herself about
Phoebus, and in crumbling up her bread for the swallows.
She had entirely ceased to see or hear Quasimodo. The poor bellringer
seemed to have disappeared from the church. One night, nevertheless, when she
was not asleep, but was thinking of her handsome captain, she heard something
breathing near her cell. She rose in alarm, and saw by the light of the moon, a
shapeless mass lying across her door on the outside. It was Quasimodo asleep
there upon the stones.
Thesaurus
faded: (adj) pale, bleached, dull, nosegay: (n) posy, flower, garland, defined, tailored.
exhausted, faint, washy, withered, festoon, corsage, chaplet, tassel, swallows: (n) sparrows, rooks, robins,
colorless, discoloured, attenuate; (adj, bunch, flower arrangement, aroma, Passeriformes, Hirundinidae, etc,
v) dilapidated. ANTONYMS: (adj) fragrance. order Passeriformes.
vivid, Colored, colorful, fresh, preserved: (adj) kept, conserved, troubled: (adj, v) concerned, solicitous;
vigorous, strong, bright. whole, pickled, condite, safe. (adj) distressed, anxious, worried,
intentionally: (adv) deliberately, ANTONYM: (adj) fresh. uneasy, uncomfortable, disconcerted,
advisedly, consciously, purposely, on shapeless: (adj) amorphous, upset, apprehensive, restless.
purpose, knowingly, willfully, misshapen, unformed, unstructured, ANTONYMS: (adj) unconcerned,
studiedly, expressly, purposefully, nebulous, inchoate, unshapely, composed, calm, easy, relaxed,
intendedly. ANTONYMS: (adv) indistinct, uncrystallized, embryonic, tranquil, assured, carefree, brave,
accidentally, innocently. vague. ANTONYMS: (adj) distinct, stable, unaffected.
Victor Hugo 469
CHAPTER V
THE KEY TO THE RED DOOR
In the meantime, public minor had informed the archdeacon of the

miraculous manner in which the gypsy had been saved. When he learned it, he
knew not what his sensations were. He had reconciled himself to la Esmeralda's
death. In that matter he was tranquil; he had reached the bottom of personal
suffering. The human heart (Dora Claude had meditated upon these matters)
can contain only a certain quantity of despair. When the sponge is saturated, the
sea may pass over it without causing a single drop more to enter it.%
Now, with la Esmeralda dead, the sponge was soaked, all was at an end on
this earth for Dom Claude. But to feel that she was alive, and Phoebus also,
meant that tortures, shocks, alternatives, life, were beginning again. And Claude
was weary of all this.
When he heard this news, he shut himself in his cell in the cloister. He
appeared neither at the meetings of the chapter nor at the services. He closed his
door against all, even against the bishop. He remained thus immured for several
weeks. He was believed to be ill. And so he was, in fact.
What did he do while thus shut up? With what thoughts was the
unfortunate man contending? Was he giving final battle to his formidable
Thesaurus
contending: (adj) contentious, sensations: (n) feelings, vibrations, infelicitous, untoward, lamentable.
conflicting, competitive, competing, ambiance. ANTONYMS: (adj) lucky, auspicious,
competitory, combatant, challenging, soaked: (adj) wet, drenched, sopping, good, opportune, joyous, timely,
factious, militant, warlike, fighting. soggy, soaking, drunk, wet through, appropriate, successful, easy,
quantity: (n) amount, quantum, soaking wet, damp, sloshed; (adj, v) privileged.
extent, measure, sum, multitude, sodden. ANTONYM: (adj) dry. weary: (adj, n, v) fatigue; (v) exhaust,
total, portion, heap, degree, deal. sponge: (n) parasite, leech, sponger; tire out; (adj) tired, exhausted,
saturated: (adj, v) sodden; (adj) (v) cadge, scrounge, bum, mooch, fatigued, aweary, beat, languid; (n, v)
drenched, concentrated, sopping, soaker, efface, crawl; (adj, v) wipe. jade, bore. ANTONYMS: (adj)
soaked, full, soggy, soppy, wet unfortunate: (adj) inauspicious, sad, energetic, fresh, lively, untiring,
through, pure; (v) impregnate. hapless, bad, inopportune, hopeful, refreshed; (v) refresh,
ANTONYM: (adj) unsaturated. disastrous, adverse, deplorable, enliven, energize, activate, rally.
passion? Was he concocting a final plan of death for her and of perdition for
himself?
His Jehan, his cherished brother, his spoiled child, came once to his door,
knocked, swore, entreated, gave his name half a score of times. Claude did not
open.%
He passed whole days with his face close to the panes of his window. From
that window, situated in the cloister, he could see la Esmeralda's chamber. He
often saw herself with her goat, sometimes with Quasimodo. He remarked the
little attentions of the ugly deaf man, his obedience, his delicate and submissive
ways with the gypsy. He recalled, for he had a good memory, and memory is
the tormentor of the jealous, he recalled the singular look of the bellringer, bent
on the dancer upon a certain evening. He asked himself what motive could have
impelled Quasimodo to save her. He was the witness of a thousand little scenes
between the gypsy and the deaf man, the pantomime of which, viewed from afar
and commented on by his passion, appeared very tender to him. He distrusted
the capriciousness of women. Then he felt a jealousy which be could never have
believed possible awakening within him, a jealousy which made him redden
with shame and indignation: "One might condone the captain, but this one!" This
thought upset him.
His nights were frightful. As soon as he learned that the gypsy was alive, the
cold ideas of spectre and tomb which had persecuted him for a whole day
vanished, and the flesh returned to goad him. He turned and twisted on his
couch at the thought that the dark-skinned maiden was so near him.
Every night his delirious imagination represented la Esmeralda to him in all
the attitudes which had caused his blood to boil most. He beheld her
outstretched upon the poniarded captain, her eyes closed, her beautiful bare
throat covered with Phoebus's blood, at that moment of bliss when the
archdeacon had imprinted on her pale lips that kiss whose burn the unhappy
girl, though half dead, had felt. He beheld her, again, stripped by the savage
hands of the torturers, allowing them to bare and to enclose in the boot with its
iron screw, her tiny foot, her delicate rounded leg, her white and supple knee.
Thesaurus
capriciousness: (n) whimsicality, acknowledge. foment, incite, encourage.
instability, fickleness, volatility, dark-skinned: (adj) swarthy. ANTONYMS: (n) curb, deterrent,
changeability, unpredictability, delirious: (adj) crazy, wild, frantic, disincentive; (v) deter, inhibit,
arbitrariness, caprice, wandering, demented, excited, restrain, prevent, soothe, calm,
changeableness, inconstancy, insane, mad, frenetic, doting, drunk. discourage.
moodiness. ANTONYMS: (n) ANTONYMS: (adj) unexcited, nights: (adj) nightly; (n) night.
reliability, predictability. rational, composed, relaxed, redden: (adj, v) flush; (v) color,
condone: (v) remit, pardon, tolerate, reasonable, balanced, lucid, collected, crimson, glow, go red, encrimson,
forgive, justify, overlook, permit, clearheaded, calm, dejected. rubify, rubricate, rose; (adj) mantle,
brook, let, condoning, let pass. distrusted: (adj) suspect. color up. ANTONYMS: (v) blench,
ANTONYMS: (v) censure, denounce, goad: (n, v) spur, drive, urge, stimulus, blanch.
prevent, punish, forbid, prick; (n) fillip, gad, incentive; (v)
Victor Hugo 471
Again he beheld that ivory knee which alone remained outside of Torterue's
horrible apparatus. Lastly, he pictured the young girl in her shift, with the rope
about her neck, shoulders bare, feet bare, almost nude, as he had seen her on that
last day. These images of voluptuousness made him clench his fists, and a
shiver run along his spine.%
One night, among others, they heated so cruelly his virgin and priestly
blood, that he bit his pillow, leaped from his bed, flung on a surplice over his
shirt, and left his cell, lamp in hand, half naked, wild, his eyes aflame.
He knew where to find the key to the red door, which connected the cloister
with the church, and he always had about him, as the reader knows, the key of
the staircase leading to the towers.
Thesaurus
aflame: (adj) ablaze, burning, excited, mild, apathetic, quiet, impassive. au naturel, exposed, unclothed, stark,
afire, passionate, fiery, on fire, horrible: (adj) awful, fearful, frightful, undressed, raw, uncovered; (n)
flaming, alight, reddened, red. abominable, grisly, formidable, dire, nakedness. ANTONYMS: (adj)
ANTONYM: (adj) pale. ghastly, dreadful, fearsome; (adj, v) clothed, dressed.
clench: (n, v) clasp, grip, hold, clinch, horrid. ANTONYMS: (adj) pillow: (v) rest, breathe, lie, not move;
grasp, gripe; (v) embrace, grapple, wonderful, lovely, nice, lovable, fair, (adj) wadding; (n) throw pillow,
tighten, ratify; (n) clamp. delightful, slight, appealing, minor, Wanger, bed pillow, feather bed, long
ANTONYMS: (v) release, flex, relax. attractive, great. pillow, padding.
heated: (adj) fierce, burning, excited, ivory: (n) tusk, dentin, whiteness, virgin: (adj) pure, new, chaste,
ardent, fevered, passionate, hot, elephant, teeth, yellow, dentine; (adj) innocent, fresh, untouched, intact,
furious, fiery, fervent; (v) heat. chalk, lily, milk, paper. virginal; (adj, n) vestal; (n) maid, girl.
ANTONYMS: (adj) friendly, cooled, nude: (adj, v) naked, bare; (adj) bald, ANTONYMS: (adj) defiled, sullied.
Victor Hugo 473
CHAPTER VI
CONTINUATION OF THE KEY TO THE RED

DOOR
That night, la Esmeralda had fallen asleep in her cell, full of oblivion, of hope,
and of sweet thoughts. She had already been asleep for some time, dreaming as
always, of Phoebus, when it seemed to her that she heard a noise near her. She
slept lightly and uneasily, the sleep of a bird; a mere nothing waked her. She
opened her eyes. The night was very dark. Nevertheless, she saw a figure gazing
at her through the window; a lamp lighted up this apparition. The moment that
the figure saw that la Esmeralda had perceived it, it blew out the lamp. But the
young girl had had time to catch a glimpse of it; her eyes closed again with
terror.%
"Oh!" she said in a faint voice, "the priest!"
All her past unhappiness came back to her like a flash of lightning. She fell
back on her bed, chilled.
A moment later she felt a touch along her body which made her shudder so
that she straightened herself up in a sitting posture, wide awake and furious.
The priest had just slipped in beside her. He encircled her with both arms.
She tried to scream and could not.
Thesaurus
asleep: (adj) sleeping, deceased, furious: (adj, v) fierce, violent, manner, figure, mien; (n, v) pose,
sleepy, dormant, numb, dead, sound vehement, wild, rampant; (adj) place.
asleep, snoozing, slumbering, frantic, enraged, ferocious, scream: (n, v) shout, call, howl, yell,
napping, gone. ANTONYMS: (adj) boisterous, raging, frenzied. screech, shriek, wail; (v) cry out, roar,
up, attentive, alert, conscious. ANTONYMS: (adj) happy, mild, bellow, hollo. ANTONYM: (n) bore.
awake: (v) wake, awaken, realize, gentle, pleased, mellow, quiet, slow. uneasily: (adv) apprehensively,
waken; (adj) alive, alert, attentive, lightning: (n) levin, electricity, restlessly, worriedly, nervously,
conscious, keen, intelligent; (adj, v) thunderbolt, Leven, ignis fatuus, heat solicitously, unquietly, constrainedly,
broad awake. ANTONYMS: (adj) lightning, forked lightning, fetter, awkwardly, fretfully, unsettledly,
unconscious, sleeping, comatose, dart, chain lightning; (adj) wind. fearfully. ANTONYMS: (adv) calmly,
sleepy, relaxed; (v) deaden, lull, posture: (n) attitude, condition, stance, confidently, unconcernedly,
sleep. deportment, aspect, circumstance, comfortably, fearlessly.
"Begone, monster! begone assassin!" she said, in a voice which was low and
trembling with wrath and terror.%
"Mercy! mercy!" murmured the priest, pressing his lips to her shoulder.
She seized his bald head by its remnant of hair and tried to thrust aside his
kisses as though they had been bites.
"Mercy!" repeated the unfortunate man. "If you but knew what my love for
you is! 'Tis fire, melted lead, a thousand daggers in my heart."
She stopped his two arms with superhuman force.
"Let me go," she said, "or I will spit in your face!"
He released her. "Vilify me, strike me, be malicious! Do what you will! But
have mercy! love me!"
Then she struck him with the fury of a child. She made her beautiful hands
stiff to bruise his face. "Begone, demon!"
"Love me! love mepity!" cried the poor priest returning her blows with
caresses.
All at once she felt him stronger than herself.
"There must be an end to this!" he said, gnashing his teeth.
She was conquered, palpitating in his arms, and in his power. She felt a
wanton hand straying over her. She made a last effort, and began to cry: "Help!
Help! A vampire! a vampire!"
Nothing came. Djali alone was awake and bleating with anguish.
"Hush!" said the panting priest.
All at once, as she struggled and crawled on the floor, the gypsy's hand came
in contact with something cold and metallic-it was Quasimodo's whistle. She
seized it with a convulsive hope, raised it to her lips and blew with all the
strength that she had left. The whistle gave a clear, piercing sound.
"What is that?" said the priest.
Thesaurus
bald: (adj) hairless, simple, austere, grace, charity, humanity; (n, v) error; (adj) errant, mistaking,
meager, raw, barefaced, stark, plain, quarter. ANTONYMS: (n) cruelty, containing error, incorrect,
nude, naked; (adj, v) threadbare. harshness, unkindness, severity, misleading, astray, mistaken,
ANTONYMS: (adj) ornate, furry, mercilessness, ruthlessness, erroneous.
hirsute, woolly, embellished, impatience, inhumanity. wanton: (adj) loose, dissolute, light,
adorned, decorated. stiff: (adj) hard, formal, inflexible, licentious, unchaste, lewd,
bruise: (n, v) hurt, wound; (v) crush, difficult, rigorous, numb, firm, debauched, unprovoked; (v) dally; (n,
pound, mash, contuse, grind, bray; sturdy; (adj, n) stark, severe; (n) v) sport; (adj, v) flirt. ANTONYMS:
(n) contusion, hematoma; (adj, n) corpse. ANTONYMS: (adj) soft, (adj) moral, wise, nice, kind, gentle,
buffet. supple, flexible, floppy, pliable, free, decent, clean, careful, observant,
mercy: (n) kindness, compassion, pity, easy, loose, informal, mild, pliant. justifiable, involuntary.
favor, leniency, pardon, forgiveness, straying: (n) digression, departure,
Victor Hugo 475
Almost at the same instant he felt himself raised by a vigorous arm. The cell
was dark; he could not distinguish clearly who it was that held him thus; but he
heard teeth chattering with rage, and there was just sufficient light scattered
among the gloom to allow him to see above his head the blade of a large knife.%
The priest fancied that he perceived the form of Quasimodo. He assumed that
it could be no one but he. He remembered to have stumbled, as he entered, over
a bundle which was stretched across the door on the outside. But, as the
newcomer did not utter a word, he knew not what to think. He flung himself on
the arm which held the knife, crying: "Quasimodo!" He forgot, at that moment of
distress, that Quasimodo was deaf.
In a twinkling, the priest was overthrown and a leaden knee rested on his
breast.
From the angular imprint of that knee he recognized Quasimodo; but what
was to be done? how could he make the other recognize him? the darkness
rendered the deaf man blind.
He was lost. The young girl, pitiless as an enraged tigress, did not intervene
to save him. The knife was approaching his head; the moment was critical. All
at once, his adversary seemed stricken with hesitation.
"No blood on her!" he said in a dull voice.
It was, in fact, Quasimodo's voice.
Then the priest felt a large hand dragging him feet first out of the cell; it was
there that he was to die. Fortunately for him, the moon had risen a few moments
before.
When they had passed through the door of the cell, its pale rays fell upon the
priest's countenance. Quasimodo looked him full in the face, a trembling seized
him, and he released the priest and shrank back.
The gypsy, who had advanced to the threshold of her cell, beheld with
surprise their roles abruptly changed. It was now the priest who menaced,
Quasimodo who was the suppliant.
Thesaurus
angular: (adj) bony, skinny, spare, bundle: (n, v) pack, cluster, clump, newcomer: (n) freshman, beginner,
lean, gaunt, angulate, angled, Unit of wad; (n) sheaf, pile, batch, stack, fledgeling, neophyte, recruit,
angular velocity, Angular advance of package, group, heap. ANTONYMS: immigrant, novice, arrival, entrant;
an eccentric , scrawny, gangling. (v) scatter, separate, disperse, divide. (adj, n) foreigner, stranger.
ANTONYMS: (adj) beefy, weighted, enraged: (adj) angered, furious, overthrown: (adj) overcome,
thick, straight, plump, fleshy, flat, fat. infuriated, irate, mad, livid, incensed, conquered, battered, overpowered,
blade: (n) knife, beau, foil, falchion, exasperated, raging, irritated, boiling. dejected, cast down, dissolute,
cutlass, sword, leaf, shaft, razor, intervene: (v) intercede, interpose, doomed, flooded, discomfit, mat.
brand, steel. meddle, arbitrate, step in, interject, scattered: (adj) dissipated, thin,
breast: (n) boob, udder, tit, titty, chest, interlope, pass; (adj, v) mediate, disordered, disconnected, confused,
knocker, mammilla, bust, pap, heart; intermediate; (n) interference. sparse, sporadic, distributed, rare,
(n, v) front. ANTONYMS: (v) disregard, provoke. diffuse; (v) disperse.
The priest, who was overwhelming the deaf man with gestures of wrath and
reproach, made the latter a violent sign to retire.%
The deaf man dropped his head, then he came and knelt at the gypsy's door,-
- "Monseigneur," he said, in a grave and resigned voice, "you shall do all that you
please afterwards, but kill me first."
So saying, he presented his knife to the priest. The priest, beside himself, was
about to seize it. But the young girl was quicker than be; she wrenched the knife
from Quasimodo's hands and burst into a frantic laugh,-- "Approach," she said to
the priest.
She held the blade high. The priest remained undecided.
She would certainly have struck him.
Then she added with a pitiless expression, well aware that she was about to
pierce the priest's heart with thousands of red-hot irons,
"Ah! I know that Phoebus is not dead!
The priest overturned Quasimodo on the floor with a kick, and, quivering
with rage, darted back under the vault of the staircase.
When he was gone, Quasimodo picked up the whistle which had just saved
the gypsy.
"It was getting rusty," he said, as he handed it back to her; then he left her
alone.
The young girl, deeply agitated by this violent scene, fell back exhausted on
her bed, and began to sob and weep. Her horizon was becoming gloomy once
more.
The priest had groped his way back to his cell.
It was settled. Dom Claude was jealous of Quasimodo!
He repeated with a thoughtful air his fatal words: "No one shall have her."
Thesaurus
exhausted: (adj) fatigued, tired, spent, horizon: (n) ambit, reach, purview, amazing, tremendous, resistless,
dry, empty, depleted, jaded, vista, view, perspective, prospect, formidable; (v) overwhelm.
enervated, faint; (adj, v) gone, weak. skyline, arena, celestial horizon, ANTONYMS: (adj) comfortable,
ANTONYMS: (adj) fresh, refreshed, amphitheater. comforting, weak, mild, shallow,
strong, restored, vigorous, jealous: (adj) distrustful, envious, insignificant, faint, disputable, easy.
unexhausted, replenished, remaining, covetous, suspicious, jealousy, quicker: (adv) more quickly, sooner,
energized, invigorated, restocked. resentful, invidious, green, grudging, earlier.
frantic: (adj) desperate, crazy, excited, jaundiced, attentive. ANTONYM: seize: (v) catch, capture, grab, arrest,
distraught, frenetic, distracted; (adj, (adj) trusting. clutch, get, apprehend, receive,
v) frenzied, furious, wild, raging; (n) overwhelming: (adj) devastating, annex, clasp; (n, v) grapple.
maniac. ANTONYMS: (adj) mellow, irresistible, insurmountable, ANTONYMS: (v) baulk, relinquish,
composed. crushing, monumental, astounding, restore, surrender, give, remove.
Victor Hugo 477
BOOK X
Victor Hugo 479
CHAPTER %I
GRINGOIRE HAS MANY GOOD IDEAS IN

SUCCESSION--RUE DES BERNARDINS
As soon as Pierre Gringoire had seen how this whole affair was turning, and
that there would decidedly be the rope, hanging, and other disagreeable things
for the principal personages in this comedy, he had not cared to identify himself
with the matter further. The outcasts with whom he had remained, reflecting
that, after all, it was the best company in Paris,-- the outcasts had continued to
interest themselves in behalf of the gypsy. He had thought it very simple on the
part of people who had, like herself, nothing else in prospect but Charmolue and
Torterue, and who, unlike himself, did not gallop through the regions of
imagination between the wings of Pegasus. From their remarks, he had learned
that his wife of the broken crock had taken refuge in Notre-Dame, and he was
very glad of it. But he felt no temptation to go and see her there. He meditated
occasionally on the little goat, and that was all. Moreover, he was busy executing
feats of strength during the day for his living, and at night he was engaged in
composing a memorial against the Bishop of Paris, for he remembered having
been drenched by the wheels of his mills, and he cherished a grudge against him
for it. He also occupied himself with annotating the fine work of Baudry-le-
Rouge, Bishop of Noyon and Tournay, De Cupa Petrarum, which had given him a
violent passion for architecture, an inclination which had replaced in his heart
Thesaurus
annotating: (n) expansion. pending; (n, v) suspension. commemorative; (n, v) record.
behalf: (n) sake, part, interest, behoof, inclination: (n, v) desire, bent; (n) mills: (n) Milles.
defense, lieu, good, stead, score, fancy, affection, tendency, leaning, reflecting: (adv) reflectingly; (adj)
service, side. drift, appetite, dip, proclivity, bias. reflective, thoughtful, calculating,
composing: (v) compose, comprise, ANTONYMS: (n) disinclination, reflected, shiny, shimmering,
constitute; (adj, v) component; (n) reluctance, aversion, indifference, reflectent; (n) mirroring, reflection,
composition, arranging, unwillingness, antipathy, dislike, reflexion.
arrangement, placement, makeup, horror. temptation: (n, v) lure, enticement,
constitution, manufacturing. memorial: (n) commemoration, bait; (n) attraction, allurement,
hanging: (n) execution, curtain, arras, remembrance, memento, cenotaph, invitation, seduction, inducement,
wall hanging; (adj) suspended, headstone, monument, epitaph, allure, appeal, pull. ANTONYMS: (n)
pendent, pendant, pendulous, hung, memo, memory; (adj) dislike, discouragement.
his passion for hermeticism, of which it was, moreover, only a natural corollary,
since there is an intimate relation between hermeticism and masonry. Gringoire
had passed from the love of an idea to the love of the form of that idea.%
One day he had halted near Saint Germain-l'Auxerrois, at the corner of a
mansion called "For-l'Evêque " (the Bishop's Tribunal), which stood opposite
another called "For-le-Roi" (the King's Tribunal). At this For-l'Evêque, there was
a charming chapel of the fourteenth century, whose apse was on the street.
Gringoire was devoutly examining its exterior sculptures. He was in one of
those moments of egotistical, exclusive, supreme, enjoyment when the artist
beholds nothing in the world but art, and the world in art. All at once he feels a
hand laid gravely on his shoulder. He turns round. It was his old friend, his
former master, monsieur the archdeacon.
He was stupefied. It was a long time since he had seen the archdeacon, and
Dom Claude was one of those solemn and impassioned men, a meeting with
whom always upsets the equilibrium of a sceptical philosopher.
The archdeacon maintained silence for several minutes, during which
Gringoire had time to observe him. He found Dom Claude greatly changed; pale
as a winter's morning, with hollow eyes, and hair almost white. The priest broke
the silence at length, by saying, in a tranquil but glacial tone,
"How do you do, Master Pierre?"
"My health?" replied Gringoire. "Eh! eh! one can say both one thing and
another on that score. Still, it is good, on the whole. I take not too much of
anything. You know, master, that the secret of keeping well, according to
Hippocrates; id est: cibi, potus, somni, venus, omnia moderata sint."
"So you have no care, Master Pierre?" resumed the archdeacon, gazing
intently at Gringoire.
"None, i' faith!"
"And what are you doing now?"
"You see, master. I am examining the chiselling of these stones, and the
manner in which yonder bas-relief is thrown out."
Thesaurus
egotistical: (adj) conceited, selfish, dissatisfaction, misery, repulsion, ANTONYMS: (adj) formal, cold,
egocentric, proud, arrogant, sorrow. unfriendly, external, outermost,
narcissistic, pompous, haughty, exterior: (adj, n) outside, surface, public, superficial.
boastful, vain, brassy. ANTONYMS: outward; (n) appearance, skin, front; sceptical: (adj) distrustful, questioning,
(adj) humble, modest, selfless. (adj) external, superficial, outlying, doubting, skeptical, sceptic,
enjoyment: (n) delight, appreciation, outer, outdoor. ANTONYMS: (adj, n) unbelieving, disbelieving, doubtful,
gratification, comfort, relish, interior, inside; (adj) inner, internal, dubious, suspicious, skeptic.
satisfaction, happiness, delectation, intrinsic, middle, deep. venus: (adj) the Graces; (n) Urania,
gusto, amusement, diversion. intimate: (adj, adv, v) close; (n, v) narcissus, terrestrial planet, Adonis,
ANTONYMS: (n) dislike, abhorrence, express, imply; (v) hint, indicate, peri, solar system, Hyperion, houri,
antipathy, apathy, aversion, allude, suggest; (adj) informal, inner, Hebe, genus Venus.
discomfort, displeasure, internal; (adj, v) confidential.
Victor Hugo 481
The priest began to smile with that bitter smile which raises only one corner
of the mouth.%
"And that amuses you?"
"'Tis paradise!" exclaimed Gringoire. And leaning over the sculptures with
the fascinated air of a demonstrator of living phenomena: "Do you not think, for
instance, that yon metamorphosis in bas-relief is executed with much adroitness,
delicacy and patience? Observe that slender column. Around what capital have
you seen foliage more tender and better caressed by the chisel. Here are three
raised bosses of Jean Maillevin. They are not the finest works of this great
master. Nevertheless, the naivete, the sweetness of the faces, the gayety of the
attitudes and draperies, and that inexplicable charm which is mingled with all
the defects, render the little figures very diverting and delicate, perchance, even
too much so. You think that it is not diverting?"
"Yes, certainly!" said the priest.
"And if you were to see the interior of the chapel!" resumed the poet, with his
garrulous enthusiasm. "Carvings everywhere. 'Tis as thickly clustered as the
head of a cabbage! The apse is of a very devout, and so peculiar a fashion that I
have never beheld anything like it elsewhere!"
Dom Claude interrupted him,
"You are happy, then?"
Gringoire replied warmly;
"On my honor, yes! First I loved women, then animals. Now I love stones.
They are quite as amusing as women and animals, and less treacherous."
The priest laid his hand on his brow. It was his habitual gesture.
"Really?"
"Stay!" said Gringoire, "one has one's pleasures!" He took the arm of the
priest, who let him have his way, and made him enter the staircase turret of For-
l'Evêque. "Here is a staircase! every time that I see it I am happy. It is of the
simplest and rarest manner of steps in Paris. All the steps are bevelled
Thesaurus
adroitness: (n) cleverness, ability, skill, toughness, durability, frankness, voluble, effusive. ANTONYMS: (adj)
deftness, facility, nimbleness, inelegance, ruggedness, vulgarity, taciturn, concise, reticent.
skillfulness, knack, finesse, art; (n, v) tactlessness, insensitivity, inaccuracy, metamorphosis: (n) alteration, change,
address. ANTONYMS: (n) clumsiness. conversion, transformation,
uselessness, inaccuracy. demonstrator: (n) protester, instructor, metamorphism, translation,
cabbage: (v) filch, swipe, prig, crib, salesperson, reformist, teacher, transmutation, transfiguration,
nim, purloin, bag; (n) kale, Cole, kail, dissenter, marcher, meliorist, revision, modification,
dough. reformer, demonstrationist, sales transmogrification.
delicacy: (adj, n) weakness, fragility, demonstrator. turret: (adj) steeple, spire, campanile,
tidbit; (n) finesse, daintiness, delicate, garrulous: (adj) talkative, chatty, obelisk, pillar, monument, minaret,
elegance, sensitivity, luxury, treat, gabby, verbose, wordy, column; (n) gun turret, gun
airiness. ANTONYMS: (n) sturdiness, conversational, glib, talky, windy, enclosure, garret.
underneath. Its beauty and simplicity consist in the interspacing of both, being
a foot or more wide, which are interlaced, interlocked, fitted together, enchained
enchased, interlined one upon another, and bite into each other in a manner that
is truly firm and graceful."
"And you desire nothing?"
"No."
"And you regret nothing?"
"Neither regret nor desire. I have arranged my mode of life."
"What men arrange," said Claude, "things disarrange."
"I am a Pyrrhonian philosopher," replied Gringoire, "and I hold all things in
equilibrium."
"And how do you earn your living?"
"I still make epics and tragedies now and then; but that which brings me in
most is the industry with which you are acquainted, master; carrying pyramids
of chairs in my teeth."
"The trade is but a rough one for a philosopher."
"'Tis still equilibrium," said Gringoire. "When one has an idea, one
encounters it in everything."
"I know that," replied the archdeacon.%
After a silence, the priest resumed,
"You are, nevertheless, tolerably poor?"
"Poor, yes; unhappy, no."
At that moment, a trampling of horses was heard, and our two interlocutors
beheld defiling at the end of the street, a company of the king's unattached
archers, their lances borne high, an officer at their head. The cavalcade was
brilliant, and its march resounded on the pavement.
"How you gaze at that officer!" said Gringoire, to the archdeacon.
"Because I think I recognize him."
Thesaurus
chairs: (n) seats. latticed, having frets, complicated, remorse, penitence, compunction,
consist: (n, v) be; (adj, v) lie; (v) belong, latticelike. contrition. ANTONYMS: (v)
fit, comprise, lie in, reside, exist, interlocked: (prep) interfolded. welcome, praise; (n) idealism,
make up; (adj, n) abide; (n) agree. mode: (n) means, method, form, way, shamelessness, joy, satisfaction.
defiling: (adj) impious, infectious; (n) style, custom, condition, guise; (n, v) simplicity: (n) plainness, simpleness,
inquination. manner, fashion, wise. easiness, ease, clarity, austerity,
earn: (v) acquire, deserve, get, attain, pavement: (n) walk, paving, path, gullibility, severity, artlessness,
win, bring in, bring, achieve, bear, pathway, road surface, pave, ignorance; (adj, n) inexperience.
merit, yield. ANTONYMS: (v) spend, sidewalk, floor, curbside, trottoir, ANTONYMS: (n) difficulty,
cost, scatter. earth. complexity, ambiguity, magnificence,
interlaced: (adj) interfretted, regret: (n, v) grieve, sorrow; (v) bewail, sophistication, dishonesty, clutter,
reticulated, reticulate, reticular, lament, mourn, bemoan, deplore; (n) warmth.
Victor Hugo 483
"What do you call him?"

"I think," said Claude, "that his name is Phoebus de Châteaupers."
"Phoebus! A curious name! There is also a Phoebus, Comte de Foix. I
remember having known a wench who swore only by the name of Phoebus."
"Come away from here," said the priest. "I have something to say to you."
From the moment of that troop's passing, some agitation had pierced through
the archdeacon's glacial envelope. He walked on. Gringoire followed him,
being accustomed to obey him, like all who had once approached that man so
full of ascendency. They reached in silence the Rue des Bernardins, which was
nearly deserted. Here Dom Claude paused.%
"What have you to say to me, master?" Gringoire asked him.
"Do you not think that the dress of those cavaliers whom we have just seen is
far handsomer than yours and mine?"
Gringoire tossed his head.
"I' faith! I love better my red and yellow jerkin, than those scales of iron and
steel. A fine pleasure to produce, when you walk, the same noise as the Quay of
Old Iron, in an earthquake!"
"So, Gringoire, you have never cherished envy for those handsome fellows in
their military doublets?"
"Envy for what, monsieur the archdeacon? their strength, their armor, their
discipline? Better philosophy and independence in rags. I prefer to be the head
of a fly rather than the tail of a lion."
"That is singular," said the priest dreamily. "Yet a handsome uniform is a
beautiful thing."
Gringoire, perceiving that he was in a pensive mood, quitted him to go and
admire the porch of a neighboring house. He came back clapping his hands.
"If you were less engrossed with the fine clothes of men of war, monsieur the
archdeacon, I would entreat you to come and see this door. I have always said
that the house of the Sieur Aubry had the most superb entrance in the world."
Thesaurus
accustomed: (adj, n) habitual; (adj) scorn, hate, condemn, abhor, lethargically. ANTONYMS: (adv)
familiar, normal, wonted, usual, disrespect, detest, disregard, vigorously, alertly, calmly, carefully.
natural, everyday, ordinary, disapprove, deprecate. envelope: (n, v) covering, cloak,
habituated, common, traditional. ascendency: (n) ascendant, blanket; (n) casing, container, pack,
ANTONYMS: (adj) unusual, green, predominance, sway, ascendance, case, coating, jacket, integument,
unseasoned, unconventional, advantage, ascendent, control, vesicle.
untrained, abnormal, dominance, dominion, influence, envy: (v) begrudge, want; (n)
uncharacteristic, exceptional. mastery. enviousness, desire, heartburning,
admire: (v) revere, look up to, idolize, dreamily: (adv) languorously, resentment, envies, heartburn,
appreciate, adore, wonder, praise, moonily, pensively, sleepily, jealousy, hatred; (adj) jealous.
worship, admiring, esteem, honor. dreamfully, vaguely, visionarily, ANTONYM: (n) generosity.
ANTONYMS: (v) despise, loathe, slowly, shadowily, idealistically, yours: (adj) own.
"Pierre Gringoire," said the archdeacon, "What have you done with that little
gypsy dancer?"%
"La Esmeralda? You change the conversation very abruptly."
"Was she not your wife?"
"Yes, by virtue of a broken crock. We were to have four years of it. By the
way," added Gringoire, looking at the archdeacon in a half bantering way, "are
you still thinking of her?"
"And you think of her no longer?"
"Very little. I have so many things. Good heavens, how pretty that little goat
was!"
"Had she not saved your life?"
"'Tis true, pardieu!"
"Well, what has become of her? What have you done with her?"
"I cannot tell you. I believe that they have hanged her."
"You believe so?"
"I am not sure. When I saw that they wanted to hang people, I retired from
the game."
"That is all you know of it?"
"Wait a bit. I was told that she had taken refuge in Notre-Dame, and that she
was safe there, and I am delighted to hear it, and I have not been able to discover
whether the goat was saved with her, and that is all I know."
"I will tell you more," cried Dom Claude; and his voice, hitherto low, slow,
and almost indistinct, turned to thunder. "She has in fact, taken refuge in Notre-
Dame. But in three days justice will reclaim her, and she will be hanged on the
Grève. There is a decree of parliament."
"That's annoying," said Gringoire.
The priest, in an instant, became cold and calm again.
Thesaurus
delighted: (adj) glad, cheerful, blissful, lose. retired: (adj) obscure, secluded,
jubilant, happy, overjoyed, joyful, hang: (adj, n, v) suspend; (v) dangle, sequestered, solitary, emeritus,
captivated, pleasant; (adj, v) pleased, depend, drape, float, fall, hover, secret, lonely, withdrawn,
elated. ANTONYMS: (adj) shocked, append, string up; (n, v) delay; (adj) superannuated, close; (adj, v) covert.
unhappy, sorrowful, depressed, hung. virtue: (adj, n) merit, excellence,
melancholy, miserable, desolate, hitherto: (adv) as yet, yet, so far, up to quality, attribute; (n) honor,
sorry, sad, down. now, until now, thus far, before, goodness, honesty, morality,
discover: (v) discern, disclose, hereunto, to date, still, all the same. decency, probity, efficacy.
ascertain, find, perceive, catch, reclaim: (v) recover, reform, cultivate, ANTONYMS: (n) wickedness, guilt,
expose, hear, determine, sense, claim, repossess, claim back, regain, vice, peccadillo, sin, dishonor,
detect. ANTONYMS: (v) overlook, recycle, salvage, correct, redeem. immorality, evil, demerit,
ignore, disregard, confuse, conceal, ANTONYMS: (v) lose, discard. inadequacy, disadvantage.
Victor Hugo 485
"And who the devil," resumed the poet, "has amused himself with soliciting a
decree of reintegration? Why couldn't they leave parliament in peace? What
harm does it do if a poor girl takes shelter under the flying buttresses of Notre-
Dame, beside the swallows' nests?"
"There are satans in this world," remarked the archdeacon.%
"'Tis devilish badly done," observed Gringoire.
The archdeacon resumed after a silence,
"So, she saved your life?"
"Among my good friends the outcasts. A little more or a little less and I
should have been hanged. They would have been sorry for it to-day."
"Would not you like to do something for her?"
"I ask nothing better, Dom Claude; but what if I entangle myself in some
villanous affair?"
"What matters it?"
"Bah! what matters it? You are good, master, that you are! I have two great
works already begun."
The priest smote his brow. In spite of the calm which he affected, a violent
gesture betrayed his internal convulsions from time to time.
"How is she to be saved?"
Gringoire said to him; "Master, I will reply to you; Il padelt, which means in
Turkish, 'God is our hope.'"
"How is she to be saved?" repeated Claude dreamily.
Gringoire smote his brow in his turn.
"Listen, master. I have imagination; I will devise expedients for you. What if
one were to ask her pardon from the king?"
"Of Louis XI.! A pardon!"
"Why not?"
"To take the tiger's bone from him!"
Thesaurus
bone: (n) framework, os, skeleton, free, unravel, untangle, explain, poet: (n) singer, songster, elegist,
anatomy, ivory, astragal, true undo. author, Gilbert, maker, lyricist, muse,
middlings; (adj, n, v) cartilage; (v) imagination: (n) vision, fancy, image, versifier; (adj) poet laureate,
swot, gristle, prepare. dream, conceit, imagery, originality, Shakespearean.
devise: (v) contrive, conceive, invent, invention, resource, reflection, reintegration: (n) redintegration.
plan, create, concoct, design, arrange, phantasy. shelter: (n, v) guard, refuge, harbor,
frame, formulate, excogitate. pardon: (v) excuse, condone, forgive, protect, shield; (adj, n, v) screen; (n)
entangle: (n, v) tangle; (v) embrangle, acquit, spare; (n) amnesty, protection, asylum, sanctuary,
complicate, involve, snarl, entwine, forgiveness, grace; (adj, v) justify, security, hut. ANTONYMS: (n)
mat; (adj, v) enmesh, embarrass, exonerate, exculpate. ANTONYMS: danger, exposure; (v) endanger.
confuse, bewilder. ANTONYMS: (v) (n, v) blame; (v) punish, castigate,
disentangle, disengage, extricate, condemn, convict; (n) intolerance.
Gringoire began to seek fresh expedients.%

"Well, stay! Shall I address to the midwives a request accompanied by the
declaration that the girl is with child!"
This made the priest's hollow eye flash.
"With child! knave! do you know anything of this?"
Gringoire was alarmed by his air. He hastened to say, "Oh, no, not I! Our
marriage was a real forismaritagium. I stayed outside. But one might obtain a
respite, all the same."
"Madness! Infamy! Hold your tongue!"
"You do wrong to get angry," muttered Gringoire. "One obtains a respite;
that does no harm to any one, and allows the midwives, who are poor women, to
earn forty deniers parisis."
The priest was not listening to him!
"But she must leave that place, nevertheless!" he murmured, "the decree is to
be executed within three days. Moreover, there will be no decree; that
Quasimodo! Women have very depraved tastes!" He raised his voice: "Master
Pierre, I have reflected well; there is but one means of safety for her."
"What? I see none myself."
"Listen, Master Pierre, remember that you owe your life to her. I will tell you
my idea frankly. The church is watched night and day; only those are allowed
to come out, who have been seen to enter. Hence you can enter. You will come.
I will lead you to her. You will change clothes with her. She will take your
doublet; you will take her petticoat."
"So far, it goes well," remarked the philosopher, "and then?"
"And then? she will go forth in your garments; you will remain with hers.
You will be hanged, perhaps, but she will be saved."
Gringoire scratched his ear, with a very serious air. "Stay!" said he, "that is an
idea which would never have occurred to me unaided."
Thesaurus
declaration: (n) affirmation, assertion, ANTONYMS: (adv) hesitantly, (adj, n) furor, rage, desperation,
expression, pronouncement, indirectly, guardedly, untruthfully, furore. ANTONYMS: (n) sense,
statement, allegation, enunciation, deceitfully, ambiguously, politely. calmness, order.
acknowledgment, predication; (n, v) harm: (adj, n, v) damage, hurt; (adj, n) reflected: (adj) reflecting, reverberant,
claim, avowal. ANTONYMS: (n) evil, detriment, injury; (n, v) abuse, reflectent.
denial, disavowal, retraction, request. wound, blemish, disadvantage; (n) respite: (n, v) pause, rest, lull; (n)
executed: (adj) finished, fulfilled, bruise; (adj, v) injure. ANTONYMS: repose, intermission, recess, break,
complete. (n, v) benefit, respect, help; (n) remission, relief, cessation,
frankly: (adv) openly, sincerely, reparation, service; (v) enable, spoil, interruption.
bluntly, honestly, truthfully, directly, protect, defend, repair. stayed: (v) staid, serious, philosophic,
unreservedly, straightforwardly, madness: (n) frenzy, insanity, lunacy, sedate, platonic, stoical; (n) stays;
ingenuously, plainly; (adj, adv) freely. idiocy, folly, delirium, insaneness; (adj) late.
Victor Hugo 487
At Dom Claude's proposition, the open and benign face of the poet had
abruptly clouded over, like a smiling Italian landscape, when an unlucky squall
comes up and dashes a cloud across the sun.%
"Well! Gringoire, what say you to the means?"
"I say, master, that I shall not be hanged, perchance, but that I shall be hanged
indubitably.
"That concerns us not."
"The deuce!" said Gringoire.
"She has saved your life. 'Tis a debt that you are discharging."
"There are a great many others which I do not discharge."
"Master Pierre, it is absolutely necessary."
The archdeacon spoke imperiously."
"Listen, Dom Claude," replied the poet in utter consternation. You cling to
that idea, and you are wrong. I do not see why I should get myself hanged in
some one else's place."
"What have you, then, which attaches you so strongly to life?"
"Oh! a thousand reasons!"
"What reasons, if you please?"
"What? The air, the sky, the morning, the evening, the moonlight, my good
friends the thieves, our jeers with the old hags of go-betweens, the fine
architecture of Paris to study, three great books to make, one of them being
against the bishops and his mills; and how can I tell all? Anaxagoras said that he
was in the world to admire the sun. And then, from morning till night, I have
the happiness of passing all my days with a man of genius, who is myself, which
is very agreeable."
"A head fit for a mule bell!" muttered the archdeacon. "Oh! tell me who
preserved for you that life which you render so charming to yourself? To whom
do you owe it that you breathe that air, behold that sky, and can still amuse your
lark's mind with your whimsical nonsense and madness? Where would you be,
Thesaurus
benign: (adj, n) benevolent, nice, choke, asphyxiate, drain, die, inhale. dissatisfaction, seriousness, dullness,
gentle, humane; (adj) kind, affable, cloud: (n, v) mist, blur; (v) becloud, discontent, dejection, gloominess,
amiable, charitable, merciful, soft, obscure, eclipse, blacken, taint, befog, displeasure.
beneficial. ANTONYMS: (adj) overshadow; (adj, n) swarm; (n) haze. nonsense: (n) bosh, absurdity,
unkind, malevolent, malign, ANTONYMS: (v) clear, refine, humbug, balderdash, foolishness,
unfortunate, severe, selfish, accentuate, illuminate, explain, drivel, folderol, baloney, falderal,
misanthropic, mean, malignant, clarify, unveil. jargon, claptrap. ANTONYMS: (n)
malicious, hurtful. happiness: (n) delight, merriment, sense, wisdom, substance, fact.
breathe: (n, v) respire, subsist, imply; ecstasy, welfare, gladness, luck, proposition: (n, v) offer, bid, proffer;
(n) breath, bespeak; (adj, n, v) live; (v) cheerfulness, blessedness, bliss, (n) proposal, motion, design,
exhale, exist, emit, rest, be. felicity, contentment. ANTONYMS: approach, assertion, suggestion, plan,
ANTONYMS: (v) suffocate, hide, (n) sadness, despair, grief, misery, premise.
had it not been for her? Do you then desire that she through whom you are alive,
should die? that she should die, that beautiful, sweet, adorable creature, who is
necessary to the light of the world and more divine than God, while you, half
wise, and half fool, a vain sketch of something, a sort of vegetable, which thinks
that it walks, and thinks that it thinks, you will continue to live with the life
which you have stolen from her, as useless as a candle in broad daylight? Come,
have a little pity, Gringoire; be generous in your turn; it was she who set the
example."
The priest was vehement. Gringoire listened to him at first with an
undecided air, then he became touched, and wound up with a grimace which
made his pallid face resemble that of a new-born infant with an attack of the
colic.%
"You are pathetic!" said he, wiping away a tear. "Well! I will think about it.
That's a queer idea of yours.-- After all," he continued after a pause, "who
knows? perhaps they will not hang me. He who becomes betrothed does not
always marry. When they find me in that little lodging so grotesquely muffled
in petticoat and coif, perchance they will burst with laughter. And then, if they
do hang me,-- well! the halter is as good a death as any. 'Tis a death worthy of a
sage who has wavered all his life; a death which is neither flesh nor fish, like the
mind of a veritable sceptic; a death all stamped with Pyrrhonism and hesitation,
which holds the middle station betwixt heaven and earth, which leaves you in
suspense. 'Tis a philosopher's death, and I was destined thereto, perchance. It is
magnificent to die as one has lived."
The priest interrupted him: "Is it agreed."
"What is death, after all?" pursued Gringoire with exaltation. "A disagreeable
moment, a toll-gate, the passage of little to nothingness. Some one having asked
Cercidas, the Megalopolitan, if he were willing to die: 'Why not?' he replied; 'for
after my death I shall see those great men, Pythagoras among the philosophers,
Hecataeus among historians, Homer among poets, Olympus among musicians.'"
The archdeacon gave him his hand: "It is settled, then? You will come to-
morrow?"
Thesaurus
grotesquely: (adv) monstrously, quiet; (v) allusive, covert. correct, correctness, deportment,
ludicrously, unnaturally, anticly, ANTONYMS: (adj) clear, distinct, detail, exact, expected.
funnily, hideously, ridiculously, audible, slight. vegetable: (adj, n) vegetal; (n) plant,
bizarrely, fantasticly, fantastically, sceptic: (n) doubter, skeptic, atheist, earthnut, fennel, pumpkin, rhubarb,
drolly. pessimist, infidel, incredulous, gumbo, truffle, artichoke, cucumber,
interrupted: (adj) discontinuous, fitful, distrustful, disbeliever, sceptical, celery. ANTONYM: (adj) mineral.
intermittent, discontinued, unbeliever, skeptical. vehement: (adj) fierce, intense, violent,
disconnected, unsuccessive, sketch: (n, v) plan, outline, draft, strong, furious, passionate, ferocious,
intervallic, episodic, gaping, periodic; scheme, picture, project; (n) drawing, eager, hot, fervent, fervid.
(prep) interrupt. cartoon, plot; (v) paint, draw. ANTONYMS: (adj) impassionate,
muffled: (adj) hushed, muted, hollow, thereto: (adv) thereunto, moreover; indifferent, mild, calm.
inarticulate, faint, soft, subdued, low, (adj) likeness, accurate, coincidence,
Victor Hugo 489
This gesture recalled Gringoire to reality.%

"Ah! i' faith no!" he said in the tone of a man just waking up. "Be hanged! 'tis
too absurd. I will not."
"Farewell, then!" and the archdeacon added between his teeth: "I'll find you
again!"
"I do not want that devil of a man to find me," thought Gringoire; and he ran
after Dom Claude. "Stay, monsieur the archdeacon, no ill-feeling between old
friends! You take an interest in that girl, my wife, I mean, and 'tis well. You
have devised a scheme to get her out of Notre-Dame, but your way is extremely
disagreeable to me, Gringoire. If I had only another one myself! I beg to say that
a luminous inspiration has just occurred to me. If I possessed an expedient for
extricating her from a dilemma, without compromising my own neck to the
extent of a single running knot, what would you say to it? Will not that suffice
you? Is it absolutely necessary that I should be hanged, in order that you may be
content?"
The priest tore out the buttons of his cassock with impatience: "Stream of
words! What is your plan?"
"Yes," resumed Gringoire, talking to himself and touching his nose with his
forefinger in sign of meditation,
"that's it!
The thieves are brave fellows!
The tribe of Egypt love her!
They will rise at the first word!
Nothing easier!
A sudden stroke.
Under cover of the disorder, they will easily carry her off!
Beginning to-morrow evening. They will ask nothing better.
"The plan! speak," cried the archdeacon shaking him.
Thesaurus
absurd: (adj) ridiculous, foolish, (adv) halfway. separation, departure, aloha; (int) bon
unreasonable, irrational, devised: (adj) invented, trumped up, voyage. ANTONYMS: (n) hello,
meaningless, inept, senseless, formulated, fabulous. salutation, welcome.
nonsensical, illogical, ludicrous; (adj, expedient: (adj) fit, advisable, knot: (n) bow, cluster, lump, gang,
n) silly. ANTONYMS: (adj) rational, becoming, desirable, adequate, apt, joint; (v) entangle, knit, bind; (n, v)
reasonable, logical, wise, weighty, convenient, suitable; (n) contrivance, tie, loop, tangle. ANTONYMS: (v)
sound, consistent, serious, plausible, resource, artifice. ANTONYMS: (adj) unravel, undo, unknot, disentangle.
credible, acceptable. inappropriate, inexpedient, tribe: (n) clan, house, race, kin, nation,
buttons: (n) bellboy, peyote. impractical, futile, detrimental, people, kindred, folk, stock, lineage,
compromising: (adj) conciliatory, inconvenient, foolish. breed.
moderate, vulnerable, awkward, farewell: (int, n) adieu; (n) bye, leave,
intermediate, flexible, inculpatory; valediction, adios, parting, goodbye,
Gringoire turned majestically towards him: "Leave me! You see that I am
composing." He meditated for a few moments more, then began to clap his hands
over his thought, crying: "Admirable! success is sure!"
"The plan!" repeated Claude in wrath.%
Gringoire was radiant.
"Come, that I may tell you that very softly. 'Tis a truly gallant counter-plot,
which will extricate us all from the matter. Pardieu, it must be admitted that I am
no fool."
He broke off.
"Oh, by the way! is the little goat with the wench?"
"Yes. The devil take you!"
"They would have hanged it also, would they not?"
"What is that to me?"
"Yes, they would have hanged it. They hanged a sow last month. The
headsman loveth that; he eats the beast afterwards. Take my pretty Djali! Poor
little lamb!"
"Malediction!" exclaimed Dom Claude. "You are the executioner. What
means of safety have you found, knave? Must your idea be extracted with the
forceps?"
"Very fine, master, this is it."
Gringoire bent his head to the archdeacon's head and spoke to him in a very
low voice, casting an uneasy glance the while from one end to the other of the
street, though no one was passing. When he had finished, Dom Claude took his
hand and said coldly : "'Tis well. Farewell until to-morrow."
"Until to-morrow," repeated Gringoire. And, while the archdeacon was
disappearing in one direction, he set off in the other, saying to himself in a low
voice: "Here's a grand affair, Monsieur Pierre Gringoire. Never mind! 'Tis not
written that because one is of small account one should take fright at a great
Thesaurus
casting: (n) cast, hurl, pouring, enfranchise, free, deliver, dislodge. ANTONYMS: (adv) hoarsely,
molding, teeming, block, Malleable ANTONYMS: (v) entangle, embroil, roughly, loudly, clearly, harshly,
castings, fling, to throw something a hamper, hinder, involve, fasten, forte, severely, strongly, heavily,
long distance, flinging, pelt. wedge. convincingly, brightly.
disappearing: (adj) vanishing, fading, glance: (n, v) look, peek, flash, peep; uneasy: (adj) anxious, fidgety, restless,
declining, weakening, diminishing; (n) gaze, glimpse, coup d'oeil, concerned, nervous, apprehensive, ill
(adv) vanishingly, off; (v) disappear; gander; (v) bounce, glint, ricochet. at ease, unquiet, awkward, fretful,
(n) going, going away, leaving. ANTONYMS: (n, v) study; (n) restive. ANTONYMS: (adj) calm,
ANTONYMS: (n) appearance, arrival; examination, perusal; (v) stick, stare. untroubled, composed, relaxed, easy,
(adj) increasing. softly: (adv) quietly, mildly, lightly, unconcerned, still, comfortable,
extricate: (v) clear, evolve, disengage, tenderly, delicately, gently, soft, carefree, confident, serene.
rid, untangle, disembarrass, absolve, quiet, silently, kindly, slowly.
Victor Hugo 491
enterprise. Bitou carried a great bull on his shoulders; the water-wagtails, the
warblers, and the buntings traverse the ocean."%
Thesaurus
bull: (n) rot, ox, hogwash, absurdity, passiveness, sloth, idleness. Phylloscopus, Passeriformes, order
bear, buck, guff, shit, male; (n, v) great: (adj) eminent, gigantic, big, Passeriformes, swallows, finches, tits,
bullshit; (adj, n) blunder. distinguished, large, extensive, genus Phylloscopus, sparrows.
ANTONYMS: (n) truth, bear. extreme, grand, chief, ample,
buntings: (n) family Fringillidae, massive. ANTONYMS: (adj) awful,
Fringillidae. insignificant, tiny, mild, poor, minor,
carried: (adj) conveyed, imported. useless, ordinary, slight, weak,
enterprise: (n) business, company, unknown.
concern, endeavor, activity, traverse: (v) travel, walk, crisscross,
adventure, energy, effort, courage, track, thwart, contradict, deny; (n, v)
venture, endeavour. ANTONYMS: journey, range; (n) crossing, traversal.
(n) lethargy, apathy, laziness, warblers: (n) rooks, robins,
Victor Hugo 493
CHAPTER II
TURN VAGABOND
On re-entering the cloister, the archdeacon found at the door of his cell his
brother Jehan du Moulin, who was waiting for him, and who had beguiled the
tedium of waiting by drawing on the wall with a bit of charcoal, a profile of his
elder brother, enriched with a monstrous nose.%
Dom Claude hardly looked at his brother; his thoughts were elsewhere. That
merry scamp's face whose beaming had so often restored serenity to the priest's
sombre physiognomy, was now powerless to melt the gloom which grew more
dense every day over that corrupted, mephitic, and stagnant soul.
"Brother," said Jehan timidly, "I am come to see you."
The archdeacon did not even raise his eyes.
"What then?"
"Brother," resumed the hypocrite, "you are so good to me, and you give me
such wise counsels that I always return to you."
"What next?"
"Alas! brother, you were perfectly right when you said to me,--"Jehan! Jehan!
cessat doctorum doctrina, discipulorum disciplina. Jehan, be wise, Jehan, be learned,
Thesaurus
beguiled: (adj) entranced, rapt, charmer, bigot, whited sepulcher, stagnant: (adj) quiet, motionless, inert,
fascinated, infatuated, enchanted, smoothie. dead, slow, still, standing, immobile,
delighted, charmed, captive, mephitic: (adj) noisome, poisonous, inactive, stagnate, stationary.
captivated. deleterious, toxic, fetid, venomous, ANTONYMS: (adj) active, moving.
corrupted: (adj) tainted, rotten, septic, odorous, smelly, rank, tedium: (n) ennui, monotony,
spoiled, degraded, adulterated, virulent. tediousness, dullness, sameness,
depraved, distorted, decayed, powerless: (adj) impotent, unable, dreariness, lifelessness, difficulty,
impaired, debased; (n) corrupter. feeble, incapable, ineffective, drabness; (adj) dull work, humdrum.
ANTONYM: (adj) pure. ineffectual, infirm, inefficient, ANTONYMS: (n) excitement,
enriched: (adj) educated. nerveless, weak, prostrate. diversion, variation, entertainment,
hypocrite: (n) impostor, pretender, ANTONYMS: (adj) powerful, strong, ease.
trickster, fraud, deceiver, fake, cheat, effective, capable, able.
Jehan, pass not the night outside of the college without lawful occasion and due
leave of the master. Cudgel not the Picards: noli, Joannes, verberare Picardos. Rot
not like an unlettered ass, quasi asinus illitteratus, on the straw seats of the school.
Jehan, allow yourself to be punished at the discretion of the master. Jehan go
every evening to chapel, and sing there an anthem with verse and orison to
Madame the glorious Virgin Mary.--Alas! what excellent advice was that!"
"And then?"
"Brother, you behold a culprit, a criminal, a wretch, a libertine, a man of
enormities! My dear brother, Jehan hath made of your counsels straw and dung
to trample under foot. I have been well chastised for it, and God is
extraordinarily just. As long as I had money, I feasted, I lead a mad and joyous
life. Oh! how ugly and crabbed behind is debauch which is so charming in front!
Now I have no longer a blank; I have sold my napery, my shirt and my towels;
no more merry life! The beautiful candle is extinguished and I have henceforth,
only a wretched tallow dip which smokes in my nose. The wenches jeer at me. I
drink water.--I am overwhelmed with remorse and with creditors.%
"The rest?" said the archdeacon.
"Alas! my very dear brother, I should like to settle down to a better life. I
come to you full of contrition, I am penitent. I make my confession. I beat my
breast violently. You are quite right in wishing that I should some day become a
licentiate and sub-monitor in the college of Torchi. At the present moment I feel
a magnificent vocation for that profession. But I have no more ink and I must
buy some; I have no more paper, I have no more books, and I must buy some.
For this purpose, I am greatly in need of a little money, and I come to you,
brother, with my heart full of contrition."
"Is that all?"
"Yes," said the scholar. "A little money."
"I have none."
Then the scholar said, with an air which was both grave and resolute: "Well,
brother, I am sorry to be obliged to tell you that very fine offers and propositions
Thesaurus
anthem: (n) song, hymn, chorale, riot. ANTONYMS: (v) upgrade, ANTONYMS: (adj) weak, uncertain,
canticle, chant, choral, carol, psalm, praise, laud, elevate, honor. uncommitted, timid, fickle, feeble,
paean, national anthem, chaunt. napery: (n) table linen, mat, damask, indecisive, flexible, flippant, hesitant,
contrition: (n) compunction, linen, napkin, tablecloth. undecided.
repentance, regret, remorse, orison: (n) invocation, intercession, trample: (v) oppress, stamp, squash,
contriteness, penance, sorrow, shame, supplication, benediction, request, crush, tread, flatten, defeat, suppress,
abrasion, attrition; (v) confrication. rogation, communion, entreaty, step, frustrate; (n) trampling.
ANTONYMS: (n) pride, apathy, commination, collect, blessing. unlettered: (adj) uneducated, ignorant,
indifference, shamelessness. resolute: (adj, n) constant, firm, fixed, unlearned, analphabetic,
debauch: (v) corrupt, debase, deprave, steady; (adj, v) determined; (adj) unenlightened, uninformed, unread,
demoralize, vitiate, violate, whore, inflexible, brave, adamant, dogged, nescient, uninstructed, uncultivated,
pollute; (n) Saturnalia, orgy; (n, v) unbending, courageous. untaught.
Victor Hugo 495
are being made to me in another quarter. You will not give me any money? No.
In that case I shall become a professional vagabond."
As he uttered these monstrous words, he assumed the mien of Ajax,
expecting to see the lightnings descend upon his head.%
The archdeacon said coldly to him,-
"Become a vagabond."
Jehan made him a deep bow, and descended the cloister stairs, whistling.
At the moment when he was passing through the courtyard of the cloister,
beneath his brother's window, he heard that window open, raised his eyes and
beheld the archdeacon's severe head emerge.
"Go to the devil!" said Dom Claude; "here is the last money which you will
get from me?"
At the same time, the priest flung Jehan a purse, which gave the scholar a big
bump on the forehead, and with which Jehan retreated, both vexed and content,
like a dog who had been stoned with marrow bones.
Thesaurus
assumed: (adj) sham, affected, bulge. ANTONYMS: (v) glide, visage, eyebrow, skull; (adv)
fictitious, fake, feigned, counterfeit, promote, sail; (n) hollow. foremost.
pretended, reputed, artificial, courtyard: (n) yard, area, square, stairs: (n) stair, ladder, staircase,
hypothetical, spurious. ANTONYMS: backyard, atrium, forecourt, bailey, stairway, flight of steps, flight, steps,
(adj) true, authentic, explicit, known, cloister, grounds, patio, quad. flight of stairs, escalator,
real, natural. emerge: (v) come out, spring, emanate, companionway, backstairs.
bones: (n) bone, frame, corpse, dry arise, transpire, surface, rise, develop, vexed: (adj) troubled, irritated, angry,
bones, framework, maraca, come forth, issue, occur. pestered, peeved, harassed, sore,
physician, finger cymbals, tymbal, ANTONYMS: (v) leave, fade, recede, harried, uneasy, cross, offended.
wreck, timbrel. sink. ANTONYMS: (adj) calm,
bump: (n, v) bang, crash, knock, jolt, forehead: (n) brow, front, foreland, uncomplicated.
clash, bash, hit, push, jar; (n) blow, lineament, mut, phiz, physiognomy,
Victor Hugo 497
CHAPTER III
LONG LIVE MIRTH
The reader has probably not forgotten that a part of the Cour de Miracles was
enclosed by the ancient wall which surrounded the city, a goodly number of
whose towers had begun, even at that epoch, to fall to ruin. One of these towers
had been converted into a pleasure resort by the vagabonds. There was a drain-
shop in the underground story, and the rest in the upper stories. This was the
most lively, and consequently the most hideous, point of the whole outcast den.
It was a sort of monstrous hive, which buzzed there night and day. At night,
when the remainder of the beggar horde slept, when there was no longer a
window lighted in the dingy façades of the Place, when not a cry was any longer
to be heard proceeding from those innumerable families, those ant-hills of
thieves, of wenches, and stolen or bastard children, the merry tower was still
recognizable by the noise which it made, by the scarlet light which, flashing
simultaneously from the air-holes, the windows, the fissures in the cracked walls,
escaped, so to speak, from its every pore.%
The cellar then, was the dram-shop. The descent to it was through a low
door and by a staircase as steep as a classic Alexandrine. Over the door, by way
of a sign there hung a marvellous daub, representing new sons and dead
Thesaurus
bastard: (adj, n) illegitimate, fake; (adj) enveloped, besieged, closed, ruin: (n) devastation, desolation; (adj,
spurious, phony, misbegotten, controlled; (v) contain; (adv) n) downfall; (v) break, consume,
bastardly, adulterine, impure; (n) herewith. ANTONYMS: (adj) demolish, destroy; (n, v) doom,
whoreson, love child, illegitimate exposed, open, pervasive, outdoor. ravage, destruction, damage.
child. ANTONYM: (adj) fathered. horde: (n) gang, crowd, crush, swarm, ANTONYMS: (v) conserve, enhance,
buzzed: (n) woozy; (adj) intoxicated, mob, drove, crew, cloud, shoal, save, restore, improve; (n, v) respect;
drunk. throng, herd. ANTONYM: (n) few. (n) making, success, triumph, rise,
daub: (n, v) smear, splotch, smudge; proceeding: (n) matter, transaction, preservation.
(v) spread, besmear, plaster, coat, affair, procedure, lawsuit, scarlet: (adj) crimson, ruddy, carmine,
bedaub, stain; (n) blot, spot. proceedings; (v) deed, act; (n, v) ruby, sanguine, rubicund, reddish,
enclosed: (adj) surrounded, bounded, measure; (adv, n) happening; (adj, adv, cerise; (n) vermilion, orange red,
covered, limited, encircled, v) going on. redness.
chickens, with this, pun below: Aux sonneurs pour les trépassés,-- The wringers for
the dead.%
One evening when the curfew was sounding from all the belfries in Paris, the
sergeants of the watch might have observed, had it been granted to them to enter
the formidable Court of Miracles, that more tumult than usual was in progress in
the vagabonds' tavern, that more drinking was being done, and louder swearing.
Outside in the Place, there, were many groups conversing in low tones, as when
some great plan is being framed, and here and there a knave crouching down
engaged in sharpening a villanous iron blade on a paving-stone.
Meanwhile, in the tavern itself, wine and gaming offered such a powerful
diversion to the ideas which occupied the vagabonds' lair that evening, that it
would have been difficult to divine from the remarks of the drinkers, what was
the matter in hand. They merely wore a gayer air than was their wont, and some
weapon could be seen glittering between the legs of each of them,--a sickle, an
axe, a big two-edged sword or the hook of an old hackbut.
The room, circular in form, was very spacious; but the tables were so thickly
set and the drinkers so numerous, that all that the tavern contained, men,
women, benches, beer-jugs, all that were drinking, all that were sleeping, all that
were playing, the well, the lame, seemed piled up pell-mell, with as much order
and harmony as a heap of oyster shells. There were a few tallow dips lighted on
the tables; but the real luminary of this tavern, that which played the part in this
dram-shop of the chandelier of an opera house, was the fire. This cellar was so
damp that the fire was never allowed to go out, even in midsummer; an
immense chimney with a sculptured mantel, all bristling with heavy iron
andirons and cooking utensils, with one of those huge fires of mixed wood and
peat which at night, in village streets make the reflection of forge windows stand
out so red on the opposite walls. A big dog gravely seated in the ashes was
turning a spit loaded with meat before the coals.
Great as was the confusion, after the first glance one could distinguish in that
multitude, three principal groups which thronged around three personages
already known to the reader. One of these personages, fantastically accoutred in
Thesaurus
chandelier: (n) candlestick, pendant, drapery, drape, curtain. sickle: (n) reaping hook, hook, elbow,
candelabrum, sconce, lustre, luster, midsummer: (n) summer, solstice, ankle, groin, fluke, knee, reap hook,
girandole, candelabra, gaselier. June solstice, June. knuckle, crotch, crane.
hackbut: (n) arquebus, hack , shooting oyster: (v) clam, ostracize, frumenty, sounding: (n) investigation, depth,
iron, shooter, shotgun, hagbut. oatmeal, chowder, damper; (n) exploration, test; (adj) resounding,
luminary: (n) celebrity, star, leading huitre, shellfish, blue point, capiz, resonant, looking, audible, sonant,
light, personality, guiding light, VIP, bluepoint. voiceful, hollow.
authority, worthy, shining light, remarks: (n) commentary, thickly: (adv) deeply, heavily, thick,
Magnus Apollo, shiner. explanation. viscously, thicksetly, solidly, dully,
mantel: (n) mantelpiece, mantlepiece, sharpening: (n) grinding, training, dumbly, compactly, closely, turbidly.
chimneypiece, lintel, mantelshelf, filing, dressing, acumination, ANTONYMS: (adv) thinly, finely,
mantle piece, mantleshelf, shelf, aggravation; (adj) abrasive. slightly, sparsely, loosely, distinctly.
Victor Hugo 499
many an oriental rag, was Mathias Hungadi Spicali, Duke of Egypt and Bohemia.
The knave was seated on a table with his legs crossed, and in a loud voice was
bestowing his knowledge of magic, both black and white, on many a gaping face
which surrounded him. Another rabble pressed close around our old friend, the
valiant King of Thunes, armed to the teeth. Clopin Trouillefou, with a very
serious air and in a low voice, was regulating the distribution of an enormous
cask of arms, which stood wide open in front of him and from whence poured
out in profusion, axes, swords, bassinets, coats of mail, broadswords, lance-
heads, arrows, and viretons, like apples and grapes from a horn of plenty. Every
one took something from the cask, one a morion, another a long, straight sword,
another a dagger with a cross-- shaped hilt. The very children were arming
themselves, and there were even cripples in bowls who, in armor and cuirass,
made their way between the legs of the drinkers, like great beetles.%
Finally, a third audience, the most noisy, the most jovial, and the most
numerous, encumbered benches and tables, in the midst of which harangued and
swore a flute-like voice, which escaped from beneath a heavy armor, complete
from casque to spurs. The individual who had thus screwed a whole outfit upon
his body, was so hidden by his warlike accoutrements that nothing was to be
seen of his person save an impertinent, red, snub nose, a rosy mouth, and bold
eyes. His belt was full of daggers and poniards, a huge sword on his hip, a
rusted cross-bow at his left, and a vast jug of wine in front of him, without
reckoning on his right, a fat wench with her bosom uncovered. All mouths
around him were laughing, cursing, and drinking.
Add twenty secondary groups, the waiters, male and female, running with
jugs on their heads, gamblers squatting over taws, merelles, dice, vachettes, the
ardent game of tringlet, quarrels in one corner, kisses in another, and the reader
will have some idea of this whole picture, over which flickered the light of a
great, flaming fire, which made a thousand huge and grotesque shadows dance
over the walls of the drinking shop.
As for the noise, it was like the inside of a bell at full peal.
Thesaurus
accoutrements: (n) accouterments, vintage. acknowledge, notice, boost, include;
trappings, paraphernalia, equipment, poured: (adj) concrete. (n) acceptance.
gear, dress, clothes, apparel, attire. profusion: (n) opulence, abundance, squatting: (adj) crouching; (n) leg
casque: (v) helm, headpiece, siege cap, prodigality, plenty, excess, exercise, colonization, movement,
carapace, cowcatcher, hauberk, cornucopia, plenitude, profuseness, knee bend; (v) couchant; (adv) asquat.
salade, scutum, morion, mask, mail. copiousness, exuberance; (adj) warlike: (adj) military, belligerent,
cuirass: (v) breastplate, fender, armor, amplitude. ANTONYMS: (n) bellicose, pugnacious, combative,
mask, thimble, shield, scutum, aegis; insufficiency, scarcity. aggressive, armigerous, hostile,
(n) coat of mail, hauberk, body snub: (n, v) repulse, insult, cut, slight, unfriendly, unpacific, militant.
armor. put down; (v) disregard, offend, ANTONYMS: (adj) harmonizing,
grapes: (v) clam, chupatty, compote, ignore, check, humiliate; (n) rebuke. friendly.
damper, fish, frumenty, chowder; (n) ANTONYMS: (v) accept,
The dripping-pan, where crackled a rain of grease, filled with its continual
sputtering the intervals of these thousand dialogues, which intermingled from
one end of the apartment to the other.%
In the midst of this uproar, at the extremity of the tavern, on the bench inside
the chimney, sat a philosopher meditating with his feet in the ashes and his eyes
on the brands. It was Pierre Gringoire.
"Be quick! make haste, arm yourselves! we set out on the march in an hour!"
said Clopin Trouillefou to his thieves.
A wench was humming,
"Bonsoir mon père et ma mere,

Les derniers couvrent le feu."
Two card players were disputing,

"Knave!" cried the reddest faced of the two, shaking his fist at the other; "I'll
mark you with the club. You can take the place of Mistigri in the pack of cards of
monseigneur the king."
"Ugh!" roared a Norman, recognizable by his nasal accent; "we are packed in
here like the saints of Caillouville!"
"My sons," the Duke of Egypt was saying to his audience, in a falsetto voice,
"sorceresses in France go to the witches' sabbath without broomsticks, or grease,
or steed, merely by means of some magic words. The witches of Italy always
have a buck waiting for them at their door. All are bound to go out through the
chimney."
The voice of the young scamp armed from head to foot, dominated the
uproar.
"Hurrah! hurrah!" he was shouting. "My first day in armor! Outcast! I am an
outcast. Give me something to drink. My friends, my name is Jehan Frollo du
Moulin, and I am a gentleman. My opinion is that if God were a gendarme, he
would turn robber. Brothers, we are about to set out on a fine expedition. Lay
Thesaurus
buck: (n) dollar, stag, beau, boar, ceasing, halting, rare, acute. (int) congratulations, bravo; (v) come;
greenback, exquisite, fop, clam, hart; crackled: (adj) alligatored, crazed, (adv) cheerfully.
(v) charge; (n, v) buck jump. barmy, damaged, crackers, chapped, nasal: (n) Nasalis, os, continuant,
ANTONYMS: (v) conform, buggy, bonkers, batty, bats, balmy. continuant consonant; (adj)
surrender; (n) female, girl. dialogues: (n) dialog. adenoidal, cadaverous, haggard,
continual: (adj, adv) constant; (adj) falsetto: (adj) alto, penny trumpet, emaciated, gaunt; (v) inarticulate,
ceaseless, incessant, endless, voce di testa, soprano, tenor. guttural.
continuous, frequent, everlasting, fist: (n, v) hand; (n) duke, clenched robber: (n) highwayman, bandit,
uninterrupted, perpetual, fist, feist, manus, grip, index; (v) mugger, outlaw, plunderer, pillager,
unrelenting, perennial. ANTONYMS: finger, paw, neif, neaf. burglar, pirate, crook, filcher, spoiler.
(adj) sporadic, temporary, occasional, hurrah: (int, n) hooray; (n) huzza, cry, yourselves: (pron) themselves, myself,
finite, inconstant, infrequent, ending, controversy, fervor, passion, praise; herself.
Victor Hugo 501
siege to the church, burst in the doors, drag out the beautiful girl, save her from
the judges, save her from the priests, dismantle the cloister, burn the bishop in
his palace-- all this we will do in less time than it takes for a burgomaster to eat a
spoonful of soup. Our cause is just, we will plunder Notre-Dame and that will
be the end of it. We will hang Quasimodo. Do you know Quasimodo, ladies?
Have you seen him make himself breathless on the big bell on a grand Pentecost
festival! Corne du Père! 'tis very fine! One would say he was a devil mounted on
a man. Listen to me, my friends; I am a vagabond to the bottom of my heart, I
am a member of the slang thief gang in my soul, I was born an independent thief.
I have been rich, and I have devoured all my property. My mother wanted to
make an officer of me; my father, a sub-deacon; my aunt, a councillor of
inquests; my grandmother, prothonotary to the king; my great aunt, a treasurer
of the short robe,-- and I have made myself an outcast. I said this to my father,
who spit his curse in my face; to my mother, who set to weeping and chattering,
poor old lady, like yonder fagot on the and-irons. Long live mirth! I am a real
Bicêtre. Waitress, my dear, more wine. I have still the wherewithal to pay. I
want no more Surène wine. It distresses my throat. I'd as lief, corboeuf! gargle
my throat with a basket."
Meanwhile, the rabble applauded with shouts of laughter; and seeing that the
tumult was increasing around him, the scholar cried,
"Oh! what a fine noise! Populi debacchantis populosa debacchatio!" Then he
began to sing, his eye swimming in ecstasy, in the tone of a canon intoning
vespers, Quoe cantica! quoe organa! quoe cantilenoe! quoe meloclioe hic sine fine
decantantur! Sonant melliflua hymnorum organa, suavissima angelorum melodia,
cantica canticorum mira! He broke off: "Tavern-keeper of the devil, give me some
supper!"
There was a moment of partial silence, during which the sharp voice of the
Duke of Egypt rose, as he gave instructions to his Bohemians.%
"The weasel is called Adrune; the fox, Blue-foot, or the Racer of the Woods;
the wolf, Gray-foot, or Gold-foot; the bear the Old Man, or Grandfather. The cap
of a gnome confers invisibility, and causes one to behold invisible things. Every
Thesaurus
councillor: (n) adviser, councilman, melancholy, depression, dejection, visibility.
council member, councilor, member. anguish, sadness, despair, agony, lief: (adj, v) leef; (adv) fain, willingly;
dismantle: (v) strip, destroy, deprive, bore. (adj) glad, acceptable.
disassemble, break up, disintegrate, gargle: (v) rinse, utter, lave, drink, melodia: (n) tune.
level, undress, tear down, take down, gargarize, gargalize; (n) solution, spoonful: (n) mouthful, handful,
take apart. ANTONYMS: (v) raise, gargarism, bath; (adj) syringe, inject. armful, cochleare, tablespoonful,
erect, build, construct, support. gnome: (n) dwarf, goblin, imp, axiom, dose, containerful, blob, capful, taste;
ecstasy: (n) delight, rapture, joy, bliss, sprite, lamia, jinn, elf, brownie, (adj) thimbleful.
delirium, happiness, trance, byword, pixie. weasel: (n) muishond, informer,
enthusiasm, exaltation, elation; (n, v) invisibility: (n) darkness, whittret, vare, troublemaker, shorttail
transport. ANTONYMS: (n) nonappearance, inconspicuousness, weasel; (v) equivocate, evade, hedge,
desolation, gloom, downheartedness, imperceptibility. ANTONYM: (n) pussyfoot, dodge.
toad that is baptized must be clad in red or black velvet, a bell on its neck, a bell
on its feet. The godfather holds its head, the godmother its hinder parts. 'Tis the
demon Sidragasum who hath the power to make wenches dance stark naked."
"By the mass!" interrupted Jehan, "I should like to be the demon Sidragasum."
Meanwhile, the vagabonds continued to arm themselves and whisper at the
other end of the dram-shop.%
"That poor Esmeralda!" said a Bohemian. "She is our sister. She must be
taken away from there."
"Is she still at Notre-Dame?" went on a merchant with the appearance of a
Jew.
"Yes, pardieu!"
"Well! comrades!" exclaimed the merchant, "to Notre-Dame! So much the
better, since there are in the chapel of Saints Féréol and Ferrution two statues, the
one of John the Baptist, the other of Saint-Antoine, of solid gold, weighing
together seven marks of gold and fifteen estellins; and the pedestals are of silver-
gilt, of seventeen marks, five ounces. I know that; I am a goldsmith."
Here they served Jehan with his supper. As he threw himself back on the
bosom of the wench beside him, he exclaimed,
"By Saint Voult-de-Lucques, whom people call Saint Goguelu, I am perfectly
happy. I have before me a fool who gazes at me with the smooth face of an
archduke. Here is one on my left whose teeth are so long that they hide his
chin. And then, I am like the Marshal de Gié at the siege of Pontoise, I have
my right resting on a hillock. Ventre- Mahom! Comrade! you have the air of a
merchant of tennis- balls; and you come and sit yourself beside me! I am a
nobleman, my friend! Trade is incompatible with nobility. Get out of that! Hola
hé! You others, don't fight! What, Baptiste Croque-Oison, you who have such a
fine nose are going to risk it against the big fists of that lout! Fool! Non cuiquam
datum est habere nasum-- not every one is favored with a nose. You are really
divine, Jacqueline Ronge-Oreille! 'tis a pity that you have no hair! Holà! my
name is Jehan Frollo, and my brother is an archdeacon. May the devil fly off with
Thesaurus
datum: (n) fact, data point, datum godmother: (n) sponsor, godchild, supper: (n) meal, tea, lunch, repast,
plane, material, given, information, godparent. reception, mealtime, siesta, social
datum horizon, datum level, hinder: (v) impede, resist, check, affair; (v) dejeuner, bever, whet.
statistics, note, reading. hamper, obstruct, curb, handicap, toad: (n) batrachian, anuran,
favored: (adj) advantaged, preferred, delay; (n, v) bar; (adj) posterior, hind. salientian, crapaud, sneak, sheep
lucky, advantageous, pet, favorite, ANTONYMS: (v) help, facilitate, frog, robber frog, spadefoot,
blessed, privileged, favorable; (adj, n) assist, prompt, encourage, promote, spadefoot toad; (v) toady; (adj) satyr.
happy, prosperous. ANTONYMS: allow, support, accelerate. weighing: (n) deliberation,
(adj) disliked, unpopular, Standard. nobleman: (n) patrician, aristocrat, consideration, think, advisement,
godfather: (n) godchild, supporter, lord, peer, marquis, nobility, speculation, quantify, weigh,
patron, godparent, godmother, grandee, baron, duke, armiger, unhurriedness, study, slowness,
gangster, executive; (v) christen. burgrave. ponderation.
Victor Hugo 503
him! All that I tell you is the truth. In turning vagabond, I have gladly
renounced the half of a house situated in paradise, which my brother had
promised me. Dimidiam domum in paradiso. I quote the text. I have a fief in the
Rue Tirechappe, and all the women are in love with me, as true as Saint Eloy was
an excellent goldsmith, and that the five trades of the good city of Paris are the
tanners, the tawers, the makers of cross-belts, the purse-makers, and the
sweaters, and that Saint Laurent was burnt with eggshells. I swear to you,
comrades.%
"Que je ne beuvrai de piment,
Devant un an, si je cy ment.
"'Tis moonlight, my charmer; see yonder through the window how the wind
is tearing the clouds to tatters! Even thus will I do to your gorget.-- Wenches,
wipe the children's noses and snuff the candles.-- Christ and Mahom! What am I
eating here, Jupiter? Ohé! innkeeper! the hair which is not on the heads of your
hussies one finds in your omelettes. Old woman! I like bald omelettes. May the
devil confound you!-- A fine hostelry of Beelzebub, where the hussies comb their
heads with the forks!
"Et je n'ai moi,

Par la sang-Dieu!
Ni foi, ni loi,
Ni feu, ni lieu,
Ni roi,
Ni Dieu."
In the meantime, Clopin Trouillefou had finished the distribution of arms.

He approached Gringoire, who appeared to be plunged in a profound revery,
with his feet on an andiron.
"Friend Pierre," said the King of Thunes, "what the devil are you thinking
about?"
Thesaurus
andiron: (n) dog, handiron, fire-dog, innkeeper: (n) victualer, landlord, snuffle, bump off, smother, snort;
gridiron, support, dogiron. Boniface, hostess, hotel keeper, (adj) tobacco, nicotine.
comb: (v) brush, ransack, search, victualler, padrone, emcee, horde. tearing: (adj) fierce, violent, vehement,
dress, eliminate, groom; (adj) weed; lieu: (n) office, position, locality, stead, furious, ripping, ferocious; (n)
(n) crest, combing, caruncle, behalf, part, role, berth, station, site, lachrymation, lacrimation, riving
currycomb. seat. ahead, tear, lancination.
goldsmith: (n) silversmith, jeweller, paradise: (n) Elysium, bliss, Eden, text: (n) copy, matter, theme, script,
artisan, craftsman, artificer, Oliver Zion, promised land, Garden of subject, words, document, lyric,
goldsmith, goldworker. Eden, Elysian Fields, ecstasy, textbook, manuscript, book.
hostelry: (n) inn, lodge, tavern, hotel, nirvana, Valhalla, utopia. wipe: (n, v) rub; (v) mop, clean, towel,
khan, caravansary, pub, public ANTONYM: (n) misery. brush, scour, scrub, clear, dry, wash;
house, saloon, imaret, club. snuff: (v) smell, kill, douse, slay, scent, (adj) sponge. ANTONYM: (v) dirty.
Gringoire turned to him with a melancholy smile.%

"I love the fire, my dear lord. Not for the trivial reason that fire warms the
feet or cooks our soup, but because it has sparks. Sometimes I pass whole hours
in watching the sparks. I discover a thousand things in those stars which are
sprinkled over the black background of the hearth. Those stars are also worlds."
"Thunder, if I understand you!" said the outcast. "Do you know what o'clock
it is?"
"I do not know," replied Gringoire.
Clopin approached the Duke of Egypt.
"Comrade Mathias, the time we have chosen is not a good one. King Louis
XI. is said to be in Paris."
"Another reason for snatching our sister from his claws," replied the old
Bohemian.
"You speak like a man, Mathias," said the King of Thunes. "Moreover, we will
act promptly. No resistance is to be feared in the church. The canons are hares,
and we are in force. The people of the parliament will be well balked to-morrow
when they come to seek her! Guts of the pope I don't want them to hang the
pretty girl!"
Chopin quitted the dram-shop.
Meanwhile, Jehan was shouting in a hoarse voice:
"I eat, I drink, I am drunk, I am Jupiter! Eh! Pierre, the Slaughterer, if you
look at me like that again, I'll fillip the dust off your nose for you."
Gringoire, torn from his meditations, began to watch the wild and noisy
scene which surrounded him, muttering between his teeth: "Luxuriosa res vinum
et tumultuosa ebrietas. Alas! what good reason I have not to drink, and how
excellently spoke Saint-Benoit: 'Vinum apostatare facit etiam sapientes!'"
At that moment, Clopin returned and shouted in a voice of thunder:
"Midnight!"
Thesaurus
balked: (adj) frustrated, baffled, hares: (n) Lagomorpha. mulligatawny, borscht, bortsch,
discouraged, at sea. hearth: (n) fire, oven, fireside, stove, borsht; (adj) emulsion.
excellently: (adv) splendidly, chimney, focus, furnace, dwelling, sprinkled: (adj) scattered, speckled,
beautifully, exquisitely, kiln, home, abode. wet, dotted.
magnificently, finely, marvelously, promptly: (adv) instantly, readily, trivial: (adj) trifling, frivolous, little,
goodly, worthily, grandly, primely, quickly, directly, rapidly, swiftly, small, commonplace, superficial,
superbly. ANTONYMS: (adv) poorly, speedily, forthwith, punctually, now, petty, paltry, inconsiderable,
badly, terribly. at once. ANTONYMS: (adv) slowly, piddling, slight. ANTONYMS: (adj)
fillip: (n) incentive, incitement, spur, late, eventually. important, vital, major, urgent,
bonus, rowel, whip, provocation, snatching: (n) capture. profound, crucial, consequential,
encouragement; (v) quicken, irritate, soup: (v) pottage, potage, drink, considerable, enormous, mature,
whet. liquor; (n) juice, gumbo, serious.
Victor Hugo 505
At this word, which produced the effect of the call to boot and saddle on a
regiment at a halt, all the outcasts, men, women, children, rushed in a mass from
the tavern, with great noise of arms and old iron implements.%
The moon was obscured.
The Cour des Miracles was entirely dark. There was not a single light. One
could make out there a throng of men and women conversing in low tones. They
could be heard buzzing, and a gleam of all sorts of weapons was visible in the
darkness. Clopin mounted a large stone.
"To your ranks, Argot!" he cried. "Fall into line, Egypt! Form ranks, Galilee!"
A movement began in the darkness. The immense multitude appeared to
form in a column. After a few minutes, the King of Thunes raised his voice once
more,
"Now, silence to march through Paris! The password is, 'Little sword in
pocket!' The torches will not be lighted till we reach Notre-Dame! Forward,
march!"
Ten minutes later, the cavaliers of the watch fled in terror before a long
procession of black and silent men which was descending towards the Pont an
Change, through the tortuous streets which pierce the close-built neighborhood
of the markets in every direction.
Thesaurus
boot: (n, v) kick; (n) boots, boundless, big, large, giant, infinite. regiment: (n) corps, battalion, legion,
Wellingtons, bang, gain, jackboot, ANTONYMS: (adj) tiny, small, host, brigade, division, multitude,
buskin, kicking, charge, shoe, insignificant, miniature, slight, cohort; (v) control, organize, regulate.
bootikin. negligible, compact, narrow, short, rushed: (adj) hurried, rush, precipitate,
halt: (n, v) stay, limp, arrest, block, minor. rapid, unexpected, hassled,
check, pause; (v) cease, discontinue, obscured: (adj) hidden, blind, covered, immediate, instant, instantaneous,
desist; (n) cessation; (adj, n, v) hold. clouded, darkened, covert, dim, quick, speedy. ANTONYMS: (adj)
ANTONYMS: (v) continue, help, intangible, unnoticed, ulterior, privy. unhurried, slow, considered, gradual.
activate, begin, mobilize, accelerate, password: (n) catchword, watchword, saddle: (v) charge, load, burden,
rise; (n) go. parole, word, signal, combination, encumber, adjure, bear down, blame;
immense: (adj) vast, enormous, great, shibboleth, secret, discussion, a (n) pillion, seat, saddleback, bicycle
gigantic, immeasurable, colossal, promise; (n, v) key. seat. ANTONYM: (v) relieve.
Victor Hugo 507
CHAPTER IV
AN AWKWARD FRIEND
That night, Quasimodo did not sleep. He had just made his last round of the
church. He had not noticed, that at the moment when he was closing the doors,
the archdeacon had passed close to him and betrayed some displeasure on seeing
him bolting and barring with care the enormous iron locks which gave to their
large leaves the solidity of a wall. Dom Claude's air was even more preoccupied
than usual. Moreover, since the nocturnal adventure in the cell, he had
constantly abused Quasimodo, but in vain did he ill treat, and even beat him
occasionally, nothing disturbed the submission, patience, the devoted
resignation of the faithful bellringer. He endured everything on the part of the
archdeacon, insults, threats, blows, without murmuring a complaint. At the
most, he gazed uneasily after Dom Claude when the latter ascended the staircase
of the tower; but the archdeacon had abstained from presenting himself again
before the gypsy's eyes.%
On that night, accordingly, Quasimodo, after having cast a glance at his poor
bells which he so neglected now, Jacqueline, Marie, and Thibauld, mounted to
the summit of the Northern tower, and there setting his dark lanturn, well
closed, upon the leads, he began to gaze at Paris. The night, as we have already
said, was very dark. Paris which, so to speak was not lighted at that epoch,
Thesaurus
abused: (adj) maltreated, physically murmur, complaint, grumble, distracted, faraway, inattentive, deep
abused, downtrodden, perverted, muttering, mutter, murmur vowel; in thought, engrossed, pensive.
dull. (adj) whispering, humming, droning, ANTONYMS: (adj) alert, carefree,
barring: (prep) besides; (n) except for, murmurous. uninterested.
excepting, except, with the exception neglected: (adj) dilapidated, solidity: (n) consistency, firmness,
of, without, with a reservation, disregarded, ignored, deserted, density, compactness, reliability,
ejection, save and except, riddance, derelict, forsaken, obsolete, rigidity, substance, consistence,
expulsion. ANTONYMS: (n) antiquated, antique, shabby, hardness; (adj, n) stiffness,
entitlement; (prep) including. unnoticed. ANTONYM: (adj) soundness. ANTONYMS: (n)
bolting: (n) sifting. salubrious. softness, hollowness, porosity,
locks: (n) hair, tresses, head of hair. preoccupied: (adj) absorbed, looseness, instability, slenderness,
murmuring: (n) murmuration, abstracted, thoughtful, lost, rapt, lightness, clearness, limpness.
presented to the eye a confused collection of black masses, cut here and there by
the whitish curve of the Seine. Quasimodo no longer saw any light with the
exception of one window in a distant edifice, whose vague and sombre profile
was outlined well above the roofs, in the direction of the Porte Sainte-Antoine.
There also, there was some one awake.%
As the only eye of the bellringer peered into that horizon of mist and night,
he felt within him an inexpressible uneasiness. For several days he had been
upon his guard. He had perceived men of sinister mien, who never took their
eyes from the young girl's asylum, prowling constantly about the church. He
fancied that some plot might be in process of formation against the unhappy
refugee. He imagined that there existed a popular hatred against her, as against
himself, and that it was very possible that something might happen soon. Hence
he remained upon his tower on the watch, "dreaming in his dream-place," as
Rabelais says, with his eye directed alternately on the cell and on Paris, keeping
faithful guard, like a good dog, with a thousand suspicions in his mind.
All at once, while he was scrutinizing the great city with that eye which
nature, by a sort of compensation, had made so piercing that it could almost
supply the other organs which Quasimodo lacked, it seemed to him that there
was something singular about the Quay de la Vieille-Pelleterie, that there was a
movement at that point, that the line of the parapet, standing out blackly against
the whiteness of the water was not straight and tranquil, like that of the other
quays, but that it undulated to the eye, like the waves of a river, or like the heads
of a crowd in motion.
This struck him as strange. He redoubled his attention. The movement
seemed to be advancing towards the City. There was no light. It lasted for some
time on the quay; then it gradually ceased, as though that which was passing
were entering the interior of the island; then it stopped altogether, and the line of
the quay became straight and motionless again.
At the moment when Quasimodo was lost in conjectures, it seemed to him
that the movement had re-appeared in the Rue du Parvis, which is prolonged
into the city perpendicularly to the façade of Notre-Dame. At length, dense as
Thesaurus
advancing: (adj) progressive, moving exact, true; (adj) close, unfailing, sustained; (adj, v) protracted,
forward, increasing, moving, dependable, devoted, sound, devout; lingering. ANTONYMS: (adj) quick,
processive, thriving, ongoing, (adj, v) constant. ANTONYMS: (adj) short, temporary.
aggressive; (n) advancement, unreliable, false, inaccurate, refugee: (n) emigrant, exile, migrant,
progression, proceeding. unfaithful, unrealistic, faithless, outcast, expatriate, deserter, stateless
dense: (adj, v) compact, close; (adj) perfidious, backstabbing, cheating, person, deportee, escapee, tax exile,
thick, crowded, deep, heavy, stupid, inexact, loose. renegade.
impenetrable, solid, crass, dim. outlined: (adj) clean-cut, clearly suspicions: (adj) entertain doubts,
ANTONYMS: (adj) insightful, bright, defined, formed, distinct, graphic. have doubts; (n) doubts, misgivings,
loose, sparse, simple, readable, prolonged: (adj) lengthy, chronic, reservations, qualms, worries, fears,
clever, intelligent, sharp, thin, alert. extended, elongated, lengthened, uncertainties.
faithful: (adj, n) accurate, correct, continuous, continued, expanded, undulated: (adj) undulatory.
Victor Hugo 509
was the darkness, he beheld the head of a column debouch from that street, and
in an instant a crowd-- of which nothing could be distinguished in the gloom
except that it was a crowd-- spread over the Place.%
This spectacle had a terror of its own. It is probable that this singular
procession, which seemed so desirous of concealing itself under profound
darkness, maintained a silence no less profound. Nevertheless, some noise must
have escaped it, were it only a trampling. But this noise did not even reach our
deaf man, and this great multitude, of which he saw hardly anything, and of
which he heard nothing, though it was marching and moving so near him,
produced upon him the effect of a rabble of dead men, mute, impalpable, lost in
a smoke. It seemed to him, that he beheld advancing towards him a fog of men,
and that he saw shadows moving in the shadow.
Then his fears returned to him, the idea of an attempt against the gypsy
presented itself once more to his mind. He was conscious, in a confused way,
that a violent crisis was approaching. At that critical moment he took counsel
with himself, with better and prompter reasoning than one would have expected
from so badly organized a brain. Ought he to awaken the gypsy? to make her
escape? Whither? The streets were invested, the church backed on the river. No
boat, no issue!-- There was but one thing to be done; to allow himself to be killed
on the threshold of Notre-Dame, to resist at least until succor arrived, if it should
arrive, and not to trouble la Esmeralda's sleep. This resolution once taken, he set
to examining the enemy with more tranquillity.
The throng seemed to increase every moment in the church square. Only, he
presumed that it must be making very little noise, since the windows on the
Place remained closed. All at once, a flame flashed up, and in an instant seven or
eight lighted torches passed over the heads of the crowd, shaking their tufts of
flame in the deep shade. Quasimodo then beheld distinctly surging in the Parvis
a frightful herd of men and women in rags, armed with scythes, pikes, billhooks
and partisans, whose thousand points glittered. Here and there black pitchforks
formed horns to the hideous faces. He vaguely recalled this populace, and
thought that he recognized all the heads who had saluted him as Pope of the
Thesaurus
backed: (adj) upheld, support, backed burning, fervor, enthusiasm, possible, potential, presumable,
up, coated, lined. combustion, sheen. feasible, hopeful, convincing,
concealing: (n) covering, concealment, impalpable: (adj) imperceptible, believable, to be expected, specious.
burial, stealing, stealth, screening, shadowy, invisible, efflorescent, ANTONYMS: (adj) improbable,
burying, screenings, activity; (adj) gritty, insubstantial, incorporeal, implausible, unbelievable.
suppressive. inscrutable, ethereal, prompter: (n) autocue, supporter,
debouch: (v) issue, disembogue, inapprehensible, elusive. tempter, call boy, helper, theater
effuse, March out, process, emerge, ANTONYMS: (adj) tangible, definite. prompter, help, device, assistant.
start, march, come out, discharge presumed: (adj) supposed, reputed, surging: (adj) rolling, billowing,
itself, extravasate. putative, understood, alleged, boiling, heaving, seething, stormy,
flame: (adj, n) fire, sweetheart; (adj, v) probable, theoretical. swelling, rising and falling; (n)
burn, glow; (n, v) flash; (n) ardour, probable: (adj) likely, plausible, foaming, wash.
Fools some months previously. One man who held a torch in one hand and a
club in the other, mounted a stone post and seemed to be haranguing them. At
the same time the strange army executed several evolutions, as though it were
taking up its post around the church. Quasimodo picked up his lantern and
descended to the platform between the towers, in order to get a nearer view, and
to spy out a means of defence.%
Clopin Trouillefou, on arriving in front of the lofty portal of Notre-Dame had,
in fact, ranged his troops in order of battle. Although he expected no resistance,
he wished, like a prudent general, to preserve an order which would permit him
to face, at need, a sudden attack of the watch or the police. He had accordingly
stationed his brigade in such a manner that, viewed from above and from a
distance, one would have pronounced it the Roman triangle of the battle of
Ecnomus, the boar's head of Alexander or the famous wedge of Gustavus
Adolphus. The base of this triangle rested on the back of the Place in such a
manner as to bar the entrance of the Rue du Parvis; one of its sides faced Hôtel-
Dieu, the other the Rue Saint-Pierre-aux-Boeufs. Clopin Trouillefou had placed
himself at the apex with the Duke of Egypt, our friend Jehan, and the most
daring of the scavengers.
An enterprise like that which the vagabonds were now undertaking against
Notre-Dame was not a very rare thing in the cities of the Middle Ages. What we
now call the "police" did not exist then. In populous cities, especially in capitals,
there existed no single, central, regulating power. Feudalism had constructed
these great communities in a singular manner. A city was an assembly of a
thousand seigneuries, which divided it into compartments of all shapes and
sizes. Hence, a thousand conflicting establishments of police; that is to say, no
police at all. In Paris, for example, independently of the hundred and forty-one
lords who laid claim to a manor, there were five and twenty who laid claim to a
manor and to administering justice, from the Bishop of Paris, who had five
hundred streets, to the Prior of Notre- Dame des Champs, who had four. All
these feudal justices recognized the suzerain authority of the king only in name.
All possessed the right of control over the roads. All were at home. Louis XI.,
Thesaurus
administering: (adj) administrative; compatible, parallel, peaceful, reckless, spendthrift, stupid, careless,
(n) administration. harmonious, corresponding, unwise, unsafe, tactless.
apex: (n) top, peak, vertex, crown, agreeing, agreeable, congruous. regulating: (adj) regulatory,
acme, apices, extremity, height, constructed: (adj) made, formed, controlling, changeable, restrictive;
summit, pinnacle, point. synthetic. (n) regulation, limitation, indexation,
ANTONYMS: (n) base, nadir, trough, establishments: (n) establishment. adjustment, ordinance,
bottom, abyss, depth. haranguing: (n) declamation. autoregulation, regularisation.
conflicting: (adj) repugnant, opposed, prudent: (adj, v) discreet; (adj) ANTONYM: (adj) fixed.
incompatible, clashing, inconsistent, cautious, circumspect, reasonable, wedge: (v) compress, jam, pack, ram,
opposite, contrary, divergent, chary, economical, careful, frugal, stuff, lodge; (n) chock, shim, slice,
adverse, paradoxical; (v) antagonistic. deliberate, advisable, canny. cuneus; (n, v) stick. ANTONYMS: (v)
ANTONYMS: (adj) consistent, ANTONYMS: (adj) imprudent, dislodge, remove; (n) whole.
Victor Hugo 511
that %indefatigable worker, who so largely began the demolition of the feudal
edifice, continued by Richelieu and Louis XIV. for the profit of royalty, and
finished by Mirabeau for the benefit of the people,--Louis XI. had certainly made
an effort to break this network of seignories which covered Paris, by throwing
violently across them all two or three troops of general police. Thus, in 1465, an
order to the inhabitants to light candles in their windows at nightfall, and to shut
up their dogs under penalty of death; in the same year, an order to close the
streets in the evening with iron chains, and a prohibition to wear daggers or
weapons of offence in the streets at night. But in a very short time, all these
efforts at communal legislation fell into abeyance. The bourgeois permitted the
wind to blow out their candles in the windows, and their dogs to stray; the iron
chains were stretched only in a state of siege; the prohibition to wear daggers
wrought no other changes than from the name of the Rue Coupe-Gueule to the
name of the Rue-Coupe-Gorge which is an evident progress. The old scaffolding
of feudal jurisdictions remained standing; an immense aggregation of bailiwicks
and seignories crossing each other all over the city, interfering with each other,
entangled in one another, enmeshing each other, trespassing on each other; a
useless thicket of watches, sub-watches and counter-watches, over which, with
armed force, passed brigandage, rapine, and sedition. Hence, in this disorder,
deeds of violence on the part of the populace directed against a palace, a hotel, or
house in the most thickly populated quarters, were not unheard-of occurrences.
In the majority of such cases, the neighbors did not meddle with the matter
unless the pillaging extended to themselves. They stopped up their ears to the
musket shots, closed their shutters, barricaded their doors, allowed the matter to
be concluded with or without the watch, and the next day it was said in Paris,
"Etienne Barbette was broken open last night. The Marshal de Clermont was
seized last night, etc." Hence, not only the royal habitations, the Louvre, the
Palace, the Bastille, the Tournelles, but simply seignorial residences, the Petit-
Bourbon, the Hôtel de Sens, the Hôtel d' Angoulême, etc., had battlements on
their walls, and machicolations over their doors. Churches were guarded by
their sanctity. Some, among the number Notre-Dame, were fortified. The Abbey
of Saint-German-des-Pres was castellated like a baronial mansion, and more
Thesaurus
abeyance: (n) inaction, waiting, battlemented, casemated, crenellated; despoliation, plundering, rapine,
interruption, suspense, cessation, (v) machicolated, loopholed; (n) robbery, spoliation, despoilment,
pause, reprieve, intermission, fancier. loot.
stoppage, inactiveness; (v) meddle: (v) intervene, interfere, rapine: (n) rape, plunder, pillage,
interregnum. ANTONYMS: (n) intrude, monkey, interpose, fiddle, brigandage, robbery, pillaging,
action, activity, continuance, pry, dabble, interlope; (n) despoliation, rapacity, raven,
continuation, prolongation, revival. interference; (adj) moil. ANTONYM: despoilment; (v) razzia.
barricaded: (adj) blockaded. (v) disregard. unheard-of: (adj) extraordinary,
brigandage: (v) rapine, foray, razzia, musket: (n) fusil, blunderbuss, gun, unknown, wonderful, unlikely,
raid; (n) highway robbery, rifle. unimaginable, uncanny, outlandish,
depredation, brigandism. pillaging: (adj) looting, marauding, unaccountable, obscure, nameless,
castellated: (adj) castled, crenelated, predatory; (n) depredation, inconceivable.
brass expended about it in bombards than in bells. Its fortress was still to be
seen in 1610. To-day, barely its church remains.%
Let us return to Notre-Dame.
When the first arrangements were completed, and we must say, to the honor
of vagabond discipline, that Clopin's orders were executed in silence, and with
admirable precision, the worthy chief of the band, mounted on the parapet of the
church square, and raised his hoarse and surly voice, turning towards Notre-
Dame, and brandishing his torch whose light, tossed by the wind, and veiled
every moment by its own smoke, made the reddish façade of the church appear
and disappear before the eye.
"To you, Louis de Beaumont, bishop of Paris, counsellor in the Court of
Parliament, I, Clopin Trouillefou, king of Thunes, grand Coësre, prince of Argot,
bishop of fools, I say: Our sister, falsely condemned for magic, hath taken refuge
in your church, you owe her asylum and safety. Now the Court of Parliament
wishes to seize her once more there, and you consent to it; so that she would be
hanged to-morrow in the Grève, if God and the outcasts were not here. If your
church is sacred, so is our sister; if our sister is not sacred, neither is your church.
That is why we call upon you to return the girl if you wish to save your church,
or we will take possession of the girl again and pillage the church, which will be
a good thing. In token of which I here plant my banner, and may God preserve
you, bishop of Paris,"
Quasimodo could not, unfortunately, hear these words uttered with a sort of
sombre and savage majesty. A vagabond presented his banner to Clopin, who
planted it solemnly between two paving-stones. It was a pitchfork from whose
points hung a bleeding quarter of carrion meat.
That done, the King of Thunes turned round and cast his eyes over his army,
a fierce multitude whose glances flashed almost equally with their pikes. After a
momentary pause,-- "Forward, my Sons!" he cried; "to work, locksmiths!"
Thirty bold men, square shouldered, and with pick-lock faces, stepped from
the ranks, with hammers, pincers, and bars of iron on their shoulders. They
betook themselves to the principal door of the church, ascended the steps, and
Thesaurus
bleeding: (adj) bloody, gory, blasted; falsely: (adv) incorrectly, fraudulently, ANTONYMS: (n) austerity,
(n) haemorrhage, bloodletting, deceptively, dishonestly, wrongly, simplicity.
runout, cupping, leeches, erroneously, misleadingly, pillage: (n, v) loot, ransack, spoil, rape;
venesection, phlebotomy; (v) bleed. deceitfully, unfaithfully, spuriously, (v) despoil, harry, rob, rifle; (n)
brandishing: (n) flourish. fictitiously. ANTONYMS: (adv) depredation, despoliation,
carrion: (n) carcass, offal, dead body, honestly, truthfully, faithfully, devastation.
corpse, filth, ket, any filth, caroigne; authentically, correctly, naturally, pitchfork: (v) bolt, fulminate, drive,
(adj) garbage. rightly. sling, branch; (n) hayfork, hand tool,
expended: (adj) spent, finished, dead, majesty: (adj, n) grandeur, splendor, shakefork.
departed, unpursed, bypast, bygone, nobility; (n) dignity, loftiness, wishes: (n) desires, requirements,
deceased, gone, completely magnificence, stateliness, greatness, requests, needs, will.
exhausted; (v) expending. king, royalty, highness.
Victor Hugo 513
were soon to be seen squatting under the arch, working at the door with pincers
and levers; a throng of vagabonds followed them to help or look on. The eleven
steps before the portal were covered with them.%
But the door stood firm. "The devil! 'tis hard and obstinate!" said one. "It is
old, and its gristles have become bony," said another. "Courage, comrades!"
resumed Clopin. "I wager my head against a dipper that you will have opened
the door, rescued the girl, and despoiled the chief altar before a single beadle is
awake. Stay! I think I hear the lock breaking up."
Clopin was interrupted by a frightful uproar which resounded behind him
at that moment. He wheeled round. An enormous beam had just fallen from
above; it had crushed a dozen vagabonds on the pavement with the sound of a
cannon, breaking in addition, legs here and there in the crowd of beggars, who
sprang aside with cries of terror. In a twinkling, the narrow precincts of the
church parvis were cleared. The locksmiths, although protected by the deep
vaults of the portal, abandoned the door and Clopin himself retired to a
respectful distance from the church.
"I had a narrow escape!" cried Jehan. "I felt the wind, of it, tête-de-boeuf! but
Pierre the Slaughterer is slaughtered!"
It is impossible to describe the astonishment mingled with fright which fell
upon the ruffians in company with this beam.
They remained for several minutes with their eyes in the air, more dismayed
by that piece of wood than by the king's twenty thousand archers.
"Satan!" muttered the Duke of Egypt, "this smacks of magic!"
"'Tis the moon which threw this log at us," said Andry the Red.
"Call the moon the friend of the Virgin, after that!" went on Francois
Chanteprune.
"A thousand popes!" exclaimed Clopin, "you are all fools!" But he did not
know how to explain the fall of the beam.
Meanwhile, nothing could be distinguished on the façade, to whose summit
the light of the torches did not reach. The heavy beam lay in the middle of the
Thesaurus
altar: (n) shrine, Communion table, crushing. ANTONYMS: (adj) horrified, startled, discouraged,
sanctuary, table, structure, sanctum victorious, euphoric. disheartened, upset, downhearted,
sanctorum, sacristy, construction, despoiled: (adj) plundered, looted, afraid, downcast, dejected.
examination hall, holy of Holies. desecrated, sacked, assaulted, ANTONYMS: (adj) composed,
cannon: (n) clash, carom, gun, shank, besmirched, corrupted, desolate, enthusiastic, happy, unabashed,
basilisk, gun of position, carambole, desolated, destroyed, dishonored. cheerful.
carronade, culverin, field piece, ANTONYM: (adj) untarnished. parvis: (n) courtyard, Pervis.
howitzer. dipper: (n) shovel, spoon, Big Dipper, precincts: (n) entourage, arena,
crushed: (adj) beaten, subdued, low, scoop, butterball, bufflehead, Little outskirts, neighbourhood, walk,
conquered, flattened, dispirited, Dipper, plough, duck, oscine, neighborhood, proximity,
compressed, overwhelmed, thimble. surroundings, vicinity, limitations,
shattered; (v) victimized; (n) dismayed: (adj) aghast, shocked, suburbs.
enclosure, and groans were heard from the poor wretches who had received its
first shock, and who had been almost cut in twain, on the angle of the stone
steps.%
The King of Thunes, his first amazement passed, finally found an explanation
which appeared plausible to his companions.
"Throat of God! are the canons defending themselves? To the sack, then! to
the sack!"
"To the sack!" repeated the rabble, with a furious hurrah. A discharge of
crossbows and hackbuts against the front of the church followed.
At this detonation, the peaceable inhabitants of the surrounding houses woke
up; many windows were seen to open, and nightcaps and hands holding candles
appeared at the casements.
"Fire at the windows," shouted Clopin. The windows were immediately
closed, and the poor bourgeois, who had hardly had time to cast a frightened
glance on this scene of gleams and tumult, returned, perspiring with fear to their
wives, asking themselves whether the witches' sabbath was now being held in
the parvis of Notre-Dame, or whether there was an assault of Burgundians, as in
'64. Then the husbands thought of theft; the wives, of rape; and all trembled.
"To the sack!" repeated the thieves' crew; but they dared not approach. They
stared at the beam, they stared at the church. The beam did not stir, the edifice
preserved its calm and deserted air; but something chilled the outcasts.
"To work, locksmiths!" shouted Trouillefou. "Let the door be forced!"
No one took a step.
"Beard and belly!" said Clopin, "here be men afraid of a beam."
An old locksmith addressed him
"Captain, 'tis not the beam which bothers us, 'tis the door, which is all
covered with iron bars. Our pincers are powerless against it."
"What more do you want to break it in?" demanded Clopin.
"Ah! we ought to have a battering ram."
Thesaurus
beam: (n) ray, timber, balance beam; (adj, n, v) burst. ANTONYMS: (v) improbably, untenable.
(n, v) blaze, glow, flash, smile; (adj, v) hire, load, hold, detain, convict, sack: (v) plunder, dismiss, ransack,
shine; (v) grin, air, radiate. delegate, charge, assign, enlist, despoil, rob; (n, v) bag, discharge,
ANTONYMS: (n, v) scowl; (v) incarcerate; (n) burdening. fire; (n) pocket, sac, pouch.
darken, dim, dull, frown; (n) locksmith: (n) wheelwright, smith, ANTONYMS: (v) hire, detain.
darkness. sailmaker. theft: (n) stealing, larceny, thievery,
defending: (v) defend; (adj) caring, plausible: (adj) credible, likely, burglary, embezzlement, thieving,
shielding, protective, opposed, convincing, acceptable, feasible, peculation, defalcation, depredation,
protecting; (n) patrol. probable, reasonable, ostensible, latrociny, misappropriation.
discharge: (n) dismissal; (adj, v) acquit, imaginable, oily; (adj, v) specious. ANTONYM: (n) return.
deliver, bounce; (v) clear, complete, ANTONYMS: (adj) implausible, wives: (n) woman.
eject, absolve, cashier; (n, v) drain; unlikely, unbelievable, improbable,
Victor Hugo 515
The King of Thunes ran boldly to the formidable beam, and placed his foot
upon it: "Here is one!" he exclaimed; "'tis the canons who send it to you." And,
making a mocking salute in the direction of the church, "Thanks, canons!"
This piece of bravado produced its effects,-- the spell of the beam was broken.
The vagabonds recovered their courage; soon the heavy joist, raised like a
feather by two hundred vigorous arms, was flung with fury against the great
door which they had tried to batter down. At the sight of that long beam, in the
half-light which the infrequent torches of the brigands spread over the Place,
thus borne by that crowd of men who dashed it at a run against the church, one
would have thought that he beheld a monstrous beast with a thousand feet
attacking with lowered head the giant of stone.%
At the shock of the beam, the half metallic door sounded like an immense
drum; it was not burst in, but the whole cathedral trembled, and the deepest
cavities of the edifice were heard to echo.
At the same moment, a shower of large stones began to fall from the top of
the façade on the assailants.
"The devil!" cried Jehan, "are the towers shaking their balustrades down on
our heads?"
But the impulse had been given, the King of Thunes had set the example.
Evidently, the bishop was defending himself, and they only battered the door
with the more rage, in spite of the stones which cracked skulls right and left.
It was remarkable that all these stones fell one by one; but they followed each
other closely. The thieves always felt two at a time, one on their legs and one on
their heads. There were few which did not deal their blow, and a large layer of
dead and wounded lay bleeding and panting beneath the feet of the assailants
who, now grown furious, replaced each other without intermission. The long
beam continued to belabor the door, at regular intervals, like the clapper of a
bell, the stones to rain down, the door to groan.
The reader has no doubt divined that this unexpected resistance which had
exasperated the outcasts came from Quasimodo.
Thesaurus
batter: (v) hammer, baste, break, club, modesty. intermission: (n) rest, pause, lull,
slam, beat, mangle, buffet, smite, exasperated: (adj) incensed, annoyed, cessation, suspension, interruption,
pound; (n) batsman. enraged, angered, indignant, mad, abeyance, disruption, gap,
belabor: (v) thrash, beat, pound, irate, irritated, cheesed off, testy; (adj, discontinuance, respite. ANTONYM:
trounce, beat soundly, belabour, prep) provoked. ANTONYM: (adj) (n) continuation.
criticize, criticise, beat up; (n) buffet; pleased. joist: (n) girder, rafter, scaffold, gist,
(n, v) pelt. feather: (n) pen, feathering, pinion, Travis, trave, summer, baulk,
bravado: (n) boast, bluster, nib, plumage, quill, kind, spline; (n, crossbeam, stanchion, crossbar.
braggadocio, bluff, bragging, v) plume; (adj, n, v) fringe; (v) fledge. salute: (v) greet, hail, kiss, accost,
swagger, defiance, ostentation, groan: (n, v) grumble, murmur, cry, acknowledge, buss; (n) salutation,
bravery, talk, swaggering. sigh, mutter, squeak, rumble, scrape; bow, salaam; (n, v) address,
ANTONYMS: (n) restraint, humility, (v) howl, complain; (n) complaint. compliment.
Chance had, unfortunately, favored the brave deaf man.%

When he had descended to the platform between the towers, his ideas were
all in confusion. He had run up and down along the gallery for several minutes
like a madman, surveying from above, the compact mass of vagabonds ready to
hurl itself on the church, demanding the safety of the gypsy from the devil or
from God. The thought had occurred to him of ascending to the southern belfry
and sounding the alarm, but before he could have set the bell in motion, before
Marie's voice could have uttered a single clamor, was there not time to burst in
the door of the church ten times over? It was precisely the moment when the
locksmiths were advancing upon it with their tools. What was to be done?
All at once, he remembered that some masons had been at work all day
repairing the wall, the timber-work, and the roof of the south tower. This was a
flash of light. The wall was of stone, the roof of lead, the timber-work of wood.
(That prodigious timber-work, so dense that it was called "the forest.")
Quasimodo hastened to that tower. The lower chambers were, in fact, full of
materials. There were piles of rough blocks of stone, sheets of lead in rolls,
bundles of laths, heavy beams already notched with the saw, heaps of plaster.
Time was pressing, The pikes and hammers were at work below. With a
strength which the sense of danger increased tenfold, he seized one of the
beams-- the longest and heaviest; he pushed it out through a loophole, then,
grasping it again outside of the tower, he made it slide along the angle of the
balustrade which surrounds the platform, and let it fly into the abyss. The
enormous timber, during that fall of a hundred and sixty feet, scraping the wall,
breaking the carvings, turned many times on its centre, like the arm of a
windmill flying off alone through space. At last it reached the ground, the
horrible cry arose, and the black beam, as it rebounded from the pavement,
resembled a serpent leaping.
Quasimodo beheld the outcasts scatter at the fall of the beam, like ashes at the
breath of a child. He took advantage of their fright, and while they were fixing a
superstitious glance on the club which had fallen from heaven, and while they
were putting out the eyes of the stone saints on the front with a discharge of
Thesaurus
clamor: (n, v) outcry, cry, clamour, disperse, dispel, disseminate, measurement, investigation,
hullabaloo, roar, shout; (n) noise, distribute, break up, dissipate, triangulation; (v) inspect, examine;
racket, uproar, exclamation, hubbub. sprinkle, circulate, diffuse. (adj) observant.
ANTONYMS: (n) silence, serenity, ANTONYMS: (v) collect, reform, tenfold: (adj) decuple, decimal, tenth,
tranquility; (v) whisper, mutter. attract, concentrate. containing ten.
plaster: (n) mortar, paste, gum, glue, scraping: (n) scrape, scratching, windmill: (n) wind generator,
bandage, cataplasm; (v) daub, paint; scratch, rub, sizing, rament, incision, whirligig, aerogenerator, screw,
(n, v) cement, stucco, poultice. mark, prick; (v) rubbing; (adj) grating. Rollingstone, wind turbine, wheel,
ANTONYM: (v) uncover. superstitious: (adj) superstition, false, wind engine, grinder, wind machine,
repairing: (n) repair, adjustment; (adj) groundless, eerie, irrational, pinwheel.
remedial. fallacious.
scatter: (n, v) spread, spray; (v) surveying: (n) mensuration,
Victor Hugo 517
arrows and buckshot, Quasimodo was silently piling up plaster, stones, and
rough blocks of stone, even the sacks of tools belonging to the masons, on the
edge of the balustrade from which the beam had already been hurled.%
Thus, as soon as they began to batter the grand door, the shower of rough
blocks of stone began to fall, and it seemed to them that the church itself was
being demolished over their heads.
Any one who could have beheld Quasimodo at that moment would have
been frightened. Independently of the projectiles which he had piled upon the
balustrade, he had collected a heap of stones on the platform itself. As fast as the
blocks on the exterior edge were exhausted, he drew on the heap. Then he
stooped and rose, stooped and rose again with incredible activity. His huge
gnome's head bent over the balustrade, then an enormous stone fell, then
another, then another. From time to time, he followed a fine stone with his eye,
and when it did good execution, he said, "Hum!"
Meanwhile, the beggars did not grow discouraged. The thick door on which
they were venting their fury had already trembled more than twenty times
beneath the weight of their oaken battering-ram, multiplied by the strength of a
hundred men. The panels cracked, the carved work flew into splinters, the
hinges, at every blow, leaped from their pins, the planks yawned, the wood
crumbled to powder, ground between the iron sheathing. Fortunately for
Quasimodo, there was more iron than wood.
Nevertheless, he felt that the great door was yielding. Although he did not
hear it, every blow of the ram reverberated simultaneously in the vaults of the
church and within it. From above he beheld the vagabonds, filled with triumph
and rage, shaking their fists at the gloomy façade; and both on the gypsy's
account and his own he envied the wings of the owls which flitted away above
his head in flocks.
His shower of stone blocks was not sufficient to repel the assailants.
At this moment of anguish, he noticed, a little lower down than the
balustrade whence he was crushing the thieves, two long stone gutters which
discharged immediately over the great door; the internal orifice of these gutters
Thesaurus
buckshot: (n) pellet, bird shot, slug, decayed, ruinous, razed, lost, ANTONYMS: (v) draw, charm,
interference, projectile, cartridge, dismantled. welcome, incline, yield, please,
bullet, ammunition, shotgun shell, orifice: (n) mouth, gap, hole, aperture, delight.
shell, duck shot. vent, port, puncture, inlet, muzzle, sheathing: (n) casing, overlay,
crumbled: (adj) rotten, fragmented. chops, nozzle. overlayer, skin, sheeting, covering,
crushing: (adj) overpowering, piling: (n) pile, stacking, pillar, spile, cover, cladding, involucrum,
overwhelming, destructive; (n) heap, buttress, caking, stack, stilt, planking, lagging.
grinding, quelling, stifling, cumulus, mess. venting: (n) discharge, run, release,
suppression, flattening, pressure; (v) projectiles: (n) archery. firing, sack, sacking, firing off,
shatter; (adv) crushingly. repel: (v) nauseate, revolt, disgust, electric arc, spark, expelling; (adj)
ANTONYMS: (adj) mild, wonderful. repulse, sicken, rebuff, decline, vocal.
demolished: (adj) destroyed, baneful, displease, drive back, reject, refuse.
terminated on the pavement of the platform. An idea occurred to him; he ran in

search of a fagot in his bellringer's den, placed on this fagot a great many
bundles of laths, and many rolls of lead, munitions which he had not employed
so far, and having arranged this pile in front of the hole to the two gutters, he set
it on fire with his lantern.%
During this time, since the stones no longer fell, the outcasts ceased to gaze
into the air. The bandits, panting like a pack of hounds who are forcing a boar
into his lair, pressed tumultuously round the great door, all disfigured by the
battering ram, but still standing. They were waiting with a quiver for the great
blow which should split it open. They vied with each other in pressing as close
as possible, in order to dash among the first, when it should open, into that
opulent cathedral, a vast reservoir where the wealth of three centuries had been
piled up. They reminded each other with roars of exultation and greedy lust, of
the beautiful silver crosses, the fine copes of brocade, the beautiful tombs of
silver gilt, the great magnificences of the choir, the dazzling festivals, the
Christmasses sparkling with torches, the Easters sparkling with sunshine,-- all
those splendid solemneties wherein chandeliers, ciboriums, tabernacles, and
reliquaries, studded the altars with a crust of gold and diamonds. Certainly, at
that fine moment, thieves and pseudo sufferers, doctors in stealing, and
vagabonds, were thinking much less of delivering the gypsy than of pillaging
Notre-Dame. We could even easily believe that for a goodly number among
them la Esmeralda was only a pretext, if thieves needed pretexts.
All at once, at the moment when they were grouping themselves round the
ram for a last effort, each one holding his breath and stiffening his muscles in
order to communicate all his force to the decisive blow, a howl more frightful
still than that which had burst forth and expired beneath the beam, rose among
them. Those who did not cry out, those who were still alive, looked. Two
streams of melted lead were falling from the summit of the edifice into the
thickest of the rabble. That sea of men had just sunk down beneath the boiling
metal, which had made, at the two points where it fell, two black and smoking
holes in the crowd, such as hot water would make in snow. Dying men, half
Thesaurus
exultation: (n) jubilation, joy, delight, party, sort. reservoir: (n) fountain, well, store,
ecstasy, elation, rejoicing, revelling, lust: (n, v) desire, hunger, itch; (n) pool, lake, repository, receptacle,
transport, joyousness, bliss, glee. craving, greed, libido, lecherousness, basin, repertory, bank, supply.
ANTONYMS: (n) depression, cupidity, lewdness; (v) covet, crave. stiffening: (n) stiffness, rigidification,
desolation, misery, sorrow. munitions: (n) ordnance, arms, reinforcement, process, rigidifying,
gilt: (n) gilding, plating, money, weapons, military stores, armaments, procedure.
decoration; (adj) aureate, golden, artillery, guns, gun, military supplies, tabernacles: (n) Feast of Tabernacles,
gold, florid; (v) tesselated, ornate, ordnance stores, defense. Feast of Booths.
rich. pseudo: (adj, n) fake, phony; (adj, v) terminated: (adj) complete, all over,
grouping: (n) group, class, mock; (adj) false, artificial, bogus, over, extinct, accomplished, closed,
arrangement, association, collection, imitation, imitative; (adj, n, v) sham; highly skilled; (adj, adv) ended,
category, disposition, order, union, (n) pseud, phoney. finished, done; (adv) completed.
Victor Hugo 519
consumed and groaning with anguish, could be seen writhing there. Around
these two principal streams there were drops of that horrible rain, which
scattered over the assailants and entered their skulls like gimlets of fire. It was a
heavy fire which overwhelmed these wretches with a thousand hailstones.%
The outcry was heartrending. They fled pell-mell, hurling the beam upon the
bodies, the boldest as well as the most timid, and the parvis was cleared a second
time.
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.
Thesaurus
beacon: (n, v) guide; (n) cairn, flare, infinity, bulk, largeness, infiniteness, Amphibia, Congo snakes, family
pharos, lighthouse, signal, light, infinitude, vastness, grandeur, Salamandridae, frogs, order Caudata,
watchtower, beacon light, buoy, sign. grandness. ANTONYM: (n) lightness. Salamandridae, amphibia, newts.
disordered: (adj) chaotic, upset, sick, outcry: (n, v) clamor, exclaim, call, vomiting: (n) emesis, vomit,
disorganized, broken, incoherent, shout, vociferation; (n) noise, disgorgement, regurgitation, puking,
deranged, messy, disjointed, exclamation, din, uproar, commotion, nausea, puke, spewing, sickness, sick,
disconnected, ill. ANTONYMS: (adj) racket. ANTONYM: (n) acceptance. rumination.
neat, ordered, organized, arranged, puffed: (adj) puff, bloated, distended, woodcutter: (n) farmer, cultivator,
quiet, regulated, systematic, puffy, tumid, turgid, swell, lumberjack, lumberman, Bushman,
systematized, straightforward, tidy. breathless, bepuffed, overflowing, forester, hunter, laborer, labourer,
immensity: (n) greatness, out of breath. backwoodsman, sportsman.
enormousness, immenseness, salamanders: (n) caecilians, class
A terrified silence ensued among the outcasts, during which nothing was
heard, but the cries of alarm of the canons shut up in their cloister, and more
uneasy than horses in a burning stable, the furtive sound of windows hastily
opened and still more hastily closed, the internal hurly-burly of the houses and
of the Hôtel-Dieu, the wind in the flame, the last death-rattle of the dying, and
the continued crackling of the rain of lead upon the pavement.%
In the meanwhile, the principal vagabonds had retired beneath the porch of
the Gondelaurier mansion, and were holding a council of war.
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.
The Bohemian tossed his head. "I tell you, that 'tis the spirit Sabnac, the
grand marquis, the demon of fortifications. He has the form of an armed soldier,
the head of a lion. Sometimes he rides a hideous horse. He changes men into
stones, of which he builds towers. He commands fifty legions 'Tis he indeed; I
recognize him. Sometimes he is clad in a handsome golden robe, figured after
the Turkish fashion."
"Where is Bellevigne de l'Etoile?" demanded Clopin.
"He is dead."
Thesaurus
commands: (n) orders, instructions, v) warm; (adj, adv) aglow. marquis: (n) lord, marquisate, noble,
information, guidelines. ANTONYMS: (adj) pale, wan, margrave, nobleman, Donald Robert
crackling: (adj, n) crisp; (adj) snapping, unhappy, unenthusiastic, derogatory, perry marquis, don marquis, Markis.
crepitant, cheerful, brittle, noisy; (n) dispassionate, unwell. phantasmagorical: (adj) surrealistic,
crepitation, decrepitation, hastily: (adv) hurriedly, rapidly, dreamy, fantastic, dreamlike, surreal.
crackleware, crackle China, quickly, rashly, promptly, suddenly, sham: (adj, adv, n, v) counterfeit; (adj,
bohemian crackle. thoughtlessly, impetuously, swiftly, n, v) fake; (adj, v) pretend, put on;
demanded: (adj) urgent, popular, imprudently, speedily. ANTONYMS: (adj, n) imitation, phony; (v) feign;
requisitory. (adv) carefully, unhurriedly, (adj) false; (n) fraud, impostor,
glowing: (adj, n) enthusiastic, cordial, industriously, sensibly, prudently, falsehood. ANTONYMS: (adj, v) real;
passionate; (adj) burning, fervent, late, calmly, thoroughly, patiently, (n) original, truth, truthfulness,
blazing, flaming, fiery, dazzling; (adj, gradually, cautiously. honesty; (adj) valid.
Victor Hugo 521
Andry the Red laughed in an idiotic way: "Notre-Dame is making work for
the hospital," said he.%
"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."
"Must we then retreat in pitiful fashion, like highwaymen?" said Clopin.
"Must we leave our sister here, whom those hooded wolves will hang to-
morrow."
"And the sacristy, where there are wagon-loads of gold!" added a vagabond,
whose name, we regret to say, we do not know.
"Beard of Mahom!" cried Trouillefou.
"Let us make another trial," resumed the vagabond.
Mathias Hungadi shook his head.
"We shall never get in by the door. We must find the defect in the armor of
the old fairy; a hole, a false postern, some joint or other."
"Who will go with me?" said Clopin. "I shall go at it again. By the way,
where is the little scholar Jehan, who is so encased in iron?"
"He is dead, no doubt," some one replied; "we no longer hear his laugh."
The King of Thunes frowned: "So much the worse. There was a brave heart
under that ironmongery. And Master Pierre Gringoire?"
"Captain Clopin," said Andry the Red, "he slipped away before we reached
the Pont-aux-Changeurs,"
Thesaurus
boiling: (adj) hot, ebullient, heated, (v) uphold, remain, join, embrace. atomic number, morning star.
burning, scalding, torrid, humid; (adj, facade: (n) appearance, outside, face, postern: (n) gate, ostiary, portal,
v) effervescent; (v) seethe, effervesce; front, veneer, pretense, disguise, porch, wicket, vestibule, trapdoor,
(n) ebullience. ANTONYMS: (adj) surface, guise, semblance, threshold, back door; (adj, n) rear;
cold, happy, frozen, cooled, cool, frontispiece. ANTONYMS: (n) (adj) side.
collected, calm, fresh, airy. interior, substance, rear, genuine. streak: (n, v) ray, dash, mark, flash;
defect: (adj, n) blemish, imperfection, ironmongery: (n) hardware, shop, (adj, n) stripe; (n) band, beam, run,
infirmity; (n) flaw, blot, shortcoming, store. bar, groove, gleam.
weakness, deficiency, scar, failing, mathias: (n) bob Mathias. wolves: (n) jackals, skunks, raccoons,
dearth. ANTONYMS: (n) strength, phosphorus: (n) phosphor, panthers, order Carnivora, lions,
merit, faultlessness, excellence, Phosphorus paste, P, element, tigers, foxes, cats, Carnivora, Canis.
capability, enhancement, perfection; Lucifer, daystar, chemical element,
Clopin stamped his foot. "Gueule-Dieu! 'twas he who pushed us on hither,

and he has deserted us in the very middle of the job! Cowardly chatterer, with a
slipper for a helmet!"
"Captain Clopin," said Andry the Red, who was gazing down Rue du Parvis,
"yonder is the little scholar."
"Praised be Pluto!" said Clopin. "But what the devil is he dragging after
him?"
It was, in fact, Jehan, who was running as fast as his heavy outfit of a Paladin,
and a long ladder which trailed on the pavement, would permit, more breathless
than an ant harnessed to a blade of grass twenty times longer than itself.%
"Victory! Te Deum!" cried the scholar. "Here is the ladder of the
longshoremen of Port Saint-Landry."
Clopin approached him.
"Child, what do you mean to do, corne-dieu! with this ladder?"
"I have it," replied Jehan, panting. "I knew where it was under the shed of the
lieutenant's house. There's a wench there whom I know, who thinks me as
handsome as Cupido. I made use of her to get the ladder, and I have the ladder,
Pasque-Mahom! The poor girl came to open the door to me in her shift."
"Yes," said Clopin, "but what are you going to do with that ladder?"
Jehan gazed at him with a malicious, knowing look, and cracked his fingers
like castanets. At that moment he was sublime. On his head he wore one of
those overloaded helmets of the fifteenth century, which frightened the enemy
with their fanciful crests. His bristled with ten iron beaks, so that Jehan could
have disputed with Nestor's Homeric vessel the redoubtable title of dexeubolos.
"What do I mean to do with it, august king of Thunes? Do you see that row of
statues which have such idiotic expressions, yonder, above the three portals?"
"Yes. Well?"
"'Tis the gallery of the kings of France."
"What is that to me?" said Clopin.
Thesaurus
bristled: (adj) briary, briery, barbed, language. renowned.
bristling, burry, biting, burred, iron: (v) firm, flatten; (n) Fe, chain, cast shed: (v) discard, drop, moult, scatter,
echinated, horrent, prickly, spiny. iron, irons; (adj) hard, adamant, steel, exuviate, molt, cast off, dismiss; (n)
chatterer: (n) chatterbox, babbler, harsh, tenacious. shack, hut, cabin. ANTONYMS: (v)
blabbermouth, prater, bellbird, permit: (adj, n, v) give, allow, consent; keep, cover; (adj) persistent.
flycatcher, prattler, blabber, cackler, (adj, v) grant; (n, v) license, leave; (v) slipper: (n) mule, sandal, pump, boot,
tattletale, windbag. admit, let, bear; (n) licence, carpet slipper, bootee, slider, patten,
disputed: (adj) moot, disputable, permission. ANTONYMS: (n, v) ban; scuffs, slipshoe, vertical
opposed, open to discussion, (v) prevent, prohibit, stop, refuse, synchronized slipper.
uncertain, dubious, doubtful, veto, outlaw, disagree, debar, bar; (n) vessel: (n) ship, pot, jar, duct, vas,
debatable. prohibition. boat, craft, container, bowl, barrel,
expressions: (n) vocabulary, terms, praised: (adj) bepuffed, popular, canal.
Victor Hugo 523
"Wait! At the end of that gallery there is a door which is never fastened
otherwise than with a latch, and with this ladder I ascend, and I am in the
church."
"Child let me be the first to ascend."
"No, comrade, the ladder is mine. Come, you shall be the second."
"May Beelzebub strangle you!" said surly Clopin, "I won't be second to
anybody."
"Then find a ladder, Clopin!"
Jehan set out on a run across the Place, dragging his ladder and shouting:
"Follow me, lads!"
In an instant the ladder was raised, and propped against the balustrade of the
lower gallery, above one of the lateral doors. The throng of vagabonds, uttering
loud acclamations, crowded to its foot to ascend. But Jehan maintained his right,
and was the first to set foot on the rungs. The passage was tolerably long. The
gallery of the kings of France is to-day about sixty feet above the pavement. The
eleven steps of the flight before the door, made it still higher. Jehan mounted
slowly, a good deal incommoded by his heavy armor, holding his crossbow in
one hand, and clinging to a rung with the other. When he reached the middle of
the ladder, he cast a melancholy glance at the poor dead outcasts, with which the
steps were strewn. "Alas!" said he, "here is a heap of bodies worthy of the fifth
book of the Iliad!" Then he continued his ascent. The vagabonds followed him.
There was one on every rung. At the sight of this line of cuirassed backs,
undulating as they rose through the gloom, one would have pronounced it a
serpent with steel scales, which was raising itself erect in front of the church.
Jehan who formed the head, and who was whistling, completed the illusion.%
The scholar finally reached the balcony of the gallery, and climbed over it
nimbly, to the applause of the whole vagabond tribe. Thus master of the citadel,
he uttered a shout of joy, and suddenly halted, petrified. He had just caught
sight of Quasimodo concealed in the dark, with flashing eye, behind one of the
statues of the kings.
Thesaurus
crowded: (adj) compact, congested, latch: (v) bar, fasten, grab; (n, v) bolt; step; (adj) ringed.
full, packed, busy, dense, populous, (adj, n, v) lock; (n) hasp, clasp, door scales: (adj) balance, weighbridge; (n)
jammed, cramped, tight; (adj, n) latch, hook; (adj) link, yoke. steelyard, mill Scales.
thronged. ANTONYMS: (adj) sparse, pronounced: (adj) clear, emphatic, strewn: (adj) spread, distributed,
deserted, uncrowded, loose. distinct, prominent, notable, obvious, disordered, strewed, confused,
erect: (adj) upright, vertical, salient, evident, definite, bold, covered, diffuse, disconnected,
straightforward; (v) build, raise, rear, palpable. ANTONYMS: (adj) faint, disjointed, circulated, dispersed.
construct, assemble, lift, put up, put inconspicuous, indefinite, loose, undulating: (adj) sinuous, waved,
together. ANTONYMS: (v) dismantle, slight, small. undulant, undulatory, curly,
wreck, topple, level, demolish, propped: (adj) fulcrate. apprenticed, zigzag, crimped, curvy,
destroy; (adj) prostrate, drooping, rung: (n) rundle, grade, degree, stage, indented, intended. ANTONYMS:
prone, flaccid, flat. stair, spoke, stave, crosspiece, tread, (adj) steep, straight.
Before a second assailant could gain a foothold on the gallery, the formidable
hunchback leaped to the head of the ladder, without uttering a word, seized the
ends of the two uprights with his powerful hands, raised them, pushed them out
from the wall, balanced the long and pliant ladder, loaded with vagabonds from
top to bottom for a moment, in the midst of shrieks of anguish, then suddenly,
with superhuman force, hurled this cluster of men backward into the Place.
There was a moment when even the most resolute trembled. The ladder,
launched backwards, remained erect and standing for an instant, and seemed to
hesitate, then wavered, then suddenly, describing a frightful arc of a circle eighty
feet in radius, crashed upon the pavement with its load of ruffians, more rapidly
than a drawbridge when its chains break. There arose an immense imprecation,
then all was still, and a few mutilated wretches were seen, crawling over the
heap of dead.%
A sound of wrath and grief followed the first cries of triumph among the
besiegers. Quasimodo, impassive, with both elbows propped on the balustrade,
looked on. He had the air of an old, bushy-headed king at his window.
As for Jehan Frollo, he was in a critical position. 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. Jehan had then
concealed himself behind a stone king, not daring to breathe, and fixing upon the
monstrous hunchback a frightened gaze, like the man, who, when courting the
wife of the guardian of a menagerie, went one evening to a love rendezvous,
mistook the wall which he was to climb, and suddenly found himself face to face
with a white bear.
For the first few moments, the deaf man paid no heed to him; but at last he
turned his head, and suddenly straightened up. He had just caught sight of the
scholar.
Jehan prepared himself for a rough shock, but the deaf man remained
motionless; only he had turned towards the scholar and was looking at him.
Thesaurus
assailant: (n) raider, attacker, bundling, appeal, attraction, case, sympathetic, spirited, knowing,
assaulter, invader, enemy, fighter, causa, cause, flirtation, suit. enthusiastic.
opponent, antagonist, foe, mugger; foothold: (n) bridgehead, beachhead, menagerie: (n) zoo, vivarium, menage,
(adj) aggressive. hold, support, handhold, basis, manage, installation, facility,
backward: (adj, adv) late, behindhand; footholds, ground, step, toehold, collection, assemblage, aggregation,
(adj) tardy, retarded, reluctant, coy, position. accumulation, menagery.
slow, laggard, dilatory; (adv) behind, impassive: (adj) expressionless, calm, pliant: (adj, v) pliable, limber; (adj)
backwardly. ANTONYMS: (adj, adv) cool, stolid, stoic, callous, elastic, plastic, ductile, malleable,
ahead; (adv) onward; (adj) quick, impervious, quiet, peaceful, adaptable, compliant, flexile, supple,
developing, advanced, confident, emotionless, dull. ANTONYMS: (adj) lithe. ANTONYMS: (adj) inflexible,
brilliant, bold. expressive, mobile, involved, rigid, rebellious.
courting: (n) wooing, courtship, demonstrative, affected, passionate,
Victor Hugo 525
"Ho ho!" said Jehan, "what do you mean by staring at me with that solitary
and melancholy eye?"
As he spoke thus, the young scamp stealthily adjusted his crossbow.%
"Quasimodo!" he cried, "I am going to change your surname: you shall be
called the blind man."
The shot sped. The feathered vireton whizzed and entered the hunchback's
left arm. Quasimodo appeared no more moved by it than by a scratch to King
Pharamond. He laid his hand on the arrow, tore it from his arm, and tranquilly
broke it across his big knee; then he let the two pieces drop on the floor, rather
than threw them down. But Jehan had no opportunity to fire a second time. The
arrow broken, Quasimodo breathing heavily, bounded like a grasshopper, and
he fell upon the scholar, whose armor was flattened against the wall by the blow.
Then in that gloom, wherein wavered the light of the torches, a terrible thing
was seen.
Quasimodo had grasped with his left hand the two arms of Jehan, who did
not offer any resistance, so thoroughly did he feel that he was lost. With his right
hand, the deaf man detached one by one, in silence, with sinister slowness, all the
pieces of his armor, the sword, the daggers, the helmet, the cuirass, the leg
pieces. One would have said that it was a monkey taking the shell from a nut.
Quasimodo flung the scholar's iron shell at his feet, piece by piece. When the
scholar beheld himself disarmed, stripped, weak, and naked in those terrible
hands, he made no attempt to speak to the deaf man, but began to laugh
audaciously in his face, and to sing with his intrepid heedlessness of a child of
sixteen, the then popular ditty:-
"Elle est bien habillée,
La ville de Cambrai;
Marafin l'a pillée"
He did not finish. Quasimodo was seen on the parapet of the gallery, holding
the scholar by the feet with one hand and whirling him over the abyss like a
Thesaurus
disarmed: (adj) harmless, prostrate. monkey: (n) imp, primate, scamp, underhandedly, in secret, privately,
feathered: (adj) plumy, plumelike, rascal, battering ram; (v) tinker, sneakingly; (adj, adv) noiselessly.
featherlike, plumose, plumed, meddle, tamper, trifle, cuckoo, echo. ANTONYM: (adv) brazenly.
plumaged, fledged, plumigerous, solitary: (adj) forlorn, only, alone, surname: (n) cognomen, name,
flighted, decorated; (v) fledge. single, lonely, lone, sole, sobriquet, family name, soubriquet,
grasshopper: (n) goat, frog, chamois, unaccompanied, isolated; (adj, n) last name, nickname, maiden name,
orthopteron, orthopteran, cricket, recluse; (n) hermit. ANTONYMS: moniker, first name, agnomen.
locust, cocktail, acridid, flea. (adj) sociable, combined, common, whirling: (adj) rotary, revolving,
helmet: (n, v) headpiece; (n) casque, outgoing. dizzy, giddy, lightheaded, rotating,
helm, hood, armet, basinet, heaume, stealthily: (adv) furtively, sneakily, vortical; (n) rotation, gyration,
hard hat, Galea, cowl; (v) surreptitiously, covertly, revolution; (adj, n) swirling.
pickelhaube. clandestinely, underhandly,
sling; then a sound like that of a bony structure in contact with a wall was heard,
and something was seen to fall which halted a third of the way down in its fall,
on a projection in the architecture. It was a dead body which remained hanging
there, bent double, its loins broken, its skull empty.%
A cry of horror rose among the vagabonds.
"Vengeance!" shouted Clopin. "To the sack!" replied the multitude. "Assault!
assault!"
There came a tremendous howl, in which were mingled all tongues, all
dialects, all accents. The death of the poor scholar imparted a furious ardor to
that crowd. It was seized with shame, and the wrath of having been held so long
in check before a church by a hunchback. Rage found ladders, multiplied the
torches, and, at the expiration of a few minutes, Quasimodo, in despair, beheld
that terrible ant heap mount on all sides to the assault of Notre-Dame. Those
who had no ladders had knotted ropes; those who had no ropes climbed by the
projections of the carvings. They hung from each other's rags. There were no
means of resisting that rising tide of frightful faces; rage made these fierce
countenances ruddy; their clayey brows were dripping with sweat; their eyes
darted lightnings; all these grimaces, all these horrors laid siege to Quasimodo.
One would have said that some other church had despatched to the assault of
Notre-Dame its gorgons, its dogs, its drées, its demons, its most fantastic
sculptures. It was like a layer of living monsters on the stone monsters of the
façade.
Meanwhile, the Place was studded with a thousand torches. This scene of
confusion, till now hid in darkness, was suddenly flooded with light. The parvis
was resplendent, and cast a radiance on the sky; the bonfire lighted on the lofty
platform was still burning, and illuminated the city far away. The enormous
silhouette of the two towers, projected afar on the roofs of Paris, and formed a
large notch of black in this light. The city seemed to be aroused. Alarm bells
wailed in the distance. The vagabonds howled, panted, swore, climbed; and
Quasimodo, powerless against so many enemies, shuddering for the gypsy,
Thesaurus
bony: (adj) osseous, gaunt, lean, thin, dribble, a drop. ANTONYM: (adj) form, authority, dealings, control,
emaciated, scrawny, skinny, angular, lacking. influence.
lanky, meager, boney. ANTONYMS: notch: (n, v) mark, dent, hack, nick, shuddering: (adj, n) quivering,
(adj) plump, boneless, fat, stout. score, nock, hollow, scratch; (n) gap, shaking; (adv) shudderingly; (n) cold
clayey: (adj) heavy, weighty, incision; (v) indent. ANTONYM: (v) sweat, tremor; (adj) rough, shaky,
ponderous, strong, backbreaking, fill. jumpy, quaking, shivery, bumpy.
compacter, compact, cloggy, resisting: (adj) tough, tenacious, ANTONYM: (adj) smooth.
burdensome, burdened, bolar. sequacious, stringy, tough as sling: (v) pitch, fling, hurl, dangle,
ANTONYM: (adj) arenaceous. whitleather, resistant, recalcitrant, chuck, toss, throw, heave; (adj) hang;
dripping: (adj) wet, damp, drenched, opposing, making resistance, loath; (adj, v) suspend; (n, v) cast.
sodden, soaked, soggy; (adj, adv) (v) resist.
sopping, soaking; (adj, v) reeking; (n) ropes: (n) weight, pressure, leverage,
Victor Hugo 527
beholding the furious faces approaching ever nearer and nearer to his gallery,
entreated heaven for a miracle, and wrung his arms in despair.%
Thesaurus
approaching: (adj) future, vehement, wild, rampant; (adj) celestial. ANTONYM: (n) misery.
forthcoming, impending, imminent, frantic, enraged, ferocious, miracle: (adj, n) wonder, prodigy; (n)
oncoming, near; (adj, n) coming; (n, v) boisterous, raging, frenzied. phenomenon, mystery, wonderwork,
approach; (adv) nearly, almost; (prep) ANTONYMS: (adj) happy, mild, surprise, sensation, event, theurgy,
toward. gentle, pleased, mellow, quiet, slow. astonishment, amazement.
arms: (n) armament, coat of arms, gallery: (n) balcony, veranda, drift, nearer: (adj) adjacent, narre, hither;
weaponry, ammunition, shield, audience, art gallery, circle, picture (adv) more rapidly, sooner, quicker,
ordnance, order, munition, hardware, gallery, porch, terrace, verandah, nigher, NER, faster, earlier, Neer.
blazon; (adj) armed. corridor.
beholding: (n) fusion, seeing, visual heaven: (n) Eden, firmament, bliss,
perception, look. Elysium, sky, nirvana, glory, Elysian
furious: (adj, v) fierce, violent, Fields, Garden of Eden, utopia; (adj)
Victor Hugo 529
CHAPTER V
THE RETREAT IN WHICH MONSIEUR LOUIS

OF FRANCE SAYS HIS PRAYERS
The reader has not, perhaps, forgotten that one moment before catching sight
of the nocturnal band of vagabonds, Quasimodo, as he inspected Paris from the
heights of his bell tower, perceived only one light burning, which gleamed like a
star from a window on the topmost story of a lofty edifice beside the Porte Saint-
Antoine. This edifice was the Bastille. That star was the candle of Louis XI.%
King Louis XI. had, in fact, been two days in Paris. He was to take his
departure on the next day but one for his citadel of Montilz-les-Tours. He made
but seldom and brief appearance in his good city of Paris, since there he did not
feel about him enough pitfalls, gibbets, and Scotch archers.
He had come, that day, to sleep at the Bastille. The great chamber five toises
square, which he had at the Louvre, with its huge chimney-piece loaded with
twelve great beasts and thirteen great prophets, and his grand bed, eleven feet
by twelve, pleased him but little. He felt himself lost amid all this grandeur.
This good bourgeois king preferred the Bastille with a tiny chamber and couch.
And then, the Bastille was stronger than the Louvre.
Thesaurus
burning: (adj) blazing, ablaze, boiling, exit, leave, deviation, divergence, simplicity.
afire, flaming, hot; (n) combustion, depart, parting, aberration, passing, seldom: (adj) scarce, rare, few,
firing; (adj, n) passionate, zealous, takeoff. ANTONYMS: (n) infrequent; (adv) occasionally,
glowing. ANTONYMS: (adj) cold, appearance, conformity, greeting, infrequently, uncommonly, hardly,
trivial, cool, out, painless, quenched, ingress, influx, homecoming, scarcely, not often, once in a blue
soothing, unimportant, apathetic, regularity, entrance, birth, coming, moon. ANTONYMS: (adv) often,
insignificant, unconcerned. advance. seldom.
chamber: (n) hall, bedchamber, cavity, grandeur: (n) dignity, splendor, thirteen: (n) long dozen, large integer.
cell, council, compartment, assembly, magnitude, brilliance, glory, pomp, topmost: (adj) highest, upmost, upper,
apartment, ventricle, dormitory, elegance, majesty, magnificence, maximum, uppermost, head,
cubicle. grandness; (adj, n) solemnity. supreme, utmost, crowning, apical,
departure: (n, v) decease, demise; (n) ANTONYMS: (n) modesty, uttermost. ANTONYM: (adj) bottom.
This little chamber, which the king reserved for himself in the famous state
prison, was also tolerably spacious and occupied the topmost story of a turret
rising from the donjon keep. It was circular in form, carpeted with mats of
shining straw, ceiled with beams, enriched with fleurs-de-lis of gilded metal with
interjoists in color; wainscoated with rich woods sown with rosettes of white
metal, and with others painted a fine, bright green, made of orpiment and fine
indigo.%
There was only one window, a long pointed casement, latticed with brass
wire and bars of iron, further darkened by fine colored panes with the arms of
the king and of the queen, each pane being worth two and twenty sols.
There was but one entrance, a modern door, with a fiat arch, garnished with
a piece of tapestry on the inside, and on the outside by one of those porches of
Irish wood, frail edifices of cabinet-work curiously wrought, numbers of which
were still to be seen in old houses a hundred and fifty years ago. "Although they
disfigure and embarrass the places," says Sauvel in despair, "our old people are
still unwilling to get rid of them, and keep them in spite of everybody."
In this chamber, nothing was to be found of what furnishes ordinary
apartments, neither benches, nor trestles, nor forms, nor common stools in the
form of a chest, nor fine stools sustained by pillars and counter-pillars, at four
sols a piece. Only one easy arm-chair, very magnificent, was to be seen; the wood
was painted with roses on a red ground, the seat was of ruby Cordovan leather,
ornamented with long silken fringes, and studded with a thousand golden nails.
The loneliness of this chair made it apparent that only one person had a right to
sit down in this apartment. Beside the chair, and quite close to the window,
there was a table covered with a cloth with a pattern of birds. On this table stood
an inkhorn spotted with ink, some parchments, several pens, and a large goblet
of chased silver. A little further on was a brazier, a praying stool in crimson
velvet, relieved with small bosses of gold. Finally, at the extreme end of the
room, a simple bed of scarlet and yellow damask, without either tinsel or lace;
having only an ordinary fringe. This bed, famous for having borne the sleep or
the sleeplessness of Louis XI., was still to be seen two hundred years ago, at the
Thesaurus
darkened: (adj) darkens, obscured, grail, beaker, basin, tumbler, orpiment: (n) auripigment.
old, obfuscate, murky, cloudy, rummer, flask; (v) glass. ruby: (adj, n) red, crimson; (adj) jewel,
opaque, overcast. lace: (v) entwine, interlace, braid, bind; ruddy, scarlet, diamond, pearl,
fiat: (n) decree, edict, dictum, act, (adj, v) tie, string; (n) lacing, ribbon, precious stone, bijou; (n) carbuncle,
order, call, behest, bidding, rescript, edging; (n, v) net, rope. ANTONYMS: deep red.
enactment, mandate. (v) untie, untwine, unpick. sleeplessness: (n) wakefulness,
fringe: (n) brim, brink, boundary, loneliness: (n) desolation, aloneness, restlessness, nerves, insomnolence,
periphery, rim, lip, bound; (n, v) isolation, solitariness, lonesomeness, disquietude, unrest; (v) vigil.
edge, hem, skirt; (adj, n, v) feather. bleakness, forlornness, desolateness, ANTONYM: (n) sleepiness.
ANTONYMS: (adj, n) mainstream; (n) temperament, unhappiness; (adj, n) stool: (n) seat, bench, footstool, feces,
center. solitude. ANTONYMS: (n) inclusion, dejection, faeces, ordure, fecal matter,
goblet: (n) bowl, chalice, cup, mug, cheerfulness, hopefulness. droppings, bowel movement, form.
Victor Hugo 531
house of a councillor of state, where it was seen by old Madame Pilou, celebrated
in Cyrus under the name "Arricidie" and of "la Morale Vivante".%
Such was the chamber which was called "the retreat where Monsieur Louis
de France says his prayers."
At the moment when we have introduced the reader into it, this retreat was
very dark. The curfew bell had sounded an hour before; night was come, and
there was only one flickering wax candle set on the table to light five persons
variously grouped in the chamber.
The first on which the light fell was a seigneur superbly clad in breeches and
jerkin of scarlet striped with silver, and a loose coat with half sleeves of cloth of
gold with black figures. This splendid costume, on which the light played,
seemed glazed with flame on every fold. The man who wore it had his armorial
bearings embroidered on his breast in vivid colors; a chevron accompanied by a
deer passant. The shield was flanked, on the right by an olive branch, on the left
by a deer's antlers. This man wore in his girdle a rich dagger whose hilt, of silver
gilt, was chased in the form of a helmet, and surmounted by a count's coronet.
He had a forbidding air, a proud mien, and a head held high. At the first glance
one read arrogance on his visage; at the second, craft.
He was standing bareheaded, a long roll of parchment in his hand, behind
the arm-chair in which was seated, his body ungracefully doubled up, his knees
crossed, his elbow on the table, a very badly accoutred personage. Let the reader
imagine in fact, on the rich seat of Cordova leather, two crooked knees, two thin
thighs, poorly clad in black worsted tricot, a body enveloped in a cloak of
fustian, with fur trimming of which more leather than hair was visible; lastly, to
crown all, a greasy old hat of the worst sort of black cloth, bordered with a
circular string of leaden figures. This, in company with a dirty skull-cap, which
hardly allowed a hair to escape, was all that distinguished the seated personage.
He held his head so bent upon his breast, that nothing was to be seen of his face
thus thrown into shadow, except the tip of his nose, upon which fell a ray of
light, and which must have been long. From the thinness of his wrinkled hand,
one divined that he was an old man. It was Louis XI.
Thesaurus
bareheaded: (adj) hatless, bare, bald, fustian: (adj, n) rant, jargon; (adj) tricot: (n) knit, made of tricot, of tricot,
unclothed, alone; (v) cap in hand, bombastic, inflated, pompous, warp knitting.
obsequious, respectful, reverential, grandiloquent, highfalutin, prose run trimming: (n) decoration, dressing,
decorous, ceremonious. mad; (n) claptrap, blah, grandiosity. adornment, ornament, fringe, border,
chevron: (n) chevron-molding, sounded: (adj) measured, oral. clipping, cutting, frill, edging, lace.
chevron-work, banding, stripes, dirt thinness: (n) slenderness, slimness, ungracefully: (adv) inelegantly,
band, band, badge, armorial bearing, tenuity, leanness, rarity, narrowness, clumsily, awkwardly, woodenly,
bearing, cockade, grade insignia. slightness, fluidity, fluidness, rigidly, uncouthly, meanly,
flickering: (adj) sparkling, aflicker, maceration, emaciation. ungraciously, without graciousness.
desultory, capricious, glistening, ANTONYMS: (n) plumpness, ANTONYM: (adv) elegantly.
shimmering, glittering; (n) twinkling, stoutness, width, thickness, fatness, worsted: (adj) disappointed; (n) fabric,
flicker, fluttering; (adv) flickeringly. roundness, coarseness, strength. knitting worsted, cloth.
At some distance behind them, two men dressed in garments of Flemish style
were conversing, who were not sufficiently lost in the shadow to prevent any one
who had been present at the performance of Gringoire's mystery from
recognizing in them two of the principal Flemish envoys, Guillaume Rym, the
sagacious pensioner of Ghent, and Jacques Coppenole, the popular hosier. The
reader will remember that these men were mixed up in the secret politics of
Louis XI.%
Finally, quite at the end of the room, near the door, in the dark, stood,
motionless as a statue, a vigorous man with thickset limbs, a military harness,
with a surcoat of armorial bearings, whose square face pierced with staring eyes,
slit with an immense mouth, his ears concealed by two large screens of flat hair,
had something about it both of the dog and the tiger.
All were uncovered except the king.
The gentleman who stood near the king was reading him a sort of long
memorial to which his majesty seemed to be listening attentively. The two
Flemings were whispering together.
"Cross of God!" grumbled Coppenole, "I am tired of standing; is there no
chair here?"
Rym replied by a negative gesture, accompanied by a discreet smile.
"Croix-Dieu!" resumed Coppenole, thoroughly unhappy at being obliged to
lower his voice thus, "I should like to sit down on the floor, with my legs crossed,
like a hosier, as I do in my shop."
"Take good care that you do not, Master Jacques."
"Ouais! Master Guillaume! can one only remain here on his feet?"
"Or on his knees," said Rym.
At that moment the king's voice was uplifted. They held their peace.
"Fifty sols for the robes of our valets, and twelve livres for the mantles of the
clerks of our crown! That's it! Pour out gold by the ton! Are you mad, Olivier?"
Thesaurus
gold: (n) Au, money, riches, wealth, ungrateful. incompletely, negligently, partially,
bullion, treasure, yellow, amber; (adj) pensioner: (n) beneficiary, retiree, partly, barely, halfheartedly,
aureate, gilt, golden. hireling, annuitant, donee, senior, deficiently, inadequately,
harness: (adj, n) strap, tether; (n, v) ward. insufficiently, hastily.
yoke, rein, couple, check; (adj, v) slit: (n, v) score, rip, split, breach, uncovered: (adj) naked, open, bare,
hitch; (v) wear, equip, limit, use. slash, crack, scratch; (n) crevice, gap; nude, unclothed, bald, unreserved,
ANTONYM: (v) undo. (adj, n) cleft; (v) slice. unprotected, evident, frank, manifest.
obliged: (adj) grateful, thankful, thoroughly: (adv, v) fully; (adv) ANTONYMS: (adj) indoor, concealed.
appreciative, forced, accountable, entirely, totally, soundly, uplifted: (adj) high, raised, noble, not
compelled; (adj, v) bound, under exhaustively, carefully, absolutely, inverted, not prone, proud,
obligation; (adj, prep) indebted; (v) perfectly, deeply, utterly, exactly. undismayed, stately, lofty, sublime,
oblige, binding. ANTONYM: (adj) ANTONYMS: (adv) superficially, animated.
Victor Hugo 533
As he spoke thus, the old man raised his head. The golden shells of the collar
of Saint-Michael could be seen gleaming on his neck. The candle fully
illuminated his gaunt and morose profile. He tore the papers from the other's
hand.%
"You are ruining us!" he cried, casting his hollow eyes over the scroll. "What
is all this? What need have we of so prodigious a household? Two chaplains at
ten livres a month each, and, a chapel clerk at one hundred sols! A valet-de-
chambre at ninety livres a year. Four head cooks at six score livres a year each!
A spit-cook, an herb-cook, a sauce-cook, a butler, two sumpter-horse lackeys, at
ten livres a month each! Two scullions at eight livres! A groom of the stables
and his two aids at four and twenty livres a month! A porter, a pastry-cook, a
baker, two carters, each sixty livres a year! And the farrier six score livres! And
the master of the chamber of our funds, twelve hundred livres! And the
comptroller five hundred. And how do I know what else? 'Tis ruinous. The
wages of our servants are putting France to the pillage! All the ingots of the
Louvre will melt before such a fire of expenses! We shall have to sell our plate!
And next year, if God and our Lady (here he raised his hat) lend us life, we shall
drink our potions from a pewter pot!"
So saying, he cast a glance at the silver goblet which gleamed upon the table.
He coughed and continued,
"Master Olivier, the princes who reign over great lordships, like kings and
emperors, should not allow sumptuousness in their houses; for the fire spreads
thence through the province. Hence, Master Olivier, consider this said once for
all. Our expenditure increases every year. The thing displease us. How, pasque-
Dieu! when in '79 it did not exceed six and thirty thousand livres, did it attain in
'80, forty-three thousand six hundred and nineteen livres? I have the figures in
my head. In '81, sixty-six thousand six hundred and eighty livres, and this year,
by the faith of my body, it will reach eighty thousand livres! Doubled in four
years! Monstrous!"
He paused breathless, then resumed energetically,
Thesaurus
attain: (v) make, reach, achieve, irritate, nark, nettle. ANTONYMS: (v) baneful, pernicious; (adj, n)
acquire, gain, strike, catch, arrive at, please, satisfy, pacify, delight. subversive. ANTONYMS: (adj)
find, obtain, come to. ANTONYMS: exceed: (v) beat, pass, surpass, beneficial, fortunate, harmless.
(v) lose, fail, abandon, surrender, transcend, outdo, surmount, cap, scroll: (n, v) roll, list, roller, record; (n)
differ. outshine, overrun, top, outweigh. curlicue, curl, archive, helix, book,
comptroller: (n) controller, accountant, ANTONYMS: (v) follow, fail, trail, whorl; (v) role.
auditor, governor, manager, make. sumptuousness: (n) splendor,
bookkeeper, supervisor, farrier: (n) horseshoer; (v) cowboy, luxuriousness, opulence, lavishness,
businessperson, rector, bourgeois, bull whacker, cow puncher. sumptuosity, wealth, magnificence,
certified public accountant. ruinous: (adj) harmful, baleful, affluence, expensiveness, richness,
displease: (v) annoy, disgust, bother, disastrous, calamitous, injurious, stateliness. ANTONYMS: (n)
anger, vex, affront, offend, rile, deleterious, dilapidated, blasting, austerity, poverty, shabbiness.
"I behold around me only people who fatten on my leanness! you suck
crowns from me at every pore."%
All remained silent. This was one of those fits of wrath which are allowed to
take their course. He continued,
"'Tis like that request in Latin from the gentlemen of France, that we should
re-establish what they call the grand charges of the Crown! Charges in very
deed! Charges which crush! Ah! gentlemen! you say that we are not a king to
reign dapifero nullo, buticulario nullo! We will let you see, pasque-Dieu! whether we
are not a king!"
Here he smiled, in the consciousness of his power; this softened his bad
humor, and he turned towards the Flemings,
"Do you see, Gossip Guillaume? the grand warden of the keys, the grand
butler, the grand chamberlain, the grand seneschal are not worth the smallest
valet. Remember this, Gossip Coppenole. They serve no purpose, as they stand
thus useless round the king; they produce upon me the effect of the four
Evangelists who surround the face of the big clock of the palace, and which
Philippe Brille has just set in order afresh. They are gilt, but they do not indicate
the hour; and the hands can get on without them."
He remained in thought for a moment, then added, shaking his aged head,
"Ho! ho! by our Lady, I am not Philippe Brille, and I shall not gild the great
vassals anew. Continue, Olivier."
The person whom he designated by this name, took the papers into his hands
again, and began to read aloud,
"To Adam Tenon, clerk of the warden of the seals of the provostship of Paris;
for the silver, making, and engraving of said seals, which have been made new
because the others preceding, by reason of their antiquity and their worn
condition, could no longer be successfully used, twelve livres parisis.
"To Guillaume Frère, the sum of four livres, four sols parisis, for his trouble
and salary, for having nourished and fed the doves in the two dove-cots of the
Thesaurus
antiquity: (n) ancientness, ancientry, elaborate; (v) fatten up, feed, fill out; gauntness. ANTONYM: (n)
past, relic, status quo, artefact, (adj) fructify, bloom, bear fruit, plumpness.
artifact, oldness, old age, hoariness; blossom, blow. ANTONYMS: (v) re-establish: (v) restore, reconstruct,
(adj, n) age. ANTONYMS: (n) today, undernourish, starve. renew, regenerate, reestablish, return.
newness, modernity. gild: (v) embellish, ornament, beautify, seneschal: (n) burgomaster, bailiff,
doves: (n) Columbiformes, order decorate, begild, engild, paint, Corregidor, castellan, factotum,
Columbiformes. whitewash, varnish; (n) club, warden, servant, shepherd,
engraving: (n) print, sculpture, plate, fraternity. ANTONYM: (v) strip. portreeve, retainer, alderman.
picture, carving, copperplate, leanness: (n) emaciation, scrawniness, softened: (adj) diffused, muffled,
aquatint, printmaking, engravement, meagreness, slenderness, slimness, muted, quiet, slow, touched,
cutting, chasing. tenuity, bodily property, sluggish, soften, pultaceous,
fatten: (adj, n) enrich; (adj, v) fat, compactness, barrenness, fineness, subdued, low-key.
Victor Hugo 535
Hôtel des Tournelles, during the months of January, February, and March of this
year; and for this he hath given seven sextiers of barley.%
"To a gray friar for confessing a criminal, four sols parisis."
The king listened in silence. From time to time be coughed; then he raised
the goblet to his lips and drank a draught with a grimace.
"During this year there have been made by the ordinance of justice, to the
sound of the trumpet, through the squares of Paris, fifty-six proclamations.
Account to be regulated.
"For having searched and ransacked in certain places, in Paris as well as
elsewhere, for money said to be there concealed; but nothing hath been found:
forty-five livres parisis."
"Bury a crown to unearth a sou!" said the king.
"For having set in the Hôtel des Tournelles six panes of white glass in the
place where the iron cage is, thirteen sols; for having made and delivered by
command of the king, on the day of the musters, four shields with the
escutcheons of the said seigneur, encircled with garlands of roses all about, six
livres; for two new sleeves to the king's old doublet, twenty sols; for a box of
grease to grease the boots of the king, fifteen deniers; a stable newly made to
lodge the king's black pigs, thirty livres parisis; many partitions, planks, and
trap-doors, for the safekeeping of the lions at Saint-Paul, twenty-two livres."
"These be dear beasts," said Louis XI. "It matters not; it is a fine magnificence
in a king. There is a great red lion whom I love for his pleasant ways. Have you
seen him, Master Guillaume? Princes must have these terrific animals; for we
kings must have lions for our dogs and tigers for our cats. The great befits a
crown. In the days of the pagans of Jupiter, when the people offered the temples
a hundred oxen and a hundred sheep, the emperors gave a hundred lions and a
hundred eagles. This was wild and very fine. The kings of France have always
had roarings round their throne. Nevertheless, people must do me this justice,
that I spend still less money on it than they did, and that I possess a greater
Thesaurus
draught: (n, v) draft, sketch, design, up. unremarkable.
potation, plan; (n) dose, air current, safekeeping: (n) keeping, care, throne: (v) enthrone; (n) can, stool,
wind, gulp, outline; (v) blueprint. guardianship, charge, protection, place, fecal matter, potty, chair,
eagles: (n) order Falconiformes, conservation, preservation, trust, cathedra, lavatory, crapper, pot.
caracaras, Falconiformes. hands, responsibility; (adj) tutelage. trumpet: (n) horn, cornet, bugle,
oxen: (n) bull, ox, cows, cow, cattle, terrific: (adj) tremendous, fantastic, clarion, trump, brass, trombone; (v)
Bos Taurus, bullock, kine, milker, great, wonderful, dreadful, proclaim, promulgate, show off,
beef, dairy cow. formidable, splendid, brilliant, blare.
regulated: (adj) ordered, arranged, marvellous; (adj, v) terrible, shocking. unearth: (v) disinter, locate, uncover,
consistent, lawful, temperate, not ANTONYMS: (adj) tiny, abysmal, reveal, dig up, excavate, turn up,
haphazard, organized; (adv) in time, bad, calm, moderate, nasty, dreadful, discover, find, dig, expose.
in harmony, keeping pace, keeping insignificant, ordinary, ANTONYMS: (v) hide, conceal.
modesty of lions, bears, elephants, and leopards.-- Go on, Master Olivier. We

wished to say thus much to our Flemish friends."
Guillaume Rym bowed low, while Coppenole, with his surly mien, had the
air of one of the bears of which his majesty was speaking. The king paid no
heed. He had just dipped his lips into the goblet, and he spat out the beverage,
saying: "Foh! what a disagreeable potion!" The man who was reading continued:
"For feeding a rascally footpad, locked up these six months in the little cell of
the flayer, until it should be determined what to do with him, six livres, four
sols."
"What's that?" interrupted the king; "feed what ought to be hanged! Pasque-
Dieu! I will give not a sou more for that nourishment. Olivier, come to an
understanding about the matter with Monsieur d'Estouteville, and prepare me
this very evening the wedding of the gallant and the gallows. Resume."
Olivier made a mark with his thumb against the article of the "rascally foot
soldier," and passed on.%
"To Henriet Cousin, master executor of the high works of justice in Paris, the
sum of sixty sols parisis, to him assessed and ordained by monseigneur the
provost of Paris, for having bought, by order of the said sieur the provost, a great
broad sword, serving to execute and decapitate persons who are by justice
condemned for their demerits, and he hath caused the same to be garnished with
a sheath and with all things thereto appertaining; and hath likewise caused to be
repointed and set in order the old sword, which had become broken and notched
in executing justice on Messire Louis de Luxembourg, as will more fully appear .
The king interrupted: "That suffices. I allow the sum with great good will.
Those are expenses which I do not begrudge. I have never regretted that money.
Continue."
"For having made over a great cage..."
"Ah!" said the king, grasping the arms of his chair in both hands, "I knew well
that I came hither to this Bastille for some purpose. Hold, Master Olivier; I desire
Thesaurus
appertaining: (adj) appertinent. footpad: (n) Dick Turpin, padder, abject, mean, mischievous,
begrudge: (v) envy, covet, resent, stint, Macheath, bandit, sturdy beggar, scoundrelly, roguish, scabby, scurvy,
hang fire; (adj, v) pinch; (adj) hold pad, road agent, Claude Duval. shabby, paltry.
back, screw, gripe, withhold, starve. nourishment: (n) food, alimentation, sheath: (n, v) cover; (n) envelope,
ANTONYMS: (v) congratulate, wish. meal, meat, diet, feeding, nutrition, vagina, scabbard, blanket, casing,
decapitate: (v) decollate, decapitation, repast, sustenance, edible, fuel. skin, holster, tegument; (v) sheathe,
guillotine, kill, execute, head, olivier: (n) sir Laurence Kerr Olivier. envelop.
murder, top, unhead. ordained: (adj) destined, prescribed, spat: (n, v) squabble, altercation, tiff,
elephants: (n) Elephantidae. appointed, predestined, fated, bicker, dispute, wrangle, row; (n)
executor: (n) doer, fiduciary, agent, preordained, meant, legal, lawful, gaiter, argument, bickering, fuss.
executioner, trustee, executrix, dedicated, inevitable. ANTONYM: (n) agreement.
perpetrator, trustee in bankruptcy. rascally: (adj) dirty, contemptible,
Victor Hugo 537
to see that cage myself. You shall read me the cost while I am examining it.
Messieurs Flemings, come and see this; 'tis curious."
Then he rose, leaned on the arm of his interlocutor, made a sign to the sort of
mute who stood before the door to precede him, to the two Flemings to follow
him, and quitted the room.%
The royal company was recruited, at the door of the retreat, by men of arms,
all loaded down with iron, and by slender pages bearing flambeaux. It marched
for some time through the interior of the gloomy donjon, pierced with staircases
and corridors even in the very thickness of the walls. The captain of the Bastille
marched at their head, and caused the wickets to be opened before the bent and
aged king, who coughed as he walked.
At each wicket, all heads were obliged to stoop, except that of the old man
bent double with age. "Hum," said he between his gums, for he had no longer
any teeth, "we are already quite prepared for the door of the sepulchre. For a
low door, a bent passer."
At length, after having passed a final wicket, so loaded with locks that a
quarter of an hour was required to open it, they entered a vast and lofty vaulted
hall, in the centre of which they could distinguish by the light of the torches, a
huge cubic mass of masonry, iron, and wood. The interior was hollow. It was
one of those famous cages of prisoners of state, which were called "the little
daughters of the king." In its walls there were two or three little windows so
closely trellised with stout iron bars; that the glass was not visible. The door was
a large flat slab of stone, as on tombs; the sort of door which serves for entrance
only. Only here, the occupant was alive.
The king began to walk slowly round the little edifice, examining it carefully,
while Master Olivier, who followed him, read aloud the note.
"For having made a great cage of wood of solid beams, timbers and wall-
plates, measuring nine feet in length by eight in breadth, and of the height of
seven feet between the partitions, smoothed and clamped with great bolts of
iron, which has been placed in a chamber situated in one of the towers of the
Bastille Saint-Antoine, in which cage is placed and detained, by command of the
Thesaurus
aloud: (adv) loud, out loud, strong, detained: (adj) seized, locked up, curved. ANTONYM: (adj) sharp.
out, audibly, hard, forte. jailed, intransitive, tardy, inside, stoop: (v) crouch, bend, deign,
ANTONYMS: (adv) softly, inaudibly, caged, captive, behind bars; (n) in condescend, descend, squat, couch,
quietly. prison, under arrest. cringe, lean, lower oneself; (n) porch.
breadth: (n) width, spread, amplitude, occupant: (n) tenant, inhabitant, ANTONYM: (v) straighten.
wideness, size, length, latitude, dweller, denizen, occupier, inmate, stout: (adj, n) sturdy, stocky, hearty;
extent, area, broadness, stretch. holder, citizen, householder, (adj) hardy, strong, robust, obese,
ANTONYMS: (n) length, longitude, dalesman, coaster. husky, bold, corpulent, fleshy.
emptiness, thinness. slab: (n) hunk, chunk, bar, monument, ANTONYMS: (adj) thin, slim, flimsy,
cubic: (adj) solid, Ternary cubic, block, layer, board, flag, floor; (adj) cowardly, slight, skinny, fragile,
cuboid, cubiform, compact. plate, tablet. weak.
ANTONYM: (adj) planar. smoothed: (adj) round, smoothened,
king our lord, a prisoner who formerly inhabited an old, decrepit, and ruined
cage. There have been employed in making the said new cage, ninety-six
horizontal beams, and fifty-two upright joists, ten wall plates three toises long;
there have been occupied nineteen carpenters to hew, work, and fit all the said
wood in the courtyard of the Bastille during twenty days."
"Very fine heart of oak," said the king, striking the woodwork with his fist.%
"There have been used in this cage," continued the other, "two hundred and
twenty great bolts of iron, of nine feet, and of eight, the rest of medium length,
with the rowels, caps and counterbands appertaining to the said bolts; weighing,
the said iron in all, three thousand, seven hundred and thirty-five pounds; beside
eight great squares of iron, serving to attach the said cage in place with clamps
and nails weighing in all two hundred and eighteen pounds, not reckoning the
iron of the trellises for the windows of the chamber wherein the cage hath been
placed, the bars of iron for the door of the cage and other things."
"'Tis a great deal of iron," said the king, "to contain the light of a spirit."
"The whole amounts to three hundred and seventeen livres, five sols, seven
deniers."
"Pasque-Dieu!" exclaimed the king.
At this oath, which was the favorite of Louis XI., some one seemed to awaken
in the interior of the cage; the sound of chains was heard, grating on the floor,
and a feeble voice, which seemed to issue from the tomb was uplifted. "Sire!
sire! mercy!" The one who spoke thus could not be seen.
"Three hundred and seventeen livres, five sols, seven deniers," repeated
Louis XI.
The lamentable voice which had proceeded from the cage had frozen all
present, even Master Olivier himself. The king alone wore the air of not having
heard. At his order, Master Olivier resumed his reading, and his majesty coldly
continued his inspection of the cage.
"In addition to this there hath been paid to a mason who hath made the holes
wherein to place the gratings of the windows, and the floor of the chamber
Thesaurus
attach: (v) append, adhere, add, affix, persuasive, able. unfortunate.
bind, link, associate, assign, nail, mason: (n) freemason, bricklayer, sire: (v) generate, engender, beget,
apply, annex. ANTONYMS: (v) undo, stonemason, manufacturer, maker, procreate, mother, get, make; (n)
separate, unfasten, disconnect, free, artist, artificer, architect, smith, forefather, ancestor, patriarch, pater.
deflect, dissociate, loosen, quit, take, stonecutter, James Neville mason. upright: (adj) perpendicular, erect,
unscrew. oath: (n) expletive, malediction, fair, good, righteous, just, virtuous,
feeble: (adj) delicate, decrepit, ailing, imprecation, promise, affidavit, cuss, true, honorable, plumb; (adj, n)
helpless, powerless, poor, mild, lax, swearing, pledge, assurance, vertical. ANTONYMS: (adj) prone,
thin; (adj, v) faint, debilitated. asseveration; (v) swear. disreputable, degenerate, hanging,
ANTONYMS: (adj) strong, vigorous, prisoner: (n) captive, hostage, jailbird, unwholesome, dishonest,
hearty, tough, effective, powerful, accused, con, gaolbird, criminal, dishonorable, lying, horizontal,
unrelenting, robust, potent, detainee, inmate, defendant, falling; (adv) horizontally.
Victor Hugo 539
where the cage is, because that floor could not support this cage by reason of its
weight, twenty-seven livres fourteen sols parisis."
The voice began to moan again.%
"Mercy, sire! I swear to you that 'twas Monsieur the Cardinal d'Angers and
not I, who was guilty of treason."
"The mason is bold!" said the king. "Continue, Olivier." Olivier continued,
"To a joiner for window frames, bedstead, hollow stool, and other things,
twenty livres, two sols parisis."
The voice also continued.
"Alas, sire! will you not listen to me? I protest to you that 'twas not I who
wrote the matter to Monseigneur do Guyenne, but Monsieur le Cardinal Balue."
"The joiner is dear," quoth the king. "Is that all?"
"No, sire. To a glazier, for the windows of the said chamber, forty-six sols,
eight deniers parisis."
"Have mercy, sire! Is it not enough to have given all my goods to my judges,
my plate to Monsieur de Torcy, my library to Master Pierre Doriolle, my tapestry
to the governor of the Roussillon? I am innocent. I have been shivering in an
iron cage for fourteen years. Have mercy, sire! You will find your reward in
heaven."
"Master Olivier," said the king, "the total?"
"Three hundred sixty-seven livres, eight sols, three deniers parisis.
"Notre-Dame!" cried the king. "This is an outrageous cage!"
He tore the book from Master Olivier's hands, and set to reckoning it himself
upon his fingers, examining the paper and the cage alternately. Meanwhile, the
prisoner could be heard sobbing. This was lugubrious in the darkness, and their
faces turned pale as they looked at each other.
"Fourteen years, sire! Fourteen years now! since the month of April, 1469. In
the name of the Holy Mother of God, sire, listen to me! During all this time you
have enjoyed the heat of the sun. Shall I, frail creature, never more behold the
Thesaurus
bedstead: (n) bed, berth, cot, superintendent, ruler, controller, engraving, lamella, disc.
bedframe, furniture, shakedown, leader, president, protector. quoth: (v) quod.
pallet, stretcher, tester, stead, hatch. joiner: (n) cabinetmaker, woodworker, reward: (n, v) recompense, return,
examining: (v) examine, investigate; member, associate, cabinet maker, compensation, guerdon, wage, meed,
(adj) investigative, curious, convoy joiner. prize, bribe; (v) repay, requite; (n)
disquisitive, exploratory, inquiring. moan: (n, v) grumble, gripe, whine, payment. ANTONYMS: (n) penalty,
frames: (n) framework, ribs. lament, cry, howl; (v) bewail, sentence; (v) dishonor, penalize.
glazier: (n) glasscutter, glazer, complain, mourn; (n) complaint, shivering: (adj) quivering, shaking,
journeyman, puttier, artificer, artisan, lamentation. ANTONYMS: (v) trembling, shaky, quaking,
craftsman, glass cutter. compliment; (n) praise. tremulous, shuddering, chilled; (n)
governor: (n) chief, manager, plate: (v) gild, cover, coat; (n, v) sheet, chill, cold, shiver. ANTONYM: (adj)
regulator, administrator, lord, dish, leaf; (n) home plate, home, composed.
day? Mercy, sire! Be pitiful! Clemency is a fine, royal virtue, which turns aside
the currents of wrath. Does your majesty believe that in the hour of death it will
be a great cause of content for a king never to have left any offence unpunished?
Besides, sire, I did not betray your majesty, 'twas Monsieur d'Angers; and I have
on my foot a very heavy chain, and a great ball of iron at the end, much heavier
than it should be in reason. Eh! sire! Have pity on me!"
"Olivier," cried the king, throwing back his head, "I observe that they charge
me twenty sols a hogshead for plaster, while it is worth but twelve. You will
refer back this account."
He turned his back on the cage, and set out to leave the room. The miserable
prisoner divined from the removal of the torches and the noise, that the king was
taking his departure.%
"Sire! sire!" be cried in despair.
The door closed again. He no longer saw anything, and heard only the
hoarse voice of the turnkey, singing in his ears this ditty,
"Maître Jean Balue,

A perdu la vue
De ses évêchés.
Monsieur de Verdun.
N'en a plus pas un;
Tous sont dépêchés."
The king reascended in silence to his retreat, and his suite followed him,
terrified by the last groans of the condemned man. All at once his majesty
turned to the Governor of the Bastille,
"By the way," said he, "was there not some one in that cage?"
"Pardieu, yes sire!" replied the governor, astounded by the question.
"And who was it?"
"Monsieur the Bishop of Verdun."
Thesaurus
betray: (v) deceive, bewray, sell, grass, joyfulness. invisible, perdue, concealed.
dupe, reveal, mislead, disclose, observe: (n, v) comment, notice, note; pity: (n, v) compassion, ruth; (n)
accuse, befool, bamboozle. (v) commemorate, mind, guard, mercy, commiseration, condolence,
ANTONYMS: (v) protect, undeceive, mention, mark, see, discover; (int, v) sympathy, clemency, remorse; (v)
hide, defend, withhold. look. ANTONYMS: (v) feel, sympathize, compassionate, feel
despair: (n) disappointment, disregard, break, overlook, disobey, sorry for. ANTONYMS: (n) blame,
desolation, dejection, melancholy, disrespect, Miss, violate. cruelty, indifference, harshness, joy.
gloom, desperation, depression, offence: (n) insult, injury, guilt, error, suite: (n, v) series, train; (n) entourage,
dismay, discouragement, pessimism, delinquency, fault, misdeed, apartment, cortege, flat, court,
sorrow. ANTONYMS: (n) happiness, infraction, infringement, attack, battery, group; (adj) round,
hopefulness, expectation, joy, cheer, offense. succession.
cheerfulness, resilience, elation, perdu: (v) buried, underground; (adj) unpunished: (adj) impune.
Victor Hugo 541
The king knew this better than any one else. But it was a mania of his.%
"Ah!" said he, with the innocent air of thinking of it for the first time,
"Guillaume de Harancourt, the friend of Monsieur the Cardinal Balue. A good
devil of a bishop!"
At the expiration of a few moments, the door of the retreat had opened again,
then closed upon the five personages whom the reader has seen at the beginning
of this chapter, and who resumed their places, their whispered conversations,
and their attitudes.
During the king's absence, several despatches had been placed on his table,
and he broke the seals himself. Then he began to read them promptly, one after
the other, made a sign to Master Olivier who appeared to exercise the office of
minister, to take a pen, and without communicating to him the contents of the
despatches, he began to dictate in a low voice, the replies which the latter wrote,
on his knees, in an inconvenient attitude before the table.
Guillaume Rym was on the watch.
The king spoke so low that the Flemings heard nothing of his dictation,
except some isolated and rather unintelligible scraps, such as,
"To maintain the fertile places by commerce, and the sterile by
manufactures-- To show the English lords our four bombards, London, Brabant,
Bourg-en-Bresse, Saint- Omer --Artillery is the cause of war being made more
judiciously now --To Monsieur de Bressuire, our friend --Armies cannot be
maintained without tribute, etc.
Once he raised his voice,
"Pasque Dieu! Monsieur the King of Sicily seals his letters with yellow wax,
like a king of France. Perhaps we are in the wrong to permit him so to do. My
fair cousin of Burgundy granted no armorial bearings with a field of gules. The
grandeur of houses is assured by the integrity of prerogatives. Note this, friend
Olivier."
Again,
Thesaurus
dictate: (n, v) command, charge, order, inconvenient: (adj) inopportune, Pinnipedia, sea Lions.
decree; (n) bidding, behest, edict; (v) awkward, disadvantageous, sterile: (adj) infertile, barren, effete,
bid, prescribe, rule, ordain. bothersome, improper, unfavorable, antiseptic, futile, vain, poor, arid,
ANTONYMS: (v) request, ask, troublesome, hard, inapt, untoward, aseptic; (adj, v) fruitless; (v) abortive.
record; (n, v) obey. unfortunate. ANTONYMS: (adj) ANTONYMS: (adj) fertile,
fertile: (adj) productive, fat, fecund, convenient, suitable, opportune, unhygienic, dirty, productive,
abundant, fruitful, exuberant, timely, advantageous. fruitful, exciting, creative.
copious, affluent, bountiful, scraps: (n) garbage, odds and ends, tribute: (n) commendation, tax, honor,
generous; (adj, v) creative. scrap, bits, food waste, leftover, trash, testimonial, duty, homage, respect,
ANTONYMS: (adj) sterile, waste, oddments, leftovers, residue. eulogy, compliment; (n, v)
unproductive, barren, fruitless, arid, seals: (n) Pinnipedia, key, talisman, contribution, subsidy. ANTONYMS:
impotent, withering. aquatic mammal, signet, suborder (n) blame, accusation, dishonor.
"Oh! oh!" said he, "What a long message! What doth our brother the
emperor claim?" And running his eye over the missive and breaking his reading
with interjection: "Surely! the Germans are so great and powerful, that it is
hardly credible--But let us not forget the old proverb: 'The finest county is
Flanders; the finest duchy, Milan; the finest kingdom, France.' Is it not so,
Messieurs Flemings?"
This time Coppenole bowed in company with Guillaume Rym. The hosier's
patriotism was tickled.%
The last despatch made Louis XI. frown.
"What is this?" be said, "Complaints and fault finding against our garrisons in
Picardy! Olivier, write with diligence to M. the Marshal de Rouault:-- That
discipline is relaxed. That the gendarmes of the unattached troops, the feudal
nobles, the free archers, and the Swiss inflict infinite evils on the rustics.-- That
the military, not content with what they find in the houses of the rustics,
constrain them with violent blows of cudgel or of lash to go and get wine, spices,
and other unreasonable things in the town.--That monsieur the king knows this.
That we undertake to guard our people against inconveniences, larcenies and
pillage.-- That such is our will, by our Lady!-- That in addition, it suits us not that
any fiddler, barber, or any soldier varlet should be clad like a prince, in velvet,
cloth of silk, and rings of gold.-- That these vanities are hateful to God.-- That
we, who are gentlemen, content ourselves with a doublet of cloth at sixteen sols
the ell, of Paris.--That messieurs the camp-followers can very well come down to
that, also.-- Command and ordain.-- To Monsieur de Rouault, our friend.--
Good."
He dictated this letter aloud, in a firm tone, and in jerks. At the moment when
he finished it, the door opened and gave passage to a new personage, who
precipitated himself into the chamber, crying in affright,
"Sire! sire! there is a sedition of the populace in Paris!" Louis XI.'s grave face
contracted; but all that was visible of his emotion passed away like a flash of
lightning. He controlled himself and said with tranquil severity,
"Gossip Jacques, you enter very abruptly!"
Thesaurus
constrain: (v) confine, compel, force, despicable, repulsive, distasteful, correspondence, alphabetic character,
make, drive, bind, curb, bridle, foul; (adj, v) odious, obnoxious. correpondence, circular.
obligate, require, restrain. ANTONYMS: (adj) delightful, kind, nobles: (n) landed gentry, upper class.
ANTONYMS: (v) liberate, encourage, nice, benign, desirable. sedition: (n, v) rebellion, insurrection,
free, release, broaden, extend. interjection: (n) ejaculation, mutiny; (n) disloyalty, fomentation,
evils: (n) mala. intercalation, interpolation, disobedience, treason, instigation,
fiddler: (n) Fiddler's money, interposition, interlineation, violation, unrest, uprising.
trumpeter, fifer, instrumentalist, interruption, interspersion, expletive, ANTONYM: (n) loyalty.
musician, player, piper, violin player, insertion, cry, outcry. varlet: (n) rascal, knave, page,
twiddler, tinkerer, drummer. missive: (n) epistle, note, message, attendant, scoundrel, mean wretch,
hateful: (adj) disgusting, execrable, communication, billet, cullion, scalawag, scallywag,
nasty, abominable, hideous, memorandum, encyclical, rapscallion, scamp.
Victor Hugo 543
"Sire! sire! there is a revolt!" repeated Gossip Jacques breathlessly.%

The king, who had risen, grasped him roughly by the arm, and said in his
ear, in such a manner as to be heard by him alone, with concentrated rage and a
sidelong glance at the Flemings,
"Hold your tongue! or speak low!"
The new comer understood, and began in a low tone to give a very terrified
account, to which the king listened calmly, while Guillaume Rym called
Coppenole's attention to the face and dress of the new arrival, to his furred cowl,
(caputia fourrata), his short cape, (epitogia curta), his robe of black velvet, which
bespoke a president of the court of accounts.
Hardly had this personage given the king some explanations, when Louis XI.
exclaimed, bursting into a laugh,
"In truth? Speak aloud, Gossip Coictier! What call is there for you to talk so
low? Our Lady knoweth that we conceal nothing from our good friends the
Flemings."
"But sire..."
"Speak loud!"
Gossip Coictier was struck dumb with surprise.
"So," resumed the king,--"speak sir,--there is a commotion among the louts in
our good city of Paris?"
"Yes, sire."
"And which is moving you say, against monsieur the bailiff of the Palais-de-
Justice?"
"So it appears," said the gossip, who still stammered, utterly astounded by
the abrupt and inexplicable change which had just taken place in the king's
thoughts.
Louis XI. continued: "Where did the watch meet the rabble?"
Thesaurus
bespoke: (adj) bespoken, custom, restlessly, frantically, irritably, gab, talk, babble, natter, tattle; (n)
engaged, affianced, commissioned, emotionally, tensely. chatterbox, conversation, small talk.
customized, made to measure, made cape: (n) headland, ness, shawl, tippet, ANTONYM: (n) truth.
to order, modified, personalized, coat, point, mantelet, promontory, louis: (n) Joe Louis.
specially made. mantle, capellet, capeskin. sidelong: (adj) indirect, oblique, side,
calmly: (adv) stilly, tranquilly, coolly, conceal: (v) hide, disguise, bury, asquint, askance, askant; (adv)
serenely, placidly, sedately, screen, cloak, smother, shield, sideways, obliquely, askew, aslant,
smoothly, peacefully, easily, suppress, mask, obscure; (n, v) veil. sideling. ANTONYM: (adj) direct.
undisturbedly, steadily. ANTONYMS: (v) reveal, show, tongue: (n) lingua, speech, idiom,
ANTONYMS: (adv) anxiously, expose, divulge, clarify, uncover, dialect, clapper, glossa, natural
hysterically, nervously, agitatedly, disclose, tell, admit, spotlight, flaunt. language, striker, talk; (v) lick; (adj)
uncontrollably, histrionically, gossip: (n, v) chatter, rumor, chitchat, flowing.
"Marching from the Grand Truanderie, towards the Pont-aux- Changeurs. I

met it myself as I was on my way hither to obey your majesty's commands. I
heard some of them shouting: 'Down with the bailiff of the palace!'"
"And what complaints have they against the bailiff?"
"Ah!" said Gossip Jacques, "because he is their lord."
"Really?"
"Yes, sire. They are knaves from the Cour-des-Miracles. They have been
complaining this long while, of the bailiff, whose vassals they are. They do not
wish to recognize him either as judge or as voyer?"
"Yes, certainly!" retorted the king with a smile of satisfaction which he
strove in vain to disguise.%
"In all their petitions to the Parliament, they claim to have but two masters.
Your majesty and their God, who is the devil, I believe."
"Eh! eh!" said the king.
He rubbed his hands, he laughed with that inward mirth which makes the
countenance beam; he was unable to dissimulate his joy, although he
endeavored at moments to compose himself. No one understood it in the least,
not even Master Olivier. He remained silent for a moment, with a thoughtful but
contented air.
"Are they in force?" he suddenly inquired.
"Yes, assuredly, sire," replied Gossip Jacques.
"How many?"
"Six thousand at the least."
The king could not refrain from saying: "Good!" he went on,
"Are they armed?"
"With scythes, pikes, hackbuts, pickaxes. All sorts of very violent weapons."
The king did not appear in the least disturbed by this list. Jacques considered
it his duty to add,
Thesaurus
complaining: (adj) irritable, peevish, demolish, disturb, fluster. hear, conform, abide by, serve,
petulant, whining, moaning, dissimulate: (v) disguise, masquerade, comply with; (n, v) mind, heed.
complaintive, repining; (adj, v) mask, pretend, fake, feign, conceal, ANTONYMS: (v) disobey, defy,
querulous; (n, v) lamenting; (adv) cloak, secrete, simulate, make believe. break, transgress, infringe, challenge,
complainingly; (n) plaintive. ANTONYMS: (v) disclose, expose, deny.
ANTONYMS: (adj) calm, reveal, display. recognize: (n, v) know, discern; (v)
uncomplaining, cheerful, willing. faction: (n) crew, cabal, group, band, acknowledge, identify, distinguish,
compose: (v) build, compile, write, set, party, division, junto, dissension, admit, discover, confess, realize,
weave; (adj, v) appease, tranquilize, clan; (n, v) feud. ANTONYMS: (n) allow, appreciate. ANTONYMS: (v)
allay, lull; (n, v) calm, constitute, whole, agreement, entirety, peace, deny, diminish, forget, ignore,
settle. ANTONYMS: (v) destroy, ruin, unity. disregard.
unsettle, annihilate, discompose, obey: (v) comply, listen, keep, fulfill,
Victor Hugo 545
"If your majesty does not send prompt succor to the bailiff, he is lost."%
"We will send," said the king with an air of false seriousness. "It is well.
Assuredly we will send. Monsieur the bailiff is our friend. Six thousand! They
are desperate scamps! Their audacity is marvellous, and we are greatly enraged
at it. But we have only a few people about us to-night. To-morrow morning will
be time enough."
Gossip Jacques exclaimed, "Instantly, sire! there will be time to sack the
bailiwick a score of times, to violate the seignory, to hang the bailiff. For God's
sake, sire! send before to-morrow morning."
The king looked him full in the face. "I have told you to-morrow morning."
It was one Of those looks to which one does not reply. After a silence, Louis
XI. raised his voice once more,
"You should know that, Gossip Jacques. What was"
He corrected himself. "What is the bailiff's feudal jurisdiction?"
"Sire, the bailiff of the palace has the Rue Calendre as far as the Rue de
l'Herberie, the Place Saint-Michel, and the localities vulgarly known as the
Mureaux, situated near the church of Notre-Dame des Champs (here Louis XI.
raised the brim of his hat), which hotels number thirteen, plus the Cour des
Miracles, plus the Maladerie, called the Banlieue, plus the whole highway which
begins at that Maladerie and ends at the Porte Sainte-Jacques. Of these divers
places he is voyer, high, middle, and low, justiciary, full seigneur."
"Bless me!" said the king, scratching his left ear with his right hand, "that
makes a goodly bit of my city! Ah! monsieur the bailiff was king of all that."
This time he did not correct himself. He continued dreamily, and as though
speaking to himself,
"Very fine, monsieur the bailiff! You had there between your teeth a pretty
slice of our Paris."
All at once he broke out explosively, "Pasque-Dieu!" What people are those
who claim to be voyers, justiciaries, lords and masters in our domains? who have
Thesaurus
bless: (v) consecrate, celebrate, divers: (adj, v) sundry, various, ANTONYMS: (n) flippancy,
sanctify, anoint, eulogize, sign, separate; (adj) several, many, diverse, insignificance, frivolity, giddiness,
praise, keep, grant, glorify; (n) miscellaneous, not a few, varied; (v) jollity, triviality, cheerfulness, joking,
blessing. ANTONYMS: (v) curse, diversified; (n) diver. joviality, unimportance, playfulness.
condemn, disapprove, damn, explosively: (adv) hazardously, violate: (v) contravene, break,
disallow, deny. volatilely. transgress, ravish, desecrate,
brim: (n) rim, periphery, verge, edge, justiciary: (n) justiciar, judge, dishonor, disobey, infringe, rape,
lip, hem, rand, margin, perimeter, jurisdiction, jurist, magistrate. profane, offend. ANTONYMS: (v)
brink, limit. seriousness: (n) earnest, earnestness, obey, respect, consecrate, observe,
corrected: (adj) amended, reformed, graveness, importance, staidness, honor, uphold.
purified, educated, altered, solemnity, sincerity, consequence,
chastened, disciplined. sobriety, austerity, soberness.
their tollgates at the end of every field? their gallows and their hangman at every
cross-road among our people? So that as the Greek believed that he had as many
gods as there were fountains, and the Persian as many as he beheld stars, the
Frenchman counts as many kings as he sees gibbets! Pardieu! 'tis an evil thing,
and the confusion of it displeases me. I should greatly like to know whether it be
the mercy of God that there should be in Paris any other lord than the king, any
other judge than our parliament, any other emperor than ourselves in this
empire! By the faith of my soul! the day must certainly come when there shall
exist in France but one king, one lord, one judge, one headsman, as there is in
paradise but one God!"%
He lifted his cap again, and continued, still dreamily, with the air and accent
of a hunter who is cheering on his pack of hounds: "Good, my people! bravely
done! break these false lords! do your duty! at them! have at them! pillage them!
take them! sack them!....Ah! you want to be kings, messeigneurs? On, my people
on!"
Here he interrupted himself abruptly, bit his lips as though to take back his
thought which had already half escaped, bent his piercing eyes in turn on each of
the five persons who surrounded him, and suddenly grasping his hat with both
hands and staring full at it, he said to it: "Oh! I would burn you if you knew
what there was in my head."
Then casting about him once more the cautious and uneasy glance of the fox
re-entering his hole,
"No matter! we will succor monsieur the bailiff. Unfortunately, we have but
few troops here at the present moment, against so great a populace. We must
wait until to-morrow. The order will be transmitted to the City and every one
who is caught will be immediately hung."
"By the way, sire," said Gossip Coictier, "I had forgotten that in the first
agitation, the watch have seized two laggards of the band. If your majesty
desires to see these men, they are here."
"If I desire to see them!" cried the king. "What! Pasque- Dieu! You forget a
thing like that! Run quick, you, Olivier! Go, seek them!"
Thesaurus
bravely: (adv) courageously, fearlessly, wasteful, incautious, thoughtless, hanger, tormentor, tiger, boggle,
valiantly, boldly, intrepidly, imprudent, unwary. crossword puzzle, scrabble, wild
dauntlessly, gallantly, audaciously, cheering: (adj, n) encouraging, beast, hyena.
undauntedly, heroically, doughtily. inspiriting; (adj) comforting, hearty, hunter: (n) fowler, huntsman, trapper,
ANTONYMS: (adv) timidly, fearfully, exhilarating, heartening, amusing; (n) Nimrod, seeker, tracker, falconer,
execrably, nervously. applause, acclaim, ovation, cheers. hawker, courser, watch, ticker.
cautious: (adj) guarded, conservative, ANTONYMS: (adj) disheartening, transmitted: (adj) transmissible,
prudent, watchful, attentive, heartbreaking, discouraging, genetic, familial, inherited,
reserved, shy, provident, judicious, depressing, dejecting, disturbing. patrimonial, ancestral, catching,
circumspect, chary. ANTONYMS: counts: (adj) details, particulars, items. communicable, contractable,
(adj) rash, open, impulsive, gods: (n) gallery. transmittable, figurative.
impetuous, careless, irresponsible, hangman: (n) executioner, headsman,
Victor Hugo 547
Master Olivier quitted the room and returned a moment later with the two
prisoners, surrounded by archers of the guard. The first had a coarse, idiotic,
drunken and astonished face. He was clothed in rags, and walked with one knee
bent and dragging his leg. The second had a pallid and smiling countenance,
with which the reader is already acquainted.%
The king surveyed them for a moment without uttering a word, then
addressing the first one abruptly,
"What's your name?"
"Gieffroy Pincebourde."
"Your trade."
"Outcast."
"What were you going to do in this damnable sedition?" The outcast stared at
the king, and swung his arms with a stupid air.
He had one of those awkwardly shaped heads where intelligence is about as
much at its ease as a light beneath an extinguisher.
"I know not," said he. "They went, I went."
"Were you not going to outrageously attack and pillage your lord, the bailiff
of the palace?"
"I know that they were going to take something from some one. That is all."
A soldier pointed out to the king a billhook which he had seized on the
person of the vagabond.
"Do you recognize this weapon?" demanded the king.
"Yes; 'tis my billhook; I am a vine-dresser."
"And do you recognize this man as your companion?" added Louis XI.,
pointing to the other prisoner.
"No, I do not know him."
Thesaurus
billhook: (n) pruning hook, account, scandalously, preposterously, shapen, made, created, beaten,
bank bill, bank note, banknote, beak, shockingly, exorbitantly, educated, featured, having features,
hook, brush hook; (adj) cleaver, ridiculously, shamefully, built, constructed.
cutter. extortionately, nastily, excessively, soldier: (n) warrior, fighter,
damnable: (adj) cursed, damned, crazily. ANTONYMS: (adv) serviceman, champion, ranker,
abominable, hateful, accursed, admirably, sensibly, politely, calmly, military personnel, swordsman,
devilish, infernal, disgusting, sinful, modestly, commendably. trooper, cavalryman, guardsman,
deplorable, offensive. ANTONYMS: seized: (adj) confiscate, appropriated, janissary.
(adj) commendable, laudable, condemned, apprehended, grasped, surrounded: (adj) enclosed, ingirt, not
praiseworthy. taken, held, seised, detained, independent, ringed, inside, rooted,
extinguisher: (n) device, asphyxiator. obtained, arraught. conditioned, circumstanced,
outrageously: (adv) disgracefully, shaped: (adj) formed, fashioned, bounded; (v) beset, furnished.
"That will do," said the king, making a sign with his finger to the silent
personage who stood motionless beside the door, to whom we have already
called the reader's attention.%
"Gossip Tristan, here is a man for you."
Tristan l'Hermite bowed. He gave an order in a low voice to two archers,
who led away the poor vagabond.
In the meantime, the king had approached the second prisoner, who was
perspiring in great drops: "Your name?"
"Sire, Pierre Gringoire."
"Your trade?"
"Philosopher, sire."
"How do you permit yourself, knave, to go and besiege our friend, monsieur
the bailiff of the palace, and what have you to say concerning this popular
agitation?"
"Sire, I had nothing to do with it."
"Come, now! you wanton wretch, were not you apprehended by the watch
in that bad company?"
"No, sire, there is a mistake. 'Tis a fatality. I make tragedies. Sire, I entreat
your majesty to listen to me. I am a poet. 'Tis the melancholy way of men of my
profession to roam the streets by night. I was passing there. It was mere chance.
I was unjustly arrested; I am innocent of this civil tempest. Your majesty sees
that the vagabond did not recognize me. I conjure your majesty"
"Hold your tongue!" said the king, between two swallows of his ptisan. "You
split our head!"
Tristan l'Hermite advanced and pointing to Gringoire,
"Sire, can this one be hanged also?"
This was the first word that he had uttered.
"Phew!" replied the king, "I see no objection."
Thesaurus
apprehended: (adj) arrested, seized, ANTONYMS: (adj) straight, concave, merely; (adj, v) clear.
understood, under arrest, in custody, plucked. pointing: (n) punctuation, indication,
detained, appreciated, conjure: (v) invoke, entreat, arouse, scoring.
comprehended. juggle, bewitch, beseech, bid, conjure ptisan: (n) balm, balsam, cordial,
besiege: (v) beset, beleaguer, up, evoke, implore, bring up. theriac, tisane.
surround, blockade, attack, compass, meantime: (adv) meanwhile, in the unjustly: (adv) wrongly, wrongfully,
hem in, press, importune, assail, meantime, simultaneously; (n) wickedly, iniquitously, inequitably,
bombard. ANTONYMS: (v) help, interval, interlude, while, at times, undeservedly, illegally, foully,
please. whiles, mean, instrument. injuriously, unrighteously,
bowed: (adj) arched, curved, inclined, mere: (adj, n) entire; (adj) bare, simple, unjustifiedly. ANTONYMS: (adv)
crooked, arciform, arching, arced, pure; (n) loch, tarn, boundary, rightly, reasonably.
bandy, arcuate, twisted, bended. absolute; (n, v) downright; (adv)
Victor Hugo 549
"I see a great many!" said Gringoire.%

At that moment, our philosopher was greener than an olive. He perceived
from the king's cold and indifferent mien that there was no other resource than
something very pathetic, and he flung himself at the feet of Louis XI., exclaiming,
with gestures of despair:
"Sire! will your majesty deign to hear me. Sire! break not in thunder over so
small a thing as myself. God's great lightning doth not bombard a lettuce. Sire,
you are an august and, very puissant monarch; have pity on a poor man who is
honest, and who would find it more difficult to stir up a revolt than a cake of ice
would to give out a spark! Very gracious sire, kindness is the virtue of a lion and
a king. Alas! rigor only frightens minds; the impetuous gusts of the north wind
do not make the traveller lay aside his cloak; the sun, bestowing his rays little by
little, warms him in such ways that it will make him strip to his shirt. Sire, you
are the sun. I protest to you, my sovereign lord and master, that I am not an
outcast, thief, and disorderly fellow. Revolt and brigandage belong not to the
outfit of Apollo. I am not the man to fling myself into those clouds which break
out into seditious clamor. I am your majesty's faithful vassal. That same
jealousy which a husband cherisheth for the honor of his wife, the resentment
which the son hath for the love of his father, a good vassal should feel for the
glory of his king; he should pine away for the zeal of this house, for the
aggrandizement of his service. Every other passion which should transport him
would be but madness. These, sire, are my maxims of state: then do not judge
me to be a seditious and thieving rascal because my garment is worn at the
elbows. If you will grant me mercy, sire, I will wear it out on the knees in
praying to God for you night and morning! Alas! I am not extremely rich, 'tis
true. I am even rather poor. But not vicious on that account. It is not my fault.
Every one knoweth that great wealth is not to be drawn from literature, and that
those who are best posted in good books do not always have a great fire in
winter. The advocate's trade taketh all the grain, and leaveth only straw to the
other scientific professions. There are forty very excellent proverbs anent the
hole-ridden cloak of the philosopher. Oh, sire! clemency is the only light which
Thesaurus
aggrandizement: (n) elevation, vindictiveness, mercilessness. olive: (n) Olea europaea, European
exaggeration, exaltation, growth, deign: (v) lower oneself, vouchsafe, olive tree, wood, olive tree, olive
increase, promotion, rise, stoop, descend, lower, grant, move, green, chromatic color, chromatic
aggravation, dilation, rarefaction, stoop to, allow, fall, come from. colour, drupe; (adj) green, glaucous,
spread. disorderly: (adj) wild, disordered, chromatic.
anent: (adj) anenst. chaotic, boisterous, jumbled, proverbs: (n) proverb.
clemency: (n) charity, tenderness, disorganized, unruly, rowdy, untidy, zeal: (adj, n) eagerness; (n) fervor,
leniency, compassion, pardon, pity, irregular; (adj, v) lawless. enthusiasm, devotion, passion,
benevolence, quarter, grace; (adj, n) ANTONYMS: (adj) orderly, neat, vehemence, fire, fervency, heat,
kindness, benignity. ANTONYMS: arranged, peaceful, organized, fervour, ardour. ANTONYMS: (n)
(n) blame, cruelty, harshness, systematized, conforming, ordered, apathy, lethargy, patience.
strictness, unkindness, restrained, behaved, coherent.
can enlighten the interior of so great a soul. Clemency beareth the torch before
all the other virtues. Without it they are but blind men groping after God in the
dark. Compassion, which is the same thing as clemency, causeth the love of
subjects, which is the most powerful bodyguard to a prince. What matters it to
your majesty, who dazzles all faces, if there is one poor man more on earth, a
poor innocent philosopher spluttering amid the shadows of calamity, with an
empty pocket which resounds against his hollow belly? Moreover, sire, I am a
man of letters. Great kings make a pearl for their crowns by protecting letters.
Hercules did not disdain the title of Musagetes. Mathias Corvin favored Jean de
Monroyal, the ornament of mathematics. Now, 'tis an ill way to protect letters to
hang men of letters. What a stain on Alexander if he had hung Aristoteles! This
act would not be a little patch on the face of his reputation to embellish it, but a
very malignant ulcer to disfigure it. Sire! I made a very proper epithalamium for
Mademoiselle of Flanders and Monseigneur the very august Dauphin. That is
not a firebrand of rebellion. Your majesty sees that I am not a scribbler of no
reputation, that I have studied excellently well, and that I possess much natural
eloquence. Have mercy upon me, sire! In so doing you will perform a gallant
deed to our Lady, and I swear to you that I am greatly terrified at the idea of
being hanged!"%
So saying, the unhappy Gringoire kissed the king's slippers, and Guillaume
Rym said to Coppenole in a low tone: "He doth well to drag himself on the earth.
Kings are like the Jupiter of Crete, they have ears only in their feet." And
without troubling himself about the Jupiter of Crete, the hosier replied with a
heavy smile, and his eyes fixed on Gringoire: "Oh! that's it exactly! I seem to hear
Chancellor Hugonet craving mercy of me."
When Gringoire paused at last, quite out of breath, he raised his head
tremblingly towards the king, who was engaged in scratching a spot on the knee
of his breeches with his finger- nail; then his majesty began to drink from the
goblet of ptisan. But he uttered not a word, and this silence tortured Gringoire.
At last the king looked at him. "Here is a terrible bawler!" said, he. Then,
turning to Tristan l'Hermite, "Bali! let him go!"
Thesaurus
belly: (n) stomach, inside, pregnancy, deck, beautify, ornament, embroider, scrivener, Augustin Eugene scribe,
maw, bowels, intestines, waist, trim, bedeck, gild, garnish. scribe, pamphleteer, journalist.
corporation; (v) balloon, swell, bloat. ANTONYMS: (v) deface, understate, spluttering: (adj) noisy.
craving: (n) appetite, addiction, disfigure, mar, spoil, uglify. tremblingly: (adv) quiveringly,
appetence, eagerness, hankering, yen, enlighten: (v) advise, edify, educate, tremulously, quakingly,
hunger; (n, v) desire, appetency; (adj, inform, clarify, apprise, instruct, shudderingly, shiveringly, shakily,
n) longing; (adj) eager. ANTONYMS: illuminate, clear, notify; (adj, v) quaveringly.
(n) disgust, hatred, distaste, lighten. ANTONYMS: (v) puzzle, troubling: (adj) worrying, disquieting,
repulsion, aversion, apathy, obfuscate, mystify, confound, cloud, distressing, distressful, disconcerting,
disinclination; (adj) unconcerned, brutalize, bewilder, muddle. alarming, perturbing, bad, annoying,
disinterested. scribbler: (n) writer, penman, pen, sad, worrisome. ANTONYM: (adj)
embellish: (v) dress, adorn, decorate, author, the scribbling race, hack, reassuring.
Victor Hugo 551
Gringoire fell backwards, quite thunderstruck with joy.%

"At liberty!" growled Tristan "Doth not your majesty wish to have him
detained a little while in a cage?"
"Gossip," retorted Louis XI., "think you that 'tis for birds of this feather that
we cause to be made cages at three hundred and sixty-seven livres, eight sous,
three deniers apiece? Release him at once, the wanton (Louis XI. was fond of this
word which formed, with Pasque-Dieu, the foundation of his joviality), and put
him out with a buffet."
"Ugh!" cried Gringoire, "what a great king is here!"
And for fear of a counter order, he rushed towards the door, which Tristan
opened for him with a very bad grace. The soldiers left the room with him,
pushing him before them with stout thwacks, which Gringoire bore like a true
stoical philosopher.
The king's good humor since the revolt against the bailiff had been
announced to him, made itself apparent in every way. This unwonted clemency
was no small sign of it. Tristan l'Hermite in his corner wore the surly look of a
dog who has had a bone snatched away from him.
Meanwhile, the king thrummed gayly with his fingers on the arm of his chair,
the March of Pont-Audemer. He was a dissembling prince, but one who
understood far better how to hide his troubles than his joys. These external
manifestations of joy at any good news sometimes proceeded to very great
lengths thus, on the death, of Charles the Bold, to the point of vowing silver
balustrades to Saint Martin of Tours; on his advent to the throne, so far as
forgetting to order his father's obsequies.
"Hé! sire!" suddenly exclaimed Jacques Coictier, "what has become of the
acute attack of illness for which your majesty had me summoned?"
"Oh!" said the king, "I really suffer greatly, my gossip. There is a hissing in
my ear and fiery rakes rack my chest."
Coictier took the king's hand, and begun to feel of his pulse with a knowing
air.
Thesaurus
dissembling: (adj) dissimulating, revolt: (n, v) mutiny, rebellion, thunderstruck: (adj) astonished,
insincere; (n) pretense, deception, insurrection; (v) sicken, nauseate, flabbergasted, dumbfounded,
pretence, deceit, chicanery, feigning, rebel, repel, repulse, offend; (adj, v) amazed, stupefied, stunned,
hypocrisy, misrepresentation, shock; (n) uprising. ANTONYMS: (n) speechless, dumfounded, aghast,
pretending. attraction; (v) please, delight. dazed; (v) awestruck.
obsequies: (n) funeral, exequies, snatched: (adj) hasty, speedy, brief, troubles: (n) dilemma, evils, harms,
interment, obit, exequy, parentation, hurried, quick, rapid, short, sudden, ills.
last rites, wake, decease, death, swift. ANTONYM: (adj) slow. unwonted: (adj) unaccustomed, rare,
funeral procession. stoical: (adj, n) stoic; (adj) indifferent, unusual, unused, infrequent,
rack: (n, v) torment, wrack, Scud; (n) patient, imperturbable, calm, uncustomary, singular,
manger, grid, cage, bracket, stand; (v) spirited, princely, phlegmatic, extraordinary, scarce, unaccountable,
excruciate, afflict, agonize. exalted, elevated, lofty. remarkable.
"Look, Coppenole," said Rym, in a low voice. "Behold him between Coictier
and Tristan. They are his whole court. A physician for himself, a headsman for
others."
As he felt the king's pulse, Coictier assumed an air of greater and greater
alarm. Louis XI. watched him with some anxiety. Coictier grew visibly more
gloomy. The brave man had no other farm than the king's bad health. He
speculated on it to the best of his ability.%
"Oh! oh!" he murmured at length, "this is serious indeed."
"Is it not?" said the king, uneasily.
"Pulsus creber, anhelans, crepitans, irregularis," continued the leech.
"Pasque-Dieu!"
"This may carry off its man in less than three days."
"Our Lady!" exclaimed the king. "And the remedy, gossip?"
"I am meditating upon that, sire."
He made Louis XI. put out his tongue, shook his head, made a grimace, and
in the very midst of these affectations,
"Pardieu, sire," he suddenly said, "I must tell you that there is a receivership
of the royal prerogatives vacant, and that I have a nephew."
"I give the receivership to your nephew, Gossip Jacques," replied the king;
"but draw this fire from my breast."
"Since your majesty is so clement," replied the leech, "you will not refuse to
aid me a little in building my house, Rue Saint-André-des-Arcs."
"Heugh!" said the king.
"I am at the end of my finances," pursued the doctor; and it would really be a
pity that the house should not have a roof; not on account of the house, which is
simple and thoroughly bourgeois, but because of the paintings of Jehan
Fourbault, which adorn its wainscoating. There is a Diana flying in the air, but
so excellent, so tender, so delicate, of so ingenuous an action, her hair so well
coiffed and adorned with a crescent, her flesh so white, that she leads into
Thesaurus
adorn: (v) deck, dress, embellish, ingenuous: (adj, n) frank; (adj) naive, pounding, cadence; (v) pulsate,
ornament, beautify, enrich, grace, guileless, honest, forthright, innocent, palpitate, pound.
trim, garnish, gild, blazon. straight, artless, downright, green, receivership: (n) legal proceeding,
ANTONYMS: (v) mar, disfigure, hearty. ANTONYMS: (adj) proceedings, office, judicial
deform, deface, damage, hurt. disingenuous, dishonest, cunning, proceeding, proceeding.
adorned: (adj) decorated, ornate, sophisticated, scheming, worldly, vacant: (adj) blank, hollow, unfilled,
bedecked, decked out, fancy, jaded, hesitant, experienced. void, free, unoccupied, bare, idle,
garnished, ornamented, decked, nephew: (n) aunt, grandnephew, expressionless, open; (adj, v) devoid.
beautiful, inscribed, festooned. brother's son, niece, cousin, uncle, ANTONYMS: (adj) full, cognizant,
flying: (adj) fast, quick, rapid, swift, kinsman. overflowing, inhabited, aware,
moving, flaring, aflare; (n) fly, flight, pulse: (n, v) throb; (n) pulsation, comprehending, animated, solid,
aviation, ballooning. impulse, heartbeat, legume, rhythm, expressive, knowing.
Victor Hugo 553
temptation those who regard her too curiously. There is also a Ceres. She is
another very fair divinity. She is seated on sheaves of wheat and crowned with
a gallant garland of wheat ears interlaced with salsify and other flowers. Never
were seen more amorous eyes, more rounded limbs, a nobler air, or a more
gracefully flowing skirt. She is one of the most innocent and most perfect
beauties whom the brush has ever produced."
"Executioner!" grumbled Louis XI., "what are you driving at?"
"I must have a roof for these paintings, sire, and, although 'tis but a small
matter, I have no more money."
"How much doth your roof cost?"
"Why a roof of copper, embellished and gilt, two thousand livres at the
most."
"Ah, assassin!" cried the king, "He never draws out one of my teeth which is
not a diamond."
"Am I to have my roof?" said Coictier.%
"Yes; and go to the devil, but cure me."
Jacques Coictier bowed low and said,
"Sire, it is a repellent which will save you. We will apply to your loins the
great defensive composed of cerate, Armenian bole, white of egg, oil, and
vinegar. You will continue your ptisan and we will answer for your majesty."
A burning candle does not attract one gnat alone. Master Olivier, perceiving
the king to be in a liberal mood, and judging the moment to be propitious,
approached in his turn.
"Sire"
"What is it now?" said Louis XI.
"Sire, your majesty knoweth that Simon Radin is dead?"
"Well?"
"He was councillor to the king in the matter of the courts of the treasury."
Thesaurus
cerate: (n) cerote, ointment, balm, graceful, smooth, fluid, soft, liquid; loathsome, distasteful, foul,
ceratum, unguent, cosmetic, lenitive, (n) current, flux, flow; (adj, v) loose. repugnant, forbidding, revolting;
lotion, oil, camphor ice, salve. ANTONYMS: (adj) secure, ugly, still, (adj, v) odious, hateful, repulsive.
copper: (n) brass, bull, cop, Cu, stilted, jerky, harsh, halting. ANTONYMS: (adj) alluring,
constable, gold, fuzz, pig, cent, garland: (n) anthology, coronal, appealing, attractive, pleasant, nice,
bobby, coin. wreath, festoon, chaplet, bouquet, delightful.
divinity: (n) God, theology, decoration, ornament, laurels, prize, salsify: (n) black salsify, herb, root,
divineness, immortal, godship, lei. root vegetable, vegetable oyster,
godhead, spirit, demiurge, gnat: (adj) midge, animalcule, emmet, herbaceous plant.
apologetics, demigod; (adj, n) the shrimp, maggot, minnow, worm; (n) vinegar: (n) verjuice, eisel, crab,
Deity. ANTONYM: (n) devil. blackfly, mosquito, sandfly, black fly. condiment, chili vinegar, brine, cider
flowing: (adj) fluent, running, repellent: (adj) offensive, disgusting, vinegar, acetum, acetic acid, alum.
"Well?"
"Sire, his place is vacant."%
As he spoke thus, Master Olivier's haughty face quitted its arrogant
expression for a lowly one. It is the only change which ever takes place in a
courtier's visage. The king looked him well in the face and said in a dry tone,-- "I
understand."
He resumed,
"Master Olivier, the Marshal de Boucicaut was wont to say, 'There's no
master save the king, there are no fishes save in the sea.' I see that you agree
with Monsieur de Boucicaut. Now listen to this; we have a good memory. In '68
we made you valet of our chamber: in '69, guardian of the fortress of the bridge
of Saint-Cloud, at a hundred livres of Tournay in wages (you wanted them of
Paris). In November, '73, by letters given to Gergeole, we instituted you keeper
of the Wood of Vincennes, in the place of Gilbert Acle, equerry; in '75, gruyer of
the forest of Rouvray-lez- Saint-Cloud, in the place of Jacques le Maire; in '78, we
graciously settled on you, by letters patent sealed doubly with green wax, an
income of ten livres parisis, for you and your wife, on the Place of the Merchants,
situated at the School Saint-Germain; in '79, we made you gruyer of the forest of
Senart, in place of that poor Jehan Daiz; then captain of the Château of Loches;
then governor of Saint- Quentin; then captain of the bridge of Meulan, of which
you cause yourself to be called comte. Out of the five sols fine paid by every
barber who shaves on a festival day, there are three sols for you and we have the
rest. We have been good enough to change your name of Le Mauvais (The Evil),
which resembled your face too closely. In '76, we granted you, to the great
displeasure of our nobility, armorial bearings of a thousand colors, which give
you the breast of a peacock. Pasque-Dieu! Are not you surfeited? Is not the
draught of fishes sufficiently fine and miraculous? Are you not afraid that one
salmon more will make your boat sink? Pride will be your ruin, gossip. Ruin and
disgrace always press hard on the heels of pride. Consider this and hold your
tongue."
Thesaurus
comte: (n) count, Isidore Auguste birds. modestly, poorly, softly, humbly.
Marie Francois comte, Auguste graciously: (adv) gracefully, mildly, ANTONYMS: (adj) noble, privileged,
comte. politely, courteously, benevolently, high, aristocratic, refined, exalted,
disgrace: (adj, n, v) dishonor; (n, v) benignantly, civilly, sympathetically, comfortable.
discredit, shame, stain, blemish, blot, mercifully, leniently, suavely. peacock: (v) strut, swagger, pose; (n)
slur, reproach; (v) degrade, debase; ANTONYMS: (adv) bitterly, coarsely, iris, tortoise shell, peafowl, bird of
(n) degradation. ANTONYMS: (n, v) poorly, ungraciously, harshly. Juno, tulip, spectrum, peacock
respect, esteem, credit; (v) glorify, keeper: (n) curator, guardian, guard, butterfly, chameleon.
dignify, praise; (n) merit, grace, warden, janitor, jailer, gaoler, warder, surfeited: (adj) full, gorged, perfect,
pride, rise, worthiness. caretaker, sentry, conservator. satiate, sick, impaired, overfull, made
fishes: (n) amphibians, Craniata, lowly: (adj) base, lower, low, inferior, pregnant, jaded, impregnated,
Subphylum Vertebrata, Vertebrata, baseborn; (adv) meekly, meanly, plenteous.
Victor Hugo 555
These words, uttered with severity, made Master Olivier's face revert to its
insolence.
"Good!" he muttered, almost aloud, "'tis easy to see that the king is ill to-day;
he giveth all to the leech."
Louis XI. far from being irritated by this petulant insult, resumed with some
gentleness, "Stay, I was forgetting that I made you my ambassador to Madame
Marie, at Ghent. Yes, gentlemen," added the king turning to the Flemings, "this
man hath been an ambassador. There, my gossip," he pursued, addressing
Master Olivier, "let us not get angry; we are old friends. 'Tis very late. We have
terminated our labors. Shave me."
Our readers have not, without doubt, waited until the present moment to
recognize in Master Olivier that terrible Figaro whom Providence, the great
maker of dramas, mingled so artistically in the long and bloody comedy of the
reign of Louis XI. We will not here undertake to develop that singular figure.
This barber of the king had three names. At court he was politely called Olivier
le Daim (the Deer); among the people Olivier the Devil. His real name was
Olivier le Mauvais.%
Accordingly, Olivier le Mauvais remained motionless, sulking at the king,
and glancing askance at Jacques Coictier.
"Yes, yes, the physician!" he said between his teeth.
"Ah, yes, the physician!" retorted Louis XI., with singular good humor; "the
physician has more credit than you. 'Tis very simple; he has taken hold upon us
by the whole body, and you hold us only by the chin. Come, my poor barber, all
will come right. What would you say and what would become of your office if I
were a king like Chilperic, whose gesture consisted in holding his beard in one
hand? Come, gossip mine, fulfil your office, shave me. Go get what you need
therefor."
Olivier perceiving that the king had made up his mind to laugh, and that
there was no way of even annoying him, went off grumbling to execute his
orders.
Thesaurus
askance: (adj) asquint, awry, askant, effrontery, cheek, assumption, gall, fretful, pettish, touchy, choleric.
sidelong, oblique, indirect, squint; disrespect, haughtiness, crust. ANTONYMS: (adj) easygoing,
(adv) suspiciously, obliquely, ANTONYMS: (n) respect, politeness, amiable, calm, affable, cheerful.
mistrustfully, edgewise. ANTONYM: meekness, shyness. revert: (v) lapse, relapse, go back,
(adv) trustingly. insult: (n, v) contumely, affront, abuse, recur, reverse, regress, reflect,
grumbling: (n) grumble, growling, flout, outrage, wound, taunt; (n) recover, resume, get back, come back.
murmur, murmuring, mutter, disgrace, indignity, contempt; (v) cut. ANTONYMS: (v) improve, progress.
muttering; (adj, n) rumbling; (adv) ANTONYMS: (n, v) compliment, shave: (v) scrape, reduce, pare, cut,
grumblingly; (adj) grouchy, grumpy, praise; (v) flatter, consecrate; (n) brush, chip, whittle, crop; (adj, v) clip,
irritable. privilege. shear, lop. ANTONYMS: (v)
insolence: (n) impertinence, petulant: (adj) irritable, peevish, cross, augment, expand, lengthen.
arrogance, audacity, impudence, testy, irascible, cranky, fractious,
The king rose, approached the window, and suddenly opening it with
extraordinary agitation,
"Oh! yes!" he exclaimed, clapping his hands, "yonder is a redness in the sky
over the City. 'Tis the bailiff burning. It can be nothing else but that. Ah! my
good people! here you are aiding me at last in tearing down the rights of
lordship!"
Then turning towards the Flemings: "Come, look at this, gentlemen. Is it not
a fire which gloweth yonder?"
The two men of Ghent drew near.%
"A great fire," said Guillaume Rym.
"Oh!" exclaimed Coppenole, whose eyes suddenly flashed, "that reminds me
of the burning of the house of the Seigneur d'Hymbercourt. There must be a
goodly revolt yonder."
"You think so, Master Coppenole?" And Louis XI.'s glance was almost as
joyous as that of the hosier. "Will it not be difficult to resist?"
"Cross of God! Sire! Your majesty will damage many companies of men of
war thereon."
"Ah! I! 'tis different," returned the king. "If I willed." The hosier replied
hardily,
"If this revolt be what I suppose, sire, you might will in vain."
"Gossip," said Louis XI., "with the two companies of my unattached troops
and one discharge of a serpentine, short work is made of a populace of louts."
The hosier, in spite of the signs made to him by Guillaume Rym, appeared
determined to hold his own against the king.
"Sire, the Swiss were also louts. Monsieur the Duke of Burgundy was a great
gentleman, and he turned up his nose at that rabble rout. At the battle of
Grandson, sire, he cried: 'Men of the cannon! Fire on the villains!' and he swore
by Saint-George. But Advoyer Scharnachtal hurled himself on the handsome
duke with his battle-club and his people, and when the glittering Burgundian
Thesaurus
duke: (n) lord, prince, hand, patrician, sir, adult male, esquire, conclusion.
nobleman, fist, chief; (v) pass, box, sahib, gentlemen; (adj) gentilhomme, signs: (n) situation, indications,
deliver. gentlemanly. signage, appearances, cipher,
extraordinary: (adj) odd, exceptional, nose: (n) hooter, neb, nozzle, cryptogram, discriminating marks,
curious, rare, special, phenomenal, proboscis, honker, bow, odour; (v) indicia, secret code, secret language,
amazing, astonishing, unusual, wind, pry, scent; (n, v) sniff. symbols.
strange, abnormal. ANTONYMS: opening: (n) gap, break, aperture, troops: (n) soldiery, garrison, army,
(adj) ordinary, normal, everyday, beginning, door, commencement, force, military, personnel, horse,
usual, common, mundane, regular, entrance, hole, occasion, cleft; (adj, n) man, cavalry, military personnel,
undistinguished, unremarkable, preliminary. ANTONYMS: (adj) final, troop.
insignificant, natural. last; (adj, n) closing; (n) exit, finale,
gentleman: (n) gent, Mr, male, finish, ending, shutting, postscript,
Victor Hugo 557
army came in contact with these peasants in bull hides, it flew in pieces like a
pane of glass at the blow of a pebble. Many lords were then slain by low-born
knaves; and Monsieur de Château-Guyon, the greatest seigneur in Burgundy,
was found dead, with his gray horse, in a little marsh meadow."
"Friend," returned the king, "you are speaking of a battle. The question here is
of a mutiny. And I will gain the upper hand of it as soon as it shall please me to
frown."
The other replied indifferently,
"That may be, sire; in that case, 'tis because the people's hour hath not yet
come."
Guillaume Rym considered it incumbent on him to intervene,
"Master Coppenole, you are speaking to a puissant king."
"I know it," replied the hosier, gravely.%
"Let him speak, Monsieur Rym, my friend," said the king; "I love this
frankness of speech. My father, Charles the Seventh, was accustomed to say that
the truth was ailing; I thought her dead, and that she had found no confessor.
Master Coppenole undeceiveth me."
Then, laying his hand familiarly on Coppenole's shoulder,
"You were saying, Master Jacques?"
"I say, sire, that you may possibly be in the right, that the hour of the people
may not yet have come with you."
Louis XI. gazed at him with his penetrating eye,
"And when will that hour come, master?"
"You will hear it strike."
"On what clock, if you please?"
Coppenole, with his tranquil and rustic countenance, made the king
approach the window.
Thesaurus
blow: (n) beat, knock, shock, wallop, communicator, shriver, minister, occupant, parson, locum tenens,
gust, jolt; (adj, n, v) gasp, puff; (n, v) Holy Father, father. sojourner; (adj) compulsory; (v)
blast, slap; (v) squander. frankness: (n) honesty, truth, supernatant, overlying.
ANTONYMS: (n, v) calm; (v) save, forthrightness, candidness, freedom, marsh: (n) quagmire, bog, swamp,
conserve, store, stillness, inhale, sincerity, candour, plainness, morass, marish, pool, wash,
come, arrive; (n) luck, comfort, bluffness, outspokenness, marshland, mire, swampland, sump.
caress. ingenuousness. ANTONYMS: (n) mutiny: (n, v) insurrection, rebellion;
clock: (n) chronometer, horologe, cunning, tact, delicacy, deceit, (n) disobedience, uprising,
alarm, alarm clock, clepsydra, ticker, conformity, reticence, indirectness, revolution, outbreak,
cuckoo clock, clock radio; (n, v) time, evasiveness. insubordination, defiance, rising; (v)
stopwatch; (v) measure. incumbent: (adj, v) superimposed; (n) rebel, rise. ANTONYMS: (n) loyalty,
confessor: (n) priest, penitentiary, functionary, official, householder, obedience.
"Listen, sire! There is here a donjon keep, a belfry, cannons, bourgeois,

soldiers; when the belfry shall hum, when the cannons shall roar, when the
donjon shall fall in ruins amid great noise, when bourgeois and soldiers shall
howl and slay each other, the hour will strike."
Louis's face grew sombre and dreamy. He remained silent for a moment,
then he gently patted with his hand the thick wall of the donjon, as one strokes
the haunches of a steed.%
"Oh! no!" said he. "You will not crumble so easily, will you, my good
Bastille?"
And turning with an abrupt gesture towards the sturdy Fleming,
"Have you never seen a revolt, Master Jacques?"
"I have made them," said the hosier.
"How do you set to work to make a revolt?" said the king.
"Ah!" replied Coppenole, "'tis not very difficult. There are a hundred ways.
In the first place, there must be discontent in the city. The thing is not
uncommon. And then, the character of the inhabitants. Those of Ghent are easy
to stir into revolt. They always love the prince's son; the prince, never. Well!
One morning, I will suppose, some one enters my shop, and says to me: 'Father
Coppenole, there is this and there is that, the Demoiselle of Flanders wishes to
save her ministers, the grand bailiff is doubling the impost on shagreen, or
something else,'-- what you will. I leave my work as it stands, I come out of my
hosier's stall, and I shout: 'To the sack?' There is always some smashed cask at
hand. I mount it, and I say aloud, in the first words that occur to me, what I have
on my heart; and when one is of the people, sire, one always has something on
the heart: Then people troop up, they shout, they ring the alarm bell, they arm
the louts with what they take from the soldiers, the market people join in, and
they set out. And it will always be thus, so long as there are lords in the
seignories, bourgeois in the bourgs, and peasants in the country."
"And against whom do you thus rebel?" inquired the king; "against your
bailiffs? against your lords?"
Thesaurus
doubling: (n) folding, duplication, skin. muscular; (adj, n) burly, brawny.
repetition, artifice, twisting, furring, shall: (n) must, necessity; (v) require, ANTONYMS: (adj) flimsy, puny,
gemination, plication, reduplication, bequeath, leave. fragile, rickety, slight, ramshackle,
duplicity; (v) guile. slay: (n, v) murder, assassinate; (v) infirm, frail, feeble, delicate, soft.
impost: (n) custom, tax, customs, dispatch, execute, slaughter, destroy, uncommon: (adj) extraordinary,
customs duty, toll, dues, cess, excise, massacre, put to death, remove, peculiar, scarce, singular, strange,
Scot, sess, stone. finish, butcher. special, exceptional, infrequent, odd,
roar: (n, v) bellow, cry, shout, howl, strokes: (n) approval, reward, unusual, unaccustomed.
bark, clatter, holler; (adj, n, v) recognition, prize, acclaim, credit, ANTONYMS: (adj) typical, usual,
thunder; (v) bawl; (adj, v) bluster; (adj, brownie points. normal, familiar, poor, ordinary, bad,
n) peal. ANTONYMS: (v) cry, week. sturdy: (adj) strong, stout, solid, imperfect, customary, accustomed,
shagreen: (n) leather, pellicle, fell, fur, rugged, firm, mighty, robust, healthy, frequent.
Victor Hugo 559
"Sometimes; that depends. Against the duke, also, sometimes."

Louis XI. returned and seated himself, saying, with a smile,
"Ah! here they have only got as far as the bailiffs."
At that instant Olivier le Daim returned. He was followed by two pages, who
bore the king's toilet articles; but what struck Louis XI. was that he was also
accompanied by the provost of Paris and the chevalier of the watch, who
appeared to be in consternation. The spiteful barber also wore an air of
consternation, which was one of contentment beneath, however. It was he who
spoke first.%
"Sire, I ask your majesty's pardon for the calamitous news which I bring."
The king turned quickly and grazed the mat on the floor with the feet of his
chair,
"What does this mean?"
"Sire," resumed Olivier le Daim, with the malicious air of a man who rejoices
that he is about to deal a violent blow, "'tis not against the bailiff of the courts
that this popular sedition is directed."
"Against whom, then?"
"Against you, sire?'
The aged king rose erect and straight as a young man,
"Explain yourself, Olivier! And guard your head well, gossip; for I swear to
you by the cross of Saint-Lô that, if you lie to us at this hour, the sword which
severed the head of Monsieur de Luxembourg is not so notched that it cannot yet
sever yours!"
The oath was formidable; Louis XI. had only sworn twice in the course of his
life by the cross of Saint-Lô.
Olivier opened his mouth to reply.
"Sire"
Thesaurus
calamitous: (adj) fatal, evil, wretched, unhappiness, displeasure, discontent, spiteful: (adj) malicious, malevolent,
fateful, deplorable, unfortunate, sad, panic, anxiety. sinister, nasty, malignant, venomous,
black, dreadful, cataclysmic; (adj, v) grazed: (adj) hurt. despiteful, ill-natured, vindictive,
ruinous. ANTONYMS: (adj) sever: (n, v) part, cut; (v) break, detach, cruel, hateful. ANTONYMS: (adj)
wonderful, beneficial, blessed, cut off, separate, rupture, rend, benevolent, harmless, merciful,
comforting, favorable. disconnect, crack, divorce. kindhearted, friendly, pleasant,
contentment: (n) content, happiness, ANTONYMS: (v) join, associate, loving, benign, generous, gentle,
pleasure, fulfillment, ease, delight, establish, initiate, unite, mend. flattering.
comfort, complacency, bliss, joy, severed: (adj) cut off, cut, broken, toilet: (n) lavatory, attire, dress, John,
contentedness. ANTONYMS: (n) separate, Severn, disconnected, rent lav, privy, can, stool, loo, costume,
dissatisfaction, sadness, discomfort, off, disrupt, disengaged, torn, convenience.
discontentment, misery, disrupted.
"On your knees!" interrupted the king violently. "Tristan, have an eye to this
man."
Olivier knelt down and said coldly,
"Sire, a sorceress was condemned to death by your court of parliament. She
took refuge in Notre-Dame. The people are trying to take her from thence by
main force. Monsieur the provost and monsieur the chevalier of the watch, who
have just come from the riot, are here to give me the lie if this is not the truth.
The populace is besieging Notre-Dame."%
"Yes, indeed!" said the king in a low voice, all pale and trembling with wrath.
"Notre-Dame! They lay siege to our Lady, my good mistress in her cathedral!--
Rise, Olivier. You are right. I give you Simon Radin's charge. You are right. 'Tis
I whom they are attacking. The witch is under the protection of this church, the
church is under my protection. And I thought that they were acting against the
bailiff! 'Tis against myself!"
Then, rendered young by fury, he began to walk up and down with long
strides. He no longer laughed, he was terrible, he went and came; the fox was
changed into a hyaena. He seemed suffocated to such a degree that he could not
speak; his lips moved, and his fleshless fists were clenched. All at once he raised
his head, his hollow eye appeared full of light, and his voice burst forth like a
clarion: "Down with them, Tristan! A heavy hand for these rascals! Go, Tristan,
my friend! slay! slay!"
This eruption having passed, he returned to his seat, and said with cold and
concentrated wrath,
"Here, Tristan! There are here with us in the Bastille the fifty lances of the
Vicomte de Gif, which makes three hundred horse: you will take them. There is
also the company of our unattached archers of Monsieur de Châteaupers: you
will take it. You are provost of the marshals; you have the men of your
provostship: you will take them. At the Hôtel Saint-Pol you will find forty
archers of monsieur the dauphin's new guard: you will take them. And, with all
these, you will hasten to Notre-Dame. Ah! messieurs, louts of Paris, do you fling
yourselves thus against the crown of France, the sanctity of Notre-Dame, and the
Thesaurus
attacking: (adj) aggressive, assailing, eruption: (adj, n) burst, blast, disorder, rebellion; (v) rebel.
invading, abusive, abhorrent, explosion; (adj) detonation, sanctity: (n) sanctitude, godliness,
warlike, rebellious, assailant. discharge; (n) rash, spurt, outburst, sacredness, devotion, piety,
besieging: (n) encirclement, Syracuse, eructation, effusion, bang. saintliness, purity, halidom,
Orleans, Atlanta, beleaguering, ANTONYMS: (n) retention, slump. sanctimony, religion, innocence.
Corregidor, Lucknow, military forty: (adj, n) XL; (n) two score, forties; ANTONYM: (n) unholiness.
blockade. (adj) twoscore. siege: (n) blockade, envelopment,
clarion: (n) horn, trombone, hyaena: (n) canine, canid, aardwolf, encirclement, investment, besieging;
ophicleide; (v) trumpet, proclaim, brown hyena. (v) beleaguer, encompass, environ,
promulgate, pibroch, exclaim, slogan; riot: (n, v) revolt, mutiny; (adj, n) envelop, encircle, beset.
(adj) clear, fair. ANTONYMS: (adj) disturbance, tumult, hubbub; (n) suffocated: (adj) suffocate; (v)
soft, low, dull, muffled. insurrection, sedition, commotion, asphyxied.
Victor Hugo 561
peace of this commonwealth! Exterminate, Tristan! exterminate! and let not a

single one escape, except it be for Montfauçon."
Tristan bowed. "'Tis well, sire."
He added, after a silence, "And what shall I do with the sorceress?"
This question caused the king to meditate.%
"Ah!" said he, "the sorceress! Monsieur d'Estouteville, what did the people
wish to do with her?"
"Sire," replied the provost of Paris, "I imagine that since the populace has
come to tear her from her asylum in Notre- Dame, 'tis because that impunity
wounds them, and they desire to hang her."
The king appeared to reflect deeply: then, addressing Tristan l'Hermite,
"Well! gossip, exterminate the people and hang the sorceress."
"That's it," said Rym in a low tone to Coppenole, "punish the people for
willing a thing, and then do what they wish."
"Enough, sire," replied Tristan. "If the sorceress is still in Notre-Dame, must
she be seized in spite of the sanctuary?"
"Pasque-Dieu! the sanctuary!" said the king, scratching his ear. "But the
woman must be hung, nevertheless."
Here, as though seized with a sudden idea, he flung himself on his knees
before his chair, took off his hat, placed it on the seat, and gazing devoutly at one
of the leaden amulets which loaded it down, "Oh!" said he, with clasped hands,
"our Lady of Paris, my gracious patroness, pardon me. I will only do it this once.
This criminal must be punished. I assure you, madame the virgin, my good
mistress, that she is a sorceress who is not worthy of your amiable protection.
You know, madame, that many very pious princes have overstepped the
privileges of the churches for the glory of God and the necessities of the State.
Saint Hugues, bishop of England, permitted King Edward to hang a witch in his
church. Saint-Louis of France, my master, transgressed, with the same object, the
church of Monsieur Saint-Paul; and Monsieur Alphonse, son of the king of
Jerusalem, the very church of the Holy Sepulchre. Pardon me, then, for this once.
Thesaurus
assure: (n, v) certify, warrant, vouch; liquidate, slay, slaughter, massacre, keeper, bawd.
(v) secure, persuade, satisfy, reassure, uproot, wipe out. ANTONYMS: (v) necessities: (n) supplies, necessity,
affirm, promise, ascertain; (adj, v) generate, revive, protect. essential, wants, support,
ensure. ANTONYMS: (v) alarm, glory: (n) celebrity, brightness, honor, subsistence, requirement, bread.
disclaim, deny, disbelieve, distinction, glorification, eclat, patroness: (n) supporter, sponsor,
undermine. dignity; (n, v) halo, pride; (v) exult, benefactress, support, donor, fairy
commonwealth: (n) nation, state, boast. ANTONYMS: (v) blasphemy, godmother.
country, body politic, province, lament, profanity; (n) dishonor, privileges: (n) human rights, rights,
society, kingdom, community, land, disrepute, ugliness, blame, criticism. openness, license, liberty, liberality,
republic, power. madame: (n) ma'am, dame, lady, Mrs, independence, civil liberties,
exterminate: (v) annihilate, eliminate, woman, mistress, adult female, immunities, constitutional rights,
destroy, obliterate, extirpate, Grande dame, gentlewoman, brothel generosity.
Our Lady of Paris, I will never do so again, and I will give you a fine statue of
silver, like the one which I gave last year to Our Lady of Ecouys. So be it."
He made the sign of the cross, rose, donned his hat once more, and said to
Tristan,
"Be diligent, gossip. Take Monsieur Châteaupers with you. You will cause
the tocsin to be sounded. You will crush the populace. You will seize the witch.
'Tis said. And I mean the business of the execution to be done by you. You will
render me an account of it. Come, Olivier, I shall not go to bed this night. Shave
me."%
Tristan l'Hermite bowed and departed. Then the king, dismissing Rym and
Coppenole with a gesture,
"God guard you, messieurs, my good friends the Flemings. Go, take a little
repose. The night advances, and we are nearer the morning than the evening."
Both retired and gained their apartments under the guidance of the captain of
the Bastille. Coppenole said to Guillaume Rym,
"Hum! I have had enough of that coughing king! I have seen Charles of
Burgundy drunk, and he was less malignant than Louis XI. when ailing."
"Master Jacques," replied Rym, "'tis because wine renders kings less cruel
than does barley water."
Thesaurus
advances: (v) access, approach. painstaking, careful, earnest, clearheaded; (n) teetotaler.
barley: (n) barleycorn, bear, bere, oats, studious, attentive, laborious, execution: (n) accomplishment,
cereal, grain, barley fodder. industrious, zealous. ANTONYMS: achievement, enforcement,
coughing: (n) coughs, breathing out. (adj) careless, negligent, dilatory, idle, implementation, effect, action,
crush: (n, v) squeeze, crunch, press; (v) inactive, languid, slack, sluggish, carrying out, executing, discharge,
beat, break, compress, conquer, lethargic, weary, indolent. death penalty, capital punishment.
stamp, overpower, squash, bruise. dismissing: (v) dismiss; (n) acquittal, ANTONYM: (n) omission.
ANTONYMS: (v) lose, congratulate, denial, dimission. tocsin: (n) alarm, bell, alert, larum,
stretch, praise, inspirit, encourage, drunk: (adj) tipsy, wet, tight, blotto, alarum, signal of distress, alerts, fire
compliment, expand, resist, submit, drunken, inebriated; (adj, n) inebriate; cross, hue and cry, note of alarm,
smooth. (n) boozer, dipsomaniac, drunkard, signal.
diligent: (adj) busy, active, assiduous, drinker. ANTONYMS: (adj) straight,
Victor Hugo 563
CHAPTER VI
LITTLE SWORD IN POCKET
On emerging from the Bastille, Gringoire descended the Rue Saint-Antoine

with the swiftness of a runaway horse. On arriving at the Baudoyer gate, he
walked straight to the stone cross which rose in the middle of that place, as
though he were able to distinguish in the darkness the figure of a man clad and
cloaked in black, who was seated on the steps of the cross.%
"Is it you, master?" said Gringoire.
The personage in black rose.
"Death and passion! You make me boil, Gringoire. The man on the tower of
Saint-Gervais has just cried half-past one o'clock in the morning."
"Oh," retorted Gringoire, "'tis no fault of mine, but of the watch and the king.
I have just had a narrow escape. I always just miss being hung. 'Tis my
predestination."
"You lack everything," said the other. "But come quickly. Have you the
password?"
"Fancy, master, I have seen the king. I come from him. He wears fustian
breeches. 'Tis an adventure."
Thesaurus
arriving: (n) arrival; (adj) incoming, separate. ANTONYMS: (v) mistake, feeling, anger, enthusiasm, heat,
inbound, received, external, confound, ignore, Miss, unite, craving, desire; (n, v) ardor.
homeward bound, inward, new, demean. ANTONYMS: (n) apathy, hate,
inward bound. ANTONYM: (adj) fancy: (n, v) desire, fantasy, caprice, serenity, meekness, hatred, doubt,
outgoing. dream, wish, daydream; (v) imagine, dislike, calmness, moderation.
cloaked: (adj) veiled, covered, hidden, consider; (adj, v) conceive; (n) runaway: (adj, n) renegade,
covert, disguised, concealed, furtive, conception, conceit. ANTONYMS: (n) delinquent; (n) deserter, romp,
hidden away, draped, clothed, reality, certainty, actuality, walkaway, refugee, absconder,
absorbed. ANTONYM: (adj) overt. conviction; (adj) unadorned, runagate, escapee, laugher; (adj)
distinguish: (v) discriminate, perceive, common; (v) hate, demonstrate, decided. ANTONYM: (n) challenge.
know, describe, make out, discover, detest, disapprove, test.
descry, behold, identify, recognize, passion: (n) affection, fire, fervor, love,
"Oh! distaff of words! what is your adventure to me! Have you the password
of the outcasts?"
"I have it. Be at ease. 'Little sword in pocket.'"
"Good. Otherwise, we could not make our way as far as the church. The
outcasts bar the streets. Fortunately, it appears that they have encountered
resistance. We may still arrive in time."
"Yes, master, but how are we to get into Notre-Dame?"
"I have the key to the tower."
"And how are we to get out again?"
"Behind the cloister there is a little door which opens on the Terrain and the
water. I have taken the key to it, and I moored a boat there this morning."
"I have had a beautiful escape from being hung!" Gringoire repeated.%
"Eh, quick! come!" said the other.
Both descended towards the city with long strides.
Thesaurus
adventure: (n, v) venture, chance; (n) ship, gondola, hoy. tethered; (adj) stationary.
accident, escapade, incident, event, distaff: (adj) female, rack; (v) dizen; (n) resistance: (n) endurance, impedance,
undertaking, consequence, essay; (v) sphere, domain, area, arena. hindrance, friction, obstacle,
risk, jeopardize. ANTONYMS: (n) ease: (v) alleviate, assuage, relieve, immunity, insubordination, defiance,
stillness, passiveness, inactivity, allay; (n) convenience, rest, leisure, renitency; (v) rebellion; (n, v)
inaction, avoidance, inertia, bore. relief, satisfaction; (adj, v) facilitate; interference. ANTONYMS: (n)
arrive: (n, v) come, appear; (v) mature, (n, v) relax. ANTONYMS: (n) obedience, agreement, susceptibility,
reach, attain, succeed, turn up, land, discomfort, formality, awkwardness, acceptance, receptivity, frailty,
fall, get in, show. ANTONYMS: (v) worry, toil, problem, pain, friendliness, vulnerability, defeatism,
go, depart, fail, fall, lose, exit. maladroitness; (v) aggravate, worsen, attack, softness.
boat: (n) yacht, steamship, ark, scull, impede.
craft, steamboat, dinghy, pinnace, moored: (v) on a rock, rock solid,
Victor Hugo 565
CHAPTER VII
CHATEAUPERS TO THE RESCUE
The reader will, perhaps, recall the critical situation in which we left
Quasimodo. The brave deaf man, assailed on all sides, had lost, if not all
courage, at least all hope of saving, not himself (he was not thinking of himself),
but the gypsy. He ran distractedly along the gallery. Notre-Dame was on the
point of being taken by storm by the outcasts. All at once, a great galloping of
horses filled the neighboring streets, and, with a long file of torches and a thick
column of cavaliers, with free reins and lances in rest, these furious sounds
debouched on the Place like a hurricane,
"France! France! cut down the louts! Châteaupers to the rescue!
Provostship! Provostship!"
The frightened vagabonds wheeled round.%
Quasimodo who did not hear, saw the naked swords, the torches, the irons of
the pikes, all that cavalry, at the head of which he recognized Captain Phoebus;
he beheld the confusion of the outcasts, the terror of some, the disturbance
among the bravest of them, and from this unexpected succor he recovered so
much strength, that he hurled from the church the first assailants who were
already climbing into the gallery.
Thesaurus
cavalry: (n) cavalier, voltigeur, uhlan, wildly, forgetfully, absentmindedly, squall, tornado, whirlwind, twister,
hussar, troops, soldiery, mounted inattentively, vaguely, confusedly, tropical storm, gust, spring hawser,
rifles, light horse, horse artillery, preoccupiedly. ANTONYM: (adv) monsoon.
dragoon, horse cavalry. calmly. recovered: (adj) cured, retrieved, well,
courage: (n) audacity, fortitude, disturbance: (n, v) commotion, brawl; well again, healthier, aged,
boldness, nerve, spirit, backbone, (n) disorder, turmoil, upset, improved, whole, better, corned.
valor, heroism, gallantry, mettle, derangement, dislocation, disruption, ANTONYM: (adj) worse.
chivalry. ANTONYMS: (n) tumult, din; (adj, n, v) trouble. reins: (n) bridle, Reins of a vault, reins
cowardice, faintheartedness, ANTONYMS: (n) stillness, peace, of government, wheel, gearshift,
weakness, wimpiness, yellowness. satisfaction, serenity, respect, accord. joystick, pedals, potency, power,
distractedly: (adj, adv) madly; (adv) galloping: (v) flying. powerfulness.
distraughtly, frantically, frenziedly, hurricane: (n) storm, tempest, cyclone,
It was, in fact, the king's troops who had arrived. The vagabonds behaved
bravely. They defended themselves like desperate men. Caught on the flank,
by the Rue Saint- Pierre-aux-Boeufs, and in the rear through the Rue du Parvis,
driven to bay against Notre-Dame, which they still assailed and Quasimodo
defended, at the same time besiegers and besieged, they were in the singular
situation in which Comte Henri Harcourt, Taurinum obsessor idem et obsessus, as
his epitaph says, found himself later on, at the famous siege of Turin, in 1640,
between Prince Thomas of Savoy, whom he was besieging, and the Marquis de
Leganez, who was blockading him.%
The battle was frightful. There was a dog's tooth for wolf's flesh, as P.
Mathieu says. The king's cavaliers, in whose midst Phoebus de Châteaupers
bore himself valiantly, gave no quarter, and the slash of the sword disposed of
those who escaped the thrust of the lance. The outcasts, badly armed foamed
and bit with rage. Men, women, children, hurled themselves on the cruppers
and the breasts of the horses, and hung there like cats, with teeth, finger nails
and toe nails. Others struck the archers' in the face with their torches. Others
thrust iron hooks into the necks of the cavaliers and dragged them down. They
slashed in pieces those who fell.
One was noticed who had a large, glittering scythe, and who, for a long time,
mowed the legs of the horses. He was frightful. He was singing a ditty, with a
nasal intonation, he swung and drew back his scythe incessantly. At every blow
he traced around him a great circle of severed limbs. He advanced thus into the
very thickest of the cavalry, with the tranquil slowness, the lolling of the head
and the regular breathing of a harvester attacking a field of wheat. It was
Chopin Trouillefou. A shot from an arquebus laid him low.
In the meantime, windows had been opened again. The neighbors hearing
the war cries of the king's troops, had mingled in the affray, and bullets rained
upon the outcasts from every story. The Parvis was filled with a thick smoke,
which the musketry streaked with flame. Through it one could confusedly
distinguish the front of Notre-Dame, and the decrepit Hôtel-Dieu with some wan
Thesaurus
arquebus: (n) matchlock, carbine, header, Grim Reaper, picking cut down. ANTONYMS: (v) raise,
musketoon, harquebuss, hagbut, machine, farmer, farm worker, farm upgrade.
hackbut, fusil, rifle, firelock, machine. streaked: (adj) veined, striped, streaky,
musketry, caliver. hooks: (n) maulers, meat hooks. brindled, lined, mottled, virgated,
breasts: (n) chest, booby. idem: (n) the same. patterned; (v) areolar, cancellated,
defended: (adj) shielded, secured, musketry: (n) proficiency, rifle, grated.
watched over, secure, sacred. musket, facility, army unit. valiantly: (adv) bravely, valorously,
flank: (n) side, aspect, wing, abdomen, scythe: (n) crotch, crutch, crane, gallantly, intrepidly, heroically,
facet, subfigure, formation; (v) elbow, ankle, fluke, groin, knee, boldly, audaciously, fearlessly,
border, skirt; (adj) cover, ward. zigzag; (n, v) sithe; (v) reap. doughtily, pluckily, heroicly.
harvester: (n) combine, binder, slash: (n, v) gash, rip, slice, tear, split, ANTONYMS: (adv) execrably,
harvestman, cutter, fieldhand, wound; (v) reduce, hack, clip, hew, nervously, timidly, fearfully.
Victor Hugo 567
invalids gazing down from the heights of its roof all checkered with dormer
windows.%
At length the vagabonds gave way. Weariness, the lack of good weapons,
the fright of this surprise, the musketry from the windows, the valiant attack of
the king's troops, all overwhelmed them. They forced the line of assailants, and
fled in every direction, leaving the Parvis encumbered with dead.
When Quasimodo, who had not ceased to fight for a moment, beheld this
rout, he fell on his knees and raised his hands to heaven; then, intoxicated with
joy, he ran, he ascended with the swiftness of a bird to that cell, the approaches
to which he had so intrepidly defended. He had but one thought now; it was to
kneel before her whom he had just saved for the second time.
When he entered the cell, he found it empty.
Thesaurus
bird: (n) wench, poultry, fowl, girl, forced: (adj) compelled, bound, ANTONYM: (adj) unimpressed.
birdie, hen, chick, Bronx cheer, constrained, artificial, involuntary, roof: (n, v) top, cover, shelter; (n)
shuttlecock, archaeornis, unnatural, forcible, farfetched, crown, housing, ceiling, dome, house,
archeopteryx. strained, obligatory, labored. household, back, covering.
empty: (adj, v) clear, discharge, ANTONYMS: (adj) unprovoked, surprise: (n) fright, amazement,
destitute, void; (adj) hollow, bare, spontaneous, voluntary, natural, wonder, astonishment; (n, v) alarm,
blank, barren, abandoned; (v) genuine, willing, optional. shock, jolt; (v) amaze, startle,
deplete, pour. ANTONYMS: (adj) overwhelmed: (adj) beaten, astonish, stun. ANTONYMS: (n)
crowded, meaningful, packed, overpowered, vanquished, expectation; (v) encourage, comfort.
occupied, inhabited, swarming, dumbfounded, inundated, flooded, weapons: (n) weaponry, weapon,
brimming, laden, filled, cultivated; overthrown, engulfed, conquered, ordnance, munitions, defense, guns,
(v) fill. bewildered; (v) overborne. armaments, artillery.
Victor Hugo 569
BOOK XI
Victor Hugo 571
CHAPTER I
THE LITTLE SHOE
La Esmeralda was sleeping at the moment when the outcasts assailed the
church.%
Soon the ever-increasing uproar around the edifice, and the uneasy bleating
of her goat which had been awakened, had roused her from her slumbers. She
had sat up, she had listened, she had looked; then, terrified by the light and
noise, she had rushed from her cell to see. The aspect of the Place, the vision
which was moving in it, the disorder of that nocturnal assault, that hideous
crowd, leaping like a cloud of frogs, half seen in the gloom, the croaking of that
hoarse multitude, those few red torches running and crossing each other in the
darkness like the meteors which streak the misty surfaces of marshes, this whole
scene produced upon her the effect of a mysterious battle between the phantoms
of the witches' sabbath and the stone monsters of the church. Imbued from her
very infancy with the superstitions of the Bohemian tribe, her first thought was
that she had caught the strange beings peculiar to the night, in their deeds of
witchcraft. Then she ran in terror to cower in her cell, asking of her pallet some
less terrible nightmare.
But little by little the first vapors of terror had been dissipated; from the
constantly increasing noise, and from many other signs of reality, she felt herself
Thesaurus
cower: (v) crouch, cringe, wince, crosswalk, cruise. imbued: (adj) addicted, alive, instinct,
grovel, flinch, shrink, sneak, squat, disorder: (n, v) ailment, disarray, full.
blench; (n, v) skulk; (n) funk. disease, jumble, muddle; (n) clutter, nightmare: (n) incubus, fantasy, terror,
ANTONYMS: (v) swagger, disturbance, disarrangement; (v) trial, air drawn dagger, bugbear,
intimidate. derange, confuse, perturb. fancy, vision, fear, horror, situation.
croaking: (adj) hollow, raucous, ANTONYMS: (n, v) order; (n) ANTONYM: (n) reality.
sepulchral, dry, cacophonic, harsh, orderliness, calm, peace, tranquility, sleeping: (adj) asleep, inactive, latent,
guttural, gruff, croaky, cacophonous, health; (v) organize, align, arrange, sleepy, vegetive, vegetative; (n)
husky. systematize, neaten. dormancy, noctambulism,
crossing: (n) transit, ford, intersection, frogs: (n) adornment, point frogs, class quiescence, quiescency, short sleep.
hybridization, crossbreeding, Amphibia, caecilians, batrachian, ANTONYMS: (adj) active; (n)
passage, voyage, mating, crossway, amphibia, anuran. waking.
besieged not by spectres, but by human beings. Then her fear, though it did not
increase, changed its character. She had dreamed of the possibility of a popular
mutiny to tear her from her asylum. The idea of once more recovering life, hope,
Phoebus, who was ever present in her future, the extreme helplessness of her
condition, flight cut off, no support, her abandonment, her isolation,-- these
thoughts and a thousand others overwhelmed her. She fell upon her knees, with
her head on her bed, her hands clasped over her head, full of anxiety and
tremors, and, although a gypsy, an idolater, and a pagan, she began to entreat
with sobs, mercy from the good Christian God, and to pray to our Lady, her
hostess. For even if one believes in nothing, there are moments in life when one
is always of the religion of the temple which is nearest at hand.%
She remained thus prostrate for a very long time, trembling in truth, more
than praying, chilled by the ever-closer breath of that furious multitude,
understanding nothing of this outburst, ignorant of what was being plotted,
what was being done, what they wanted, but foreseeing a terrible issue.
In the midst of this anguish, she heard some one walking near her. She
turned round. Two men, one of whom carried a lantern, had just entered her
cell. She uttered a feeble cry.
"Fear nothing," said a voice which was not unknown to her, "it is I."
"Who are you?" she asked.
"Pierre Gringoire."
This name reassured her. She raised her eyes once more, and recognized the
poet in very fact. But there stood beside him a black figure veiled from head to
foot, which struck her by its silence.
"Oh!" continued Gringoire in a tone of reproach, "Djali recognized me before
you!"
The little goat had not, in fact, waited for Gringoire to announce his name.
No sooner had he entered than it rubbed itself gently against his knees, covering
the poet with caresses and with white hairs, for it was shedding its hair.
Gringoire returned the caresses.
Thesaurus
abandonment: (n) resignation, impotency, impotence, inability, outburst: (n) explosion, spurt,
renunciation, desertion, neglect, impuissance, incapability, incapacity, eruption, fit, burst, flash, effusion,
withdrawal, surrender, exposure, defencelessness, failing. gush, ebullition, blast, rage.
forsaking, relinquishment, rejection, ANTONYMS: (n) resistance, capacity, pray: (v) beg, implore, entreat, crave,
leaving. ANTONYMS: (n) attention, strength. invite, plead, beseech, appeal,
accomplishment, arrival, acceptance. hostess: (n) mistress, air hostess, flight importune, adjure, invoke.
foreseeing: (n) foresight, anticipation, attendant, housewife, steward, ANTONYM: (v) reject.
prospicience, prevision, forecast; (v) innkeeper, landlady, prostitute, host. shedding: (n) molting, abscission,
foresee; (adj) prevoyant, conscious idolater: (n) heathen, pagan, fluffing, effusion, moulting,
beforehand. idolatress, idolizer, idol worshiper, biological process, desquamation,
helplessness: (n) powerlessness, devotee, adorer, infidel, Baalite, sloughing, emission; (adj, n) peeling;
defenselessness, dependence, bigot, fanatic. (adj) flaking.
Victor Hugo 573
"Who is this with you?" said the gypsy, in a low voice.%

"Be at ease," replied Gringoire. "'Tis one of my friends." Then the philosopher
setting his lantern on the ground, crouched upon the stones, and exclaimed
enthusiastically, as he pressed Djali in his arms,
"Oh! 'tis a graceful beast, more considerable no doubt, for it's neatness than
for its size, but ingenious, subtle, and lettered as a grammarian! Let us see, my
Djali, hast thou forgotten any of thy pretty tricks? How does Master Jacques
Charmolue?..."
The man in black did not allow him to finish. He approached Gringoire and
shook him roughly by the shoulder.
Gringoire rose.
"'Tis true," said he: "I forgot that we are in haste. But that is no reason master,
for getting furious with people in this manner. My dear and lovely child, your
life is in danger, and Djali's also. They want to hang you again. We are your
friends, and we have come to save you. Follow us."
"Is it true?" she exclaimed in dismay.
"Yes, perfectly true. Come quickly!"
"I am willing," she stammered. "But why does not your friend speak?"
"Ah!" said Gringoire, "'tis because his father and mother were fantastic people
who made him of a taciturn temperament."
She was obliged to content herself with this explanation. Gringoire took her
by the hand; his companion picked up the lantern and walked on in front. Fear
stunned the young girl. She allowed herself to be led away. The goat followed
them, frisking, so joyous at seeing Gringoire again that it made him stumble
every moment by thrusting its horns between his legs.
"Such is life," said the philosopher, every time that he came near falling
down; "'tis often our best friends who cause us to be overthrown."
They rapidly descended the staircase of the towers, crossed the church, full of
shadows and solitude, and all reverberating with uproar, which formed a
Thesaurus
frisking: (n) search, hunt, hunting, purity, cleanness, elegance. flounder, fumble; (n) misstep; (v) hit,
searching. ANTONYMS: (n) untidiness, falter.
grammarian: (n) philologist, largeness, clumsiness, disorder, taciturn: (adj) silent, quiet, reserved,
syntactician. inelegance, clutter, chaos, messiness. uncommunicative, speechless,
ingenious: (adj) adroit, artful, clever, solitude: (n) desolation, loneliness, secretive, mute, withdrawn, distant,
cunning, deft, expert, creative, seclusion, privacy, aloneness, mum, incommunicative.
imaginative, cute, acute, able. isolation, retirement, lonesomeness, ANTONYMS: (adj) wordy, voluble,
ANTONYMS: (adj) impulsive, naive, retreat, desert, solitariness. communicative, forthcoming, fluent,
unoriginal, inept. ANTONYMS: (n) companionship, open.
neatness: (n) trimness, dexterity, closeness. tricks: (n) actions, behavior, thing,
orderliness, tidiness, spruceness, stumble: (adj, n, v) slip; (n, v) lurch, clowning around, fooling, magic,
cleanliness, precision, compactness, fall, err, stagger; (adj, v) blunder, plunder, possession, activities.
frightful contrast, and emerged into the courtyard of the cloister by the red door.
The cloister was deserted; the canons had fled to the bishop's palace in order to
pray together; the courtyard was empty, a few frightened lackeys were
crouching in dark corners. They directed their steps towards the door which
opened from this court upon the Terrain. The man in black opened it with a key
which he had about him. Our readers are aware that the Terrain was a tongue of
land enclosed by walls on the side of the City and belonging to the chapter of
Notre-Dame, which terminated the island on the east, behind the church. They
found this enclosure perfectly deserted. There was here less tumult in the air.
The roar of the outcasts' assault reached them more confusedly and less
clamorously. The fresh breeze which follows the current of a stream, rustled the
leaves of the only tree planted on the point of the Terrain, with a noise that was
already perceptible. But they were still very close to danger. The nearest edifices
to them were the bishop's palace and the church. It was plainly evident that
there was great internal commotion in the bishop's palace. Its shadowy mass
was all furrowed with lights which flitted from window to window; as, when
one has just burned paper, there remains a sombre edifice of ashes in which
bright sparks run a thousand eccentric courses. Beside them, the enormous
towers of Notre-Dame, thus viewed from behind, with the long nave above
which they rise cut out in black against the red and vast light which filled the
Parvis, resembled two gigantic andirons of some cyclopean fire-grate.%
What was to be seen of Paris on all sides wavered before the eye in a gloom
mingled with light. Rembrandt has such backgrounds to his pictures.
The man with the lantern walked straight to the point of the Terrain. There,
at the very brink of the water, stood the wormeaten remains of a fence of posts
latticed with laths, whereon a low vine spread out a few thin branches like the
fingers of an outspread hand. Behind, in the shadow cast by this trellis, a little
boat lay concealed. The man made a sign to Gringoire and his companion to
enter. The goat followed them. The man was the last to step in. Then he cut the
boat's moorings, pushed it from the shore with a long boat- hook, and, seizing
two oars, seated himself in the bow, rowing with all his might towards
Thesaurus
belonging: (adj) appertaining, tumultuously. stretched, broad, wide; (v) unfold.
appertinent, apropos, apposite; (n) courses: (n) menses, catamenia. rowing: (n) boating, athletics, dustup,
household, family, appendage, hook: (n, v) crook, catch, draw, bend, quarrel, course; (adj) nautical.
appurtenance, intimacy, commodity, trap, lure; (n) fishhook, claw, shadowy: (adj) indistinct, misty, dark,
closeness. ANTONYM: (n) antipathy. crotchet; (v) fasten, hitch. faint, obscure, hazy, gloomy, vague,
breeze: (n) breath, air, gust, gale, ANTONYMS: (v) undercharge, shady, insubstantial, dusky.
flurry, zephyr, rumor, wind, blow, detach, undo. ANTONYMS: (adj) clear, palpable,
bise; (v) move. moorings: (n) guy, halser, hawser, light, distinct, open.
clamorously: (adv) noisily, loudly, jetty, line, mooring, wire, painter, trellis: (n) lattice, grille, espalier,
obstreperously, vociferously, assistance, rope, ribbon. treillage, train, grate, net, network,
blatantly, importunately, urgently, outspread: (adj) spread, extended, grill; (v) plait, wattle.
uproariously, raucously, turbulently, widespread, dispersed, outstretched,
Victor Hugo 575
midstream. The Seine is very rapid at this point, and he had a good deal of
trouble in leaving the point of the island.%
Gringoire's first care on entering the boat was to place the goat on his knees.
He took a position in the stern; and the young girl, whom the stranger inspired
with an indefinable uneasiness, seated herself close to the poet.
When our philosopher felt the boat sway, he clapped his hands and kissed
Djali between the horns.
"Oh!" said he, "now we are safe, all four of us."
He added with the air of a profound thinker, "One is indebted sometimes to
fortune, sometimes to ruse, for the happy issue of great enterprises."
The boat made its way slowly towards the right shore. The young girl
watched the unknown man with secret terror. He had carefully turned off the
light of his dark lantern. A glimpse could be caught of him in the obscurity, in
the bow of the boat, like a spectre. His cowl, which was still lowered, formed a
sort of mask; and every time that he spread his arms, upon which hung large
black sleeves, as he rowed, one would have said they were two huge bat's wings.
Moreover, he had not yet uttered a word or breathed a syllable. No other noise
was heard in the boat than the splashing of the oars, mingled with the rippling
of the water along her sides.
"On my soul!" exclaimed Gringoire suddenly, "we are as cheerful and joyous
as young owls! We preserve the silence of Pythagoreans or fishes! Pasque-Dieu!
my friends, I should greatly like to have some one speak to me. The human
voice is music to the human ear. 'Tis not I who say that, but Didymus of
Alexandria, and they are illustrious words. Assuredly, Didymus of Alexandria is
no mediocre philosopher.-- One word, my lovely child! say but one word to me, I
entreat you. By the way, you had a droll and peculiar little pout; do you still
make it? Do you know, my dear, that parliament hath full jurisdiction over all
places of asylum, and that you were running a great risk in your little chamber at
Notre-Dame? Alas! the little bird trochylus maketh its nest in the jaws of the
crocodile.-- Master, here is the moon re-appearing. If only they do not perceive
us. We are doing a laudable thing in saving mademoiselle, and yet we should be
Thesaurus
indebted: (adj) grateful, appreciative, midstream: (adv) center, centre, eye, ruse: (n) guile, artifice, deceit,
thankful, obliged, liable, insolvent, heart. maneuver, plot, deception, trick,
broke; (prep) beholden, debted; (n) obscurity: (n) gloom, darkness, shade, device, dodge, scheme, ploy.
debtor; (v) owe. ANTONYM: (adj) dimness, obscureness, night, shore: (n) coast, edge, beach, seashore,
ungrateful. oblivion, haze, ambiguity, shadow, stay, seaside, brace, margin; (n, v)
laudable: (adj) commendable, cloudiness. ANTONYMS: (n) clarity, prop, land, buttress. ANTONYM: (n)
creditable, admirable, praiseworthy, fame, light, simplicity, prominence, sea.
worthy, deserving, good, honorable, celebrity, brightness. syllable: (n) antepenultimate,
meritorious, applaudable, estimable. rippling: (n) ripple, wave, riffle, antepenult, penultima, penultimate,
ANTONYMS: (adj) shameful, corrugation, moving ridge, wavelet, articulate, utter, linguistic unit, solfa
regrettable, unimpressive, ripple formation; (adj) flowing, syllable, speech sound, syllabe,
lamentable, poor, despicable. billowy. language unit.
hung by order of the king if we were caught. Alas! human actions are taken by
two handles. That is branded with disgrace in one which is crowned in another.
He admires Cicero who blames Catiline. Is it not so, master? What say you to
this philosophy? I possess philosophy by instinct, by nature, ut apes geometriam.-
- Come! no one answers me. What unpleasant moods you two are in! I must do
all the talking alone. That is what we call a monologue in tragedy.-- Pasque-Dieu!
I must inform you that I have just seen the king, Louis XI., and that I have caught
this oath from him,-- Pasque-Dieu! They are still making a hearty howl in the
city.-- 'Tis a villanous, malicious old king. He is all swathed in furs. He still owes
me the money for my epithalamium, and he came within a nick of hanging me
this evening, which would have been very inconvenient to me.-- He is niggardly
towards men of merit. He ought to read the four books of Salvien of Cologne,
Adversits Avaritiam. In truth! 'Tis a paltry king in his ways with men of letters,
and one who commits very barbarous cruelties. He is a sponge, to soak money
raised from the people. His saving is like the spleen which swelleth with the
leanness of all the other members. Hence complaints against the hardness of the
times become murmurs against the prince. Under this gentle and pious sire, the
gallows crack with the hung, the blocks rot with blood, the prisons burst like
over full bellies. This king hath one hand which grasps, and one which hangs. He
is the procurator of Dame Tax and Monsieur Gibbet. The great are despoiled of
their dignities, and the little incessantly overwhelmed with fresh oppressions.
He is an exorbitant prince. I love not this monarch. And you, master?"
The man in black let the garrulous poet chatter on. He continued to struggle
against the violent and narrow current, which separates the prow of the City and
the stem of the island of Notre-Dame, which we call to-day the Isle St. Louis.%
"By the way, master!" continued Gringoire suddenly. "At the moment when
we arrived on the Parvis, through the enraged outcasts, did your reverence
observe that poor little devil whose skull your deaf man was just cracking on the
railing of the gallery of the kings? I am near sighted and I could not recognize
him. Do you know who he could be?"
Thesaurus
apes: (n) Anthropoidea, suborder ruler, czar, despot, autocrat, tsar, enormous, important, profound.
Anthropoidea. tzar, Danaus Plexippus; (adj) prince. reverence: (n, v) respect, regard, fear,
branded: (adj) identified, known, niggardly: (adj) mean, stingy, worship, honor, esteem, adore; (n)
proprietary, recognized. closefisted, parsimonious, grudging, deference, adoration, admiration,
exorbitant: (adj) unreasonable, close, near, skimpy, miserable, awe. ANTONYMS: (n) despise,
immoderate, steep, unconscionable, penurious; (adj, v) avaricious. disrespect, irreverence, disdain,
inordinate, extravagant, outrageous, ANTONYM: (adj) graceful. disparagement, contempt; (v)
enormous, extortionate, extreme, paltry: (adj, n) mean; (adj) dishonor.
high. ANTONYMS: (adj) reasonable, contemptible, measly, trifling, abject, spleen: (n) spite, anger, resentment,
inexpensive, moderate, modest, insignificant, inconsiderable, puny, rage, lien, malice, bitterness, rancour,
sensible, fair. little, trivial, low. ANTONYMS: (adj) huff, grudge, rancor. ANTONYM: (n)
monarch: (n) sovereign, lord, emperor, generous, substantial, plentiful, affection.
Victor Hugo 577
The stranger answered not a word. But he suddenly ceased rowing, his arms
fell as though broken, his head sank on his breast, and la Esmeralda heard him
sigh convulsively. She shuddered. She had heard such sighs before.%
The boat, abandoned to itself, floated for several minutes with the stream.
But the man in black finally recovered himself, seized the oars once more and
began to row against the current. He doubled the point of the Isle of Notre
Dame, and made for the landing-place of the Port an Foin.
"Ah!" said Gringoire, "yonder is the Barbeau mansion.-- Stay, master, look:
that group of black roofs which make such singular angles yonder, above that
heap of black, fibrous grimy, dirty clouds, where the moon is completely
crushed and spread out like the yolk of an egg whose shell is broken.-- 'Tis a fine
mansion. There is a chapel crowned with a small vault full of very well carved
enrichments. Above, you can see the bell tower, very delicately pierced. There is
also a pleasant garden, which consists of a pond, an aviary, an echo, a mall, a
labyrinth, a house for wild beasts, and a quantity of leafy alleys very agreeable to
Venus. There is also a rascal of a tree which is called 'the lewd,' because it
favored the pleasures of a famous princess and a constable of France, who was a
gallant and a wit.-- Alas! we poor philosophers are to a constable as a plot of
cabbages or a radish bed to the garden of the Louvre. What matters it, after all?
human life, for the great as well as for us, is a mixture of good and evil. Pain is
always by the side of joy, the spondee by the dactyl.-- Master, I must relate to
you the history of the Barbeau mansion. It ends in tragic fashion. It was in 1319,
in the reign of Philippe V., the longest reign of the kings of France. The moral of
the story is that the temptations of the flesh are pernicious and malignant. Let us
not rest our glance too long on our neighbor's wife, however gratified our senses
may be by her beauty. Fornication is a very libertine thought. Adultery is a
prying into the pleasures of others-- Ohé! the noise yonder is redoubling!"
The tumult around Notre-Dame was, in fact, increasing. They listened. Cries
of victory were heard with tolerable distinctness. All at once, a hundred torches,
the light of which glittered upon the helmets of men at arms, spread over the
church at all heights, on the towers, on the galleries, on the flying buttresses.
Thesaurus
aviary: (v) beehive; (n) building, nemaline, gossamer, sinewy, raw, prying: (adj) inquisitive, meddlesome,
birdhouse, volery, ornithon, brawny. ANTONYM: (adj) tender. nosy, inquiring, nosey, intrusive,
enclosure, bird sanctuary, apiary, grimy: (adj) dirty, filthy, grubby, busy, snoopy; (n) nosiness, curiosity;
volary, pen, alveary. dingy, unclean, impure, nasty, (adj, n) meddling. ANTONYMS: (adj)
distinctness: (n) clearness, sharpness, begrimed, squalid, messy, muddy. apathetic; (n) apathy.
definition, otherness, perspicuity, ANTONYMS: (adj) pure, pleasant. radish: (n) Raphanus sativus, root,
discreteness, articulate sound, pernicious: (adj) detrimental, evil, bad, cruciferous vegetable, genus
separation, uncloudedness, injurious, fatal, noxious, deadly, Raphanus, Raphanus.
dissimilarity; (adj) conspicuousness. baneful, mischievous, mortal, malign. spondee: (n) dactyl, trochee, metrical
ANTONYM: (n) indistinctness. ANTONYMS: (adj) favorable, unit, metrical foot, foot, anapest.
fibrous: (adj) tough, ropy, fibrose, pleasant, harmless. yolk: (n) food, nutrient, vitellus,
filamentous, muscular, rubbery, pleasures: (n) pleasure. deutoplasm, suint.
These torches seemed to be in search of something; and soon distant clamors

reached the fugitives distinctly :-- "The gypsy! the sorceress! death to the gypsy!"
The unhappy girl dropped her head upon her hands, and the unknown
began to row furiously towards the shore. Meanwhile our philosopher reflected.
He clasped the goat in his arms, and gently drew away from the gypsy, who
pressed closer and closer to him, as though to the only asylum which remained
to her.%
It is certain that Gringoire was enduring cruel perplexity. He was thinking
that the goat also, "according to existing law," would be hung if recaptured;
which would be a great pity, poor Djali! that he had thus two condemned
creatures attached to him; that his companion asked no better than to take charge
of the gypsy. A violent combat began between his thoughts, in which, like the
Jupiter of the Iliad, he weighed in turn the gypsy and the goat; and he looked at
them alternately with eyes moist with tears, saying between his teeth:
"But I cannot save you both!"
A shock informed them that the boat had reached the land at last. The uproar
still filled the city. The unknown rose, approached the gypsy, and endeavored to
take her arm to assist her to alight. She repulsed him and clung to the sleeve of
Gringoire, who, in his turn, absorbed in the goat, almost repulsed her. Then she
sprang alone from the boat. She was so troubled that she did not know what she
did or whither she was going. Thus she remained for a moment, stunned,
watching the water flow past; when she gradually returned to her senses, she
found herself alone on the wharf with the unknown. It appears that Gringoire
had taken advantage of the moment of debarcation to slip away with the goat
into the block of houses of the Rue Grenier-sur-l'Eau.
The poor gypsy shivered when she beheld herself alone with this man. She
tried to speak, to cry out, to call Gringoire; her tongue was dumb in her mouth,
and no sound left her lips. All at once she felt the stranger's hand on hers. It was
a strong, cold hand. Her teeth chattered, she turned paler than the ray of
moonlight which illuminated her. The man spoke not a word. He began to
ascend towards the Place de Grève, holding her by the hand.
Thesaurus
absorbed: (adj) rapt, intent, immersed, transient, fleeting, mortal, modern, perplexity: (n) confusion, dilemma,
fixed, deep, engaged, preoccupied, insubstantial, inconstant, fickle, bewilderment, maze, labyrinth,
pensive, fascinated, enthralled, held. erratic, unstable. embarrassment, quandary,
ANTONYMS: (adj) bored, furiously: (adv) irately, angrily, complication, enigma; (adj, n)
disinterested, distracted, restless, fiercely, wildly, violently, ragingly, difficulty, distress. ANTONYM: (n)
unfocused, uninterested, indifferent, wrathfully, infuriatedly, rabidly, understanding.
shallow, superficial, detached. impetuously, frantically. weighed: (adj) determined, deliberate,
enduring: (adj) durable, abiding, ANTONYM: (adv) sluggishly. tared.
lasting, permanent, continuing, moist: (adj) damp, wet, muggy, wharf: (n) quay, harbor, port, pier,
constant, hardy, immortal, eternal, clammy, dank, damps, dampish, waterfront, jetty, nailery, bindery,
stable; (adv) enduringly. soggy, soppy, wettish, moisture. beehive, basin; (n, v) berth.
ANTONYMS: (adj) impatient, ANTONYMS: (adj) dry, limp, fresh.
Victor Hugo 579
At that moment, she had a vague feeling that destiny is an irresistible force.
She had no more resistance left in her, she allowed herself to be dragged along,
running while he walked. At this spot the quay ascended. But it seemed to her
as though she were descending a slope.%
She gazed about her on all sides. Not a single passer-by. The quay was
absolutely deserted. She heard no sound, she felt no people moving save in the
tumultuous and glowing city, from which she was separated only by an arm of
the Seine, and whence her name reached her, mingled with cries of "Death!" The
rest of Paris was spread around her in great blocks of shadows.
Meanwhile, the stranger continued to drag her along with the same silence
and the same rapidity. She had no recollection of any of the places where she
was walking. As she passed before a lighted window, she made an effort, drew
up suddenly, and cried out, "Help!"
The bourgeois who was standing at the window opened it, appeared there in
his shirt with his lamp, stared at the quay with a stupid air, uttered some words
which she did not understand, and closed his shutter again. It was her last
gleam of hope extinguished.
The man in black did not utter a syllable; he held her firmly, and set out again
at a quicker pace. She no longer resisted, but followed him, completely broken.
From time to time she called together a little strength, and said, in a voice
broken by the unevenness of the pavement and the breathlessness of their
flight, "Who are you? Who are you?" He made no reply.
They arrived thus, still keeping along the quay, at a tolerably spacious
square. It was the Grève. In the middle, a sort of black, erect cross was visible; it
was the gallows. She recognized all this, and saw where she was.
The man halted, turned towards her and raised his cowl.
"Oh!" she stammered, almost petrified, "I knew well that it was he again!"
It was the priest. He looked like the ghost of himself; that is an effect of the
moonlight, it seems as though one beheld only the spectres of things in that light.
Thesaurus
breathlessness: (n) shortness of deadlight, lid, louver, jalousie. excellence, symmetry, equality,
breath, dyspnea, bastard, asshole. stranger: (n) foreigner, outsider, predictability.
ghost: (n, v) apparition, specter; (n) newcomer, outlander, immigrant, vague: (adj) obscure, indistinct,
shade, spirit, demon, soul, spook, intruder, unknown, tramontane, indeterminate, undefined,
spectre, goblin, appearance, monster. trespasser; (adj) foreign, strange. undetermined, indefinite, uncertain,
separated: (adj, prep) separate, isolated, ANTONYMS: (n) pal, native, faint, ambiguous; (adj, v) loose,
disjoined, distinct; (adj, adv) apart; associate, resident, familiar. equivocal. ANTONYMS: (adj) clear,
(adj) detached, divided, disjointed, unevenness: (n) irregularity, disparity, distinct, exact, particular, precise,
free, disjunct, discrete. ANTONYMS: roughness, diversity, disproportion, specific, sure, certain, defined, alert,
(adj) attached, connected. jaggedness, variableness, asymmetry, detailed.
shutter: (n, v) close, shade; (n) curtain, bumpiness, unsteadiness; (n, v) wave.
shut, blind, window, skylight, ANTONYMS: (n) smoothness,
"Listen!" he said to her; and she shuddered at the sound of that fatal voice
which she had not heard for a long time. He continued speaking with those brief
and panting jerks, which betoken deep internal convulsions. "Listen! we are
here. I am going to speak to you. This is the Grève. This is an extreme point.
Destiny gives us to one another. I am going to decide as to your life; you will
decide as to my soul. Here is a place, here is a night beyond which one sees
nothing. Then listen to me. I am going to tell you...In the first place, speak not to
me of your Phoebus. (As he spoke thus he paced to and fro, like a man who
cannot remain in one place, and dragged her after him.) Do not speak to me of
him. Do you see? If you utter that name, I know not what I shall do, but it will
be terrible."
Then, like a body which recovers its centre of gravity, he became motionless
once more, but his words betrayed no less agitation. His voice grew lower and
lower.%
"Do not turn your head aside thus. Listen to me. It is a serious matter. In the
first place, here is what has happened.-- All this will not be laughed at. I swear it
to you.-- What was I saying? Remind me! Oh!-- There is a decree of Parliament
which gives you back to the scaffold. I have just rescued you from their hands.
But they are pursuing you. Look!"
He extended his arm toward the City. The search seemed, in fact, to be still
in progress there. The uproar drew nearer; the tower of the lieutenant's house,
situated opposite the Grève, was full of clamors and light, and soldiers could be
seen running on the opposite quay with torches and these cries, "The gypsy!
Where is the gypsy! Death! Death!"
"You see that they are in pursuit of you, and that I am not lying to you. I love
you.-- Do not open your mouth; refrain from speaking to me rather, if it be only
to tell me that you hate me. I have made up my mind not to hear that again.-- I
have just saved you.-- Let me finish first. I can save you wholly. I have prepared
everything. It is yours at will. If you wish, I can do it."
He broke off violently. "No, that is not what I should say!"
Thesaurus
betoken: (v) augur, foreshadow, triviality, cheerfulness, levity. (adv) about, around, by.
prognosticate, bode, foretell, mark, pursuit: (n) quest, hunt, search, ANTONYMS: (prep) from, away.
bespeak, presage, indicate, omen; (n, persecution, chase, career, interest, tower: (n) column, spire, steeple,
v) denote. job, business, performance, pinnacle, pylon, castle; (adj, n) pillar;
gives: (n) give, offer, provide, grant, employment. (v) ascend, rise, loom, arise.
accord. situated: (adj) set, situate, placed, wholly: (adj, adv) totally, entirely,
gravity: (n) solemnity, earnestness, sited, fixed, laid, contextualized, altogether, quite, exclusively,
gravitation, graveness, gravitational hardened, dictated; (v) locate; (prep) perfectly, solely; (adv, pref) all; (adv)
attraction, weight, seriousness, circumstanced. fully, utterly, absolutely.
significance, severity, sedateness; (n, toward: (prep) to, towards, ANTONYMS: (adv) partially,
v) poise. ANTONYMS: (n) approaching, headed for, just before, inclusively, hardly, incompletely,
insignificance, lightheartedness, of, in the direction of; (adv, prep) on; slightly.
Victor Hugo 581
As he went with hurried step and made her hurry also, for he did not release
her, he walked straight to the gallows, and pointed to it with his finger,
"Choose between us two," he said, coldly.%
She tore herself from his hands and fell at the foot of the gibbet, embracing
that funereal support, then she half turned her beautiful head, and looked at the
priest over her shoulder. One would have said that she was a Holy Virgin at the
foot of the cross. The priest remained motionless, his finger still raised toward
the gibbet, preserving his attitude like a statue. At length the gypsy said to him,
"It causes me less horror than you do."
Then he allowed his arm to sink slowly, and gazed at the pavement in
profound dejection.
"If these stones could speak," he murmured, "yes, they would say that a very
unhappy man stands here.
He went on. The young girl, kneeling before the gallows, enveloped in her
long flowing hair, let him speak on without interruption. He now had a gentle
and plaintive accent which contrasted sadly with the haughty harshness of his
features.
"I love you. Oh! how true that is! So nothing comes of that fire which burns
my heart! Alas! young girl, night and day-- yes, night and day I tell you,-- it is
torture. Oh! I suffer too much, my poor child. 'Tis a thing deserving of
compassion, I assure you. You see that I speak gently to you. I really wish that
you should no longer cherish this horror of me.-- After all, if a man loves a
woman, 'tis not his fault!-- Oh, my God!-- What! So you will never pardon me?
You will always hate me? All is over then. It is that which renders me evil, do
you see? and horrible to myself.-- You will not even look at me! You are thinking
of something else, perchance, while I stand here and talk to you, shuddering on
the brink of eternity for both of us! Above all things, do not speak to me of the
officer!-- I would cast myself at your knees, I would kiss not your feet, but the
earth which is under your feet; I would sob like a child, I would tear from my
breast not words, but my very heart and vitals, to tell you that I love you;-- all
Thesaurus
burns: (n) George Burns, Nathan ecstasy, encouragement, hopefulness, strictness. ANTONYMS: (n) softness,
Birnbaum, Robert Burns. joy, cheer. leniency, quietness, flexibility,
cherish: (v) care for, nurture, treasure, deserving: (adj) meritorious, kindness, mercy, sweetness,
entertain, cultivate, bosom, prize, admirable, creditable, commendable, melodiousness, brightness,
esteem, harbor; (n, v) hug, foster. laudable, fit, good, deserved, smoothness, lenience.
ANTONYMS: (v) hate, scorn, reject, condign; (v) deserve, worthy of. interruption: (n) disruption,
denounce, despise, neglect. ANTONYMS: (adj) unworthy, intermission, halt, pause, suspension,
dejection: (n) discouragement, undeserving, unimpressive. discontinuance, hiatus; (n, v) break,
depression, sadness, despair, sorrow, harshness: (n) austerity, asperity, hindrance, impediment; (v) interrupt.
woe, grief, melancholy, blues, severity, acrimony, brutality, ANTONYMS: (n) permanence, help,
desolation, despondency. hardness, roughness, rigor, respect.
ANTONYMS: (n) cheerfulness, inclemency, hoarseness; (adj, n)
would be useless, all!-- And yet you have nothing in your heart but what is
tender and merciful. You are radiant with the most beautiful mildness; you are
wholly sweet, good, pitiful, and charming. Alas! You cherish no ill will for any
one but me alone! Oh! what a fatality!"
He hid his face in his hands. The young girl heard him weeping. It was for
the first time. Thus erect and shaken by sobs, he was more miserable and more
suppliant than when on his knees. He wept thus for a considerable time.%
"Come!" he said, these first tears passed, "I have no more words. I had,
however, thought well as to what you would say. Now I tremble and shiver and
break down at the decisive moment, I feel conscious of something supreme
enveloping us, and I stammer. Oh! I shall fall upon the pavement if you do not
take pity on me, pity on yourself. Do not condemn us both. If you only knew
how much I love you! What a heart is mine! Oh! what desertion of all virtue!
What desperate abandonment of myself! A doctor, I mock at science; a
gentleman, I tarnish my own name; a priest, I make of the missal a pillow of
sensuality, I spit in the face of my God! all this for thee, enchantress! to be more
worthy of thy hell! And you will not have the apostate! Oh! let me tell you all!
more still, something more horrible, oh! Yet more horrible!...."
As he uttered these last words, his air became utterly distracted. He was
silent for a moment, and resumed, as though speaking to himself, and in a strong
voice,
"Cain, what hast thou done with thy brother?"
There was another silence, and he went on
"What have I done with him, Lord? I received him, I reared him, I nourished
him, I loved him, I idolized him, and I have slain him! Yes, Lord, they have just
dashed his head before my eyes on the stone of thine house, and it is because of
me, because of this woman, because of her."
His eye was wild. His voice grew ever weaker; he repeated many times, yet,
mechanically, at tolerably long intervals, like a bell prolonging its last vibration:
"Because of her.-- Because of her."
Thesaurus
apostate: (n) deserter, traitor, turncoat, precious, worshipped. (n) roughness, pungency.
heretic, quitter; (adj, n) recreant, merciful: (adj) humane, gracious, prolonging: (adj) delaying, continuing;
craven; (v) pervert, rat; (adj) lenient, compassionate, kind, (n) continuation, perseverance.
unfaithful, false. ANTONYMS: (n) clement, benign, kindly, gentle, stammer: (v) falter, hesitate, stumble,
follower, loyalist, adherent, faithful. beneficent, forgiving. ANTONYMS: bumble, fumble, mumble, utter,
enveloping: (n) envelopment, (adj) pitiless, merciless, unforgiving, verbalize, waver, halt, splutter.
enclosure, boxing, enclosing, spiteful, harsh, impatient, severe, tarnish: (adj, n, v) sully, blot, soil; (n, v)
encasement; (prep) about; (adj) hardhearted. blemish, taint, spot, stain, disgrace,
comprehensive, roundabout, mildness: (adj, n) gentleness, kindness, foul; (v) smear; (adj, v) blur.
circuitous. ANTONYM: (adj) benignity, compassion, goodness; (n) ANTONYMS: (v) uncorrupt, clean,
contained. lenity, mercy, meekness, leniency, Polish, purify, enhance, dignify,
idolized: (adj) adored, beloved, loved, lenience, tenderness. ANTONYMS: respect.
Victor Hugo 583
Then his tongue no longer articulated any perceptible sound; but his lips still
moved. All at once he sank together, like something crumbling, and lay
motionless on the earth, with his head on his knees.%
A touch from the young girl, as she drew her foot from under him, brought
him to himself. He passed his hand slowly over his hollow cheeks, and gazed for
several moments at his fingers, which were wet, "What!" he murmured, "I have
wept!"
And turning suddenly to the gypsy with unspeakable anguish,
"Alas! you have looked coldly on at my tears! Child, do you know that those
tears are of lava? Is it indeed true? Nothing touches when it comes from the man
whom one does not love. If you were to see me die, you would laugh. Oh! I do
not wish to see you die! One word! A single word of pardon! Say not that you
love me, say only that you will do it; that will suffice; I will save you. If not-- oh!
the hour is passing. I entreat you by all that is sacred, do not wait until I shall
have turned to stone again, like that gibbet which also claims you! Reflect that I
hold the destinies of both of us in my hand, that I am mad,-- it is terrible,-- that I
may let all go to destruction, and that there is beneath us a bottomless abyss,
unhappy girl, whither my fall will follow yours to all eternity! One word of
kindness! Say one word! only one word!"
She opened her mouth to answer him. He flung himself on his knees to
receive with adoration the word, possibly a tender one, which was on the point
of issuing from her lips. She said to him, "You are an assassin!"
The priest clasped her in his arms with fury, and began to laugh with an
abominable laugh.
"Well, yes, an assassin!" he said, "and I will have you. You will not have me
for your slave, you shall have me for your master. I will have you! I have a den,
whither I will drag you. You will follow me, you will be obliged to follow me, or
I will deliver you up! You must die, my beauty, or be mine! belong to the priest!
belong to the apostate! belong to the assassin! this very night, do you hear?
Come! joy; kiss me, mad girl! The tomb or my bed!"
Thesaurus
adoration: (n) admiration, adulation, immeasurable, fathomless, affection; (adj, n) courtesy, gentleness.
cult, appreciation, reverence, boundless, unfounded, groundless, ANTONYMS: (n) miserliness, spite,
glorification, idolization, homage, unplumbed. ANTONYMS: (adj) nastiness, callousness, cruelty,
praise; (adj, n) devotion, passion. shallow, bottomed, limited, unfriendliness, maliciousness,
ANTONYMS: (n) hatred, detestation, restricted. thoughtlessness, sourness, severity,
despising, disparagement, revulsion, issuing: (n) issuance, supplying, disservice.
repulsion, disgust, disdain. emanation, consequence, publication, unspeakable: (adj) ineffable, dreadful,
articulated: (adj) jointed, voiced, effect, egress, emergence, exit; (adj) awful, terrible, inexpressible, nasty,
expressed, skip loader, spoken, flowing, emergent. horrible, atrocious, indefinable,
uttered, vocal, segmented. kindness: (n) generosity, clemency, shocking; (adj, v) unutterable.
bottomless: (adj) limitless, infinite, compassion, grace, good will, ANTONYMS: (adj) nice, wonderful,
deep, unlimited, profound, graciousness, humanity, goodness, pleasant, good, lovely, bearable.
His eyes sparkled with impurity and rage. His lewd lips reddened the young
girl's neck. She struggled in his arms. He covered her with furious kisses.%
"Do not bite me, monster!" she cried. "Oh! the foul, odious monk! leave me! I
will tear out thy ugly gray hair and fling it in thy face by the handful!"
He reddened, turned pale, then released her and gazed at her with a gloomy
air. She thought herself victorious, and continued,
"I tell you that I belong to my Phoebus, that 'tis Phoebus
whom I love, that 'tis Phoebus who is handsome! you are old, priest! you are
ugly! Begone!"
He gave vent to a horrible cry, like the wretch to whom a hot iron is applied.
"Die, then!" he said, gnashing his teeth. She saw his terrible look and tried to fly.
He caught her once more, he shook her, he flung her on the ground, and walked
with rapid strides towards the corner of the Tour- Roland, dragging her after him
along the pavement by her beautiful hands.
On arriving there, he turned to her,
"For the last time, will you be mine?"
She replied with emphasis,
"No!"
Then he cried in a loud voice,
"Gudule! Gudule! here is the gypsy! take your vengeance!"
The young girl felt herself seized suddenly by the elbow. She looked. A
fleshless arm was stretched from an opening in the wall, and held her like a hand
of iron.
"Hold her well," said the priest; "'tis the gypsy escaped. Release her not. I
will go in search of the sergeants. You shall see her hanged."
A guttural laugh replied from the interior of the wall to these bloody words--
"Hah! hah! hah!"-- The gypsy watched the priest retire in the direction of the
Pont Notre-Dame. A cavalcade was heard in that direction.
Thesaurus
elbow: (n, v) poke, nudge, jolt; (n) humane, attractive, honest, pleasing, equanimity, pleasure, serenity.
cubitus, elbow joint, angle, fragrant; (v) unclog. retire: (v) resign, retreat, withdraw,
articulation; (v) jostle, push, shove, impurity: (n) impureness, pollution, leave, abdicate, ebb, depart, turn in,
crowd. filth, dirtiness, admixture, fall back, hit the hay, go to bed.
escaped: (adj) at large, at liberty, loose, defilement, dirt, dross, adulteration, ANTONYMS: (v) remain, enter.
on the loose, runaway, easy, wild; (n) foulness, corruption. ANTONYM: (n) victorious: (adj) triumphant,
freer; (v) escaping. cleanliness. successful, winning, jubilant, victor,
foul: (adj, v) nasty, base, corrupt, rage: (adj, n, v) fume, bluster; (adj, n) fortunate, lifted up; (adj, v)
coarse; (adj) filthy, disgusting, evil, wrath, indignation, frenzy, mania; (n) triumphal, exultant, triumphing, on
unclean, putrid; (n, v) defile, soil. passion, anger, craze, exasperation; top. ANTONYMS: (adj) beaten,
ANTONYMS: (adj, v) clean, pure; (n, v) storm. ANTONYMS: (n) unsuccessful, failing, losing,
(adj) pleasant, fair, inoffensive, gentleness, composure, calm, sorrowful.
Victor Hugo 585
The young girl had recognized the spiteful recluse. Panting with terror, she
tried to disengage herself. She writhed, she made many starts of agony and
despair, but the other held her with incredible strength. The lean and bony
fingers which bruised her, clenched on her flesh and met around it. One would
have said that this hand was riveted to her arm. It was more than a chain, more
than a fetter, more than a ring of iron, it was a living pair of pincers endowed
with intelligence, which emerged from the wall.%
She fell back against the wall exhausted, and then the fear of death took
possession of her. She thought of the beauty of life, of youth, of the view of
heaven, the aspects of nature, of her love for Phoebus, of all that was vanishing
and all that was approaching, of the priest who was denouncing her, of the
headsman who was to come, of the gallows which was there. Then she felt terror
mount to the very roots of her hair and she heard the mocking laugh of the
recluse, saying to her in a very low tone: "Hah! hah! hah! you are going to be
hanged!"
She turned a dying look towards the window, and she beheld the fierce face
of the sacked nun through the bars.
"What have I done to you?" she said, almost lifeless.
The recluse did not reply, but began to mumble with a singsong irritated,
mocking intonation: "Daughter of Egypt! daughter of Egypt! daughter of Egypt!"
The unhappy Esmeralda dropped her head beneath her flowing hair,
comprehending that it was no human being she had to deal with.
All at once the recluse exclaimed, as though the gypsy's question had taken
all this time to reach her brain,-- "'What have you done to me?' you say! Ah!
what have you done to me, gypsy! Well! listen.-- I had a child! you see! I had a
child! a child, I tell you!-- a pretty little girl!-- my Agnes!" she went on wildly,
kissing something in the dark.-- "Well! do you see, daughter of Egypt? they took
my child from me; they stole my child; they ate my child. That is what you have
done to me."
The young girl replied like a lamb,
Thesaurus
denouncing: (v) denounce; (adj) chain, confine, handcuff, band. fleeting, momentary, breaking up,
disparaging, critical, reproving, ANTONYMS: (v) free, facilitate. declining, diminishing, dissolving,
censorious, disapproving. intonation: (n) inflection, tone, evanescent. ANTONYMS: (adj)
disengage: (v) discharge, detach, expression, cadence, timbre, thriving, increasing.
extricate, release, disconnect, chanting, drone, prosody, vocalizing, wildly: (adj, adv) madly,
enfranchise; (adj, v) disentangle, clear, singing, sound. extravagantly; (adv) savagely,
disembarrass, free; (adj) disencumber. singsong: (adj) chantlike, monotonous, fiercely, violently, frantically,
ANTONYMS: (v) fasten, engage, toneless, rhythmic, rhythmical; (v) brutally, furiously, tempestuously,
attach, connect, tighten, obstruct, sing, intonate, intone, displace; (n) viciously, crazily. ANTONYMS: (adv)
unite, couple, join, activate, lock. pitch contour, intonation. quietly, peacefully, meekly,
fetter: (n, v) shackle, bond, gyve, vanishing: (n) disappearance, cautiously, gently.
hamper, hobble, tether; (v) bind, vanishment, dissipation; (adj) dying,
"Alas! perchance I was not born then!"

"Oh! yes!" returned the recluse, "you must have been born. You were among
them. She would be the same age as you! so!-- I have been here fifteen years;
fifteen years have I suffered; fifteen years have I prayed; fifteen years have I beat
my head against these four walls-- I tell you that 'twas the gypsies who stole her
from me, do you hear that? and who ate her with their teeth.-- Have you a heart?
imagine a child playing, a child sucking; a child sleeping. It is so innocent a
thing!-- Well! that, that is what they took from me, what they killed. The good
God knows it well! To-day, it is my turn; I am going to eat the gypsy.-- Oh! I
would bite you well, if the bars did not prevent me! My head is too large!-- Poor
little one! while she was asleep! And if they woke her up when they took her, in
vain she might cry; I was not there!-- Ah! gypsy mothers, you devoured my
child! come see your own."
Then she began to laugh or to gnash her teeth, for the two things resembled
each other in that furious face. The day was beginning to dawn. An ashy gleam
dimly lighted this scene, and the gallows grew more and more distinct in the
square. On the other side, in the direction of the bridge of Notre-Dame, the poor
condemned girl fancied that she heard the sound of cavalry approaching.%
"Madam," she cried, clasping her hands and falling on her knees,
dishevelled, distracted, mad with fright; "madam! have pity! They are coming. I
have done nothing to you. Would you wish to see me die in this horrible fashion
before your very eyes? You are pitiful, I am sure. It is too frightful. Let me make
my escape. Release me! Mercy. I do not wish to die like that!"
"Give me back my child!" said the recluse.
"Mercy! Mercy!"
"Give me back my child!"
"Release me, in the name of heaven!"
"Give me back my child!"
Again the young girl fell; exhausted, broken, and having already the glassy
eye of a person in the grave.
Thesaurus
dawn: (adj, n) break of day, daybreak; (adj) standing, increasing, frivolous, funny, cheerful, carefree,
(n) beginning, commencement, burgeoning. slight, nonchalant, trivial, stable,
cockcrow, onset, morning, prime, glassy: (adj, v) glossy; (adj) clear, minor, insignificant, favorable.
aurora; (v) break, begin. glazed, smooth, flat, crystalline, dead, innocent: (adj) chaste, artless, clear,
ANTONYMS: (n) twilight, sunset, dull, hyaline, transparent; (v) ingenuous, innocuous, guileless,
nightfall, close, departure, demise, glabrous. ANTONYMS: (adj) alert, guiltless, ignorant, unsophisticated,
conclusion, ending; (n, v) end, finish; bumpy, dull, expressive, murky, spotless, naive. ANTONYMS: (adj)
(v) set. rough. culpable, responsible, wicked, wary,
falling: (n) descent, fall, downfall, grave: (adj) solemn, serious, critical, experienced, corrupt, worldly, unfair,
degradation, depreciation; (adj) earnest, dangerous, sedate, sad, meaningful, offensive, jaded.
descending, decreasing, declining, grand; (adj, v) severe, acute; (v) sucking: (n) suck, intake, uptake,
tumbling, ebb, down. ANTONYMS: engrave. ANTONYMS: (adj) aspiration, ingestion, consumption.
Victor Hugo 587
"Alas!" she faltered, "you seek your child, I seek my parents."

"Give me back my little Agnes!" pursued Gudule. "You do not know where
she is? Then die!-- I will tell you. I was a woman of the town, I had a child, they
took my child. It was the gypsies. You see plainly that you must die. When your
mother, the gypsy, comes to reclaim you, I shall say to her: 'Mother, look at that
gibbet!-- Or, give me back my child. Do you know where she is, my little
daughter? Stay! I will show you. Here is her shoe, all that is left me of her. Do
you know where its mate is? If you know, tell me, and if it is only at the other
end of the world, I will crawl to it on my knees."
As she spoke thus, with her other arm extended through the window, she
showed the gypsy the little embroidered shoe. It was already light enough to
distinguish its shape and its colors.%
"Let me see that shoe," said the gypsy, quivering. "God! God!"
And at the same time, with her hand which was at liberty, she quickly
opened the little bag ornamented with green glass, which she wore about her
neck.
"Go on, go on!" grumbled Gudule, "search your demon's amulet!"
All at once, she stopped short, trembled in every limb, and cried in a voice
which proceeded from the very depths of her being: "My daughter!"
The gypsy had just drawn from the bag a little shoe absolutely similar to the
other. To this little shoe was attached a parchment on which was inscribed this
charm,
Quand le parell retrouveras
Ta mere te tendras les bras.
Quicker than a flash of lightning, the recluse had laid the two shoes together,
had read the parchment and had put close to the bars of the window her face
beaming with celestial joy as she cried,
"My daughter! my daughter!"
"My mother!" said the gypsy.
Thesaurus
attached: (adj) affectionate, committed, unpleasantness; (v) repulse, offend, dependence.
affiliated, associated, devoted, fond, irritate, disgust, bore. mate: (n, v) equal, partner, spouse;
loving, loyal, near, added; (n) depths: (n) bottom, abyss, depth, (adj, n) companion, comrade, fellow,
attachment. ANTONYMS: (adj) lowest point, low point, depression, associate, friend; (n) compeer,
separate, unmarried, unattached, bowels, rock bottom, slump, midst, consort, husband.
vagile, free, distant. nadir. ANTONYM: (n) peak. seek: (n, v) ask, inquire; (v) hunt,
charm: (n, v) allure, captivate, appeal, liberty: (adj, n) freedom, franchise; (n) endeavor, attempt, look, aspire,
spell, fascinate, bewitch, conjure; (adj, license, leave, independence, pursue, beg, quest, explore.
v) attract; (n) amulet; (v) enchant, autonomy, emancipation, latitude, ANTONYMS: (v) answer, grant.
entrance. ANTONYMS: (n) ugliness, permission, scope, release. spoke: (n) bar, rung, radius, rule, shoe,
repulsion, repulsiveness, ANTONYMS: (n) slavery, skid, rundle, line, clog, round; (v)
awkwardness, hatefulness, domination, constraint, suppression, said.
Here we are unequal to the task of depicting the scene. The wall and the iron
bars were between them. "Oh! the wall!" cried the recluse. "Oh! to see her and
not to embrace her! Your hand! your hand!"
The young girl passed her arm through the opening; the recluse threw herself
on that hand, pressed her lips to it and there remained, buried in that kiss, giving
no other sign of life than a sob which heaved her breast from time to time. In the
meanwhile, she wept in torrents, in silence, in the dark, like a rain at night. The
poor mother poured out in floods upon that adored hand the dark and deep well
of tears, which lay within her, and into which her grief had filtered, drop by
drop, for fifteen years.%
All at once she rose, flung aside her long gray hair from her brow, and
without uttering a word, began to shake the bars of her cage cell, with both
hands, more furiously than a lioness. The bars held firm. Then she went to seek
in the corner of her cell a huge paving stone, which served her as a pillow, and
launched it against them with such violence that one of the bars broke, emitting
thousands of sparks. A second blow completely shattered the old iron cross
which barricaded the window. Then with her two hands, she finished breaking
and removing the rusted stumps of the bars. There are moments when woman's
hands possess superhuman strength.
A passage broken, less than a minute was required for her to seize her
daughter by the middle of her body, and draw her into her cell. "Come let me
draw you out of the abyss," she murmured.
When her daughter was inside the cell, she laid her gently on the ground,
then raised her up again, and bearing her in her arms as though she were still
only her little Agnes, she walked to and fro in her little room, intoxicated, frantic,
joyous, crying out, singing, kissing her daughter, talking to her, bursting into
laughter, melting into tears, all at once and with vehemence.
"My daughter! my daughter!" she said. "I have my daughter! here she is! The
good God has given her back to me! Ha you! come all of you! Is there any one
there to see that I have my daughter? Lord Jesus, how beautiful she is! You have
made me wait fifteen years, my good God, but it was in order to give her back to
Thesaurus
depicting: (n) portraying, depict, refined. v) exhausted; (v) battered, dead beat,
characterisation, characterization, melting: (n) thawing, fusion, melt, done up, lame. ANTONYMS: (adj)
delineation, mirror, portrayal. dissolution, warming, thaw, fresh, energetic, lively, whole, strong.
embrace: (v) comprise, adopt, liquefaction, fusion range; (adj) torrents: (n) white water, rapids.
comprehend, contain, admit, liquescent, pathetic; (adj, n) unequal: (adj) different, unlike,
espouse, include; (n, v) clasp, hug, dissolving. uneven, rough, lopsided, unfair,
grip, bosom. ANTONYMS: (v) reject, paving: (n) pavement, floor, pavage, inadequate, disparate,
exclude, spurn, shun, renounce, curbside, earth, ground, sett paving, disproportionate, unbalanced,
release, loose, disbelieve. surface, paved surface, metalling of unsymmetrical. ANTONYMS: (adj)
emitting: (n) emission; (adj) flowing, road, ground floor. equal, even, fair, identical, similar,
mittent, emissive. shattered: (adj) destroyed, smashed, same, level, constant, balanced, like,
filtered: (n) clean, drinkable; (adj) done in, crazy, shaky, crushed; (adj, corresponding.
Victor Hugo 589
me beautiful.-- Then the gypsies did not eat her! Who said so? My little
daughter! my little daughter! Kiss me. Those good gypsies! I love the gypsies!--
It is really you! That was what made my heart leap every time that you passed
by. And I took that for hatred! Forgive me, my Agnes, forgive me. You thought
me very malicious, did you not? I love you. Have you still the little mark on
your neck? Let us see. She still has it. Oh! you are beautiful! It was I who gave
you those big eyes, mademoiselle. Kiss me. I love you. It is nothing to me that
other mothers have children; I scorn them now. They have only to come and see.
Here is mine. See her neck, her eyes, her hair, her hands. Find me anything as
beautiful as that! Oh! I promise you she will have lovers, that she will! I have
wept for fifteen years. All my beauty has departed and has fallen to her. Kiss
me."%
She addressed to her a thousand other extravagant remarks, whose accent
constituted their sole beauty, disarranged the poor girl's garments even to the
point of making her blush, smoothed her silky hair with her hand, kissed her
foot, her knee, her brow, her eyes, was in raptures over everything. The young
girl let her have her way, repeating at intervals and very low and with infinite
tenderness, "My mother!"
"Do you see, my little girl," resumed the recluse, interspersing her words with
kisses, "I shall love you dearly? We will go away from here. We are going to be
very happy. I have inherited something in Reims, in our country. You know
Reims? Ah! no, you do not know it; you were too small! If you only knew how
pretty you were at the age of four months! Tiny feet that people came even from
Epernay, which is seven leagues away, to see! We shall have a field, a house. I
will put you to sleep in my bed. My God! my God! who would believe this? I
have my daughter!"
"Oh, my mother!" said the young girl, at length finding strength to speak in
her emotion, "the gypsy woman told me so. There was a good gypsy of our band
who died last year, and who always cared for me like a nurse. It was she who
placed this little bag about my neck. She always said to me: 'Little one, guard
Thesaurus
extravagant: (adj) wasteful, luxurious, castigate. ANTONYMS: (adj) finite, limited,
prodigal, exaggerated, profligate, hatred: (n, v) detestation, enmity, restricted, small, tiny, slight.
costly, expensive, lavish, animosity; (n) aversion, antipathy, inherited: (adj) inborn, genetic,
immoderate, profuse, undue. disgust, abhorrence, grudge, anger, familial, ancestral, transmissible,
ANTONYMS: (adj) restrained, frugal, abomination, hostility. ANTONYMS: congenital, inherent, incarnate,
parsimonious, plain, stingy, (n) liking, adoration, affection, transmitted, instinctive, intuitive.
understated, thrifty, reasonable, attraction, goodwill, kindness, silky: (adj, v) silken; (adj) glossy, soft,
moderate, cautious, tasteful. delight, friendliness, admiration. smooth, satiny, delicate, fine, fluffy,
forgive: (v) absolve, excuse, acquit, infinite: (adj) absolute, eternal, sericeous, slick, downy.
remit, pardon, justify, to forgive, endless, countless, immense, ANTONYMS: (adj) rough, harsh,
exonerate, overlook, clear, to excuse. incalculable, boundless, innumerable, coarse, dull.
ANTONYMS: (v) condemn, punish, immeasurable, everlasting, spaceless.
this jewel well! 'Tis a treasure. It will cause thee to find thy mother once again.
Thou wearest thy mother about thy neck.'-- The gypsy predicted it!"
The sacked nun again pressed her daughter in her arms.%
"Come, let me kiss you! You say that prettily. When we are in the country,
we will place these little shoes on an infant Jesus in the church. We certainly
owe that to the good, holy Virgin. What a pretty voice you have! When you
spoke to me just now, it was music! Ah! my Lord God! I have found my child
again! But is this story credible? Nothing will kill one-- or I should have died of
joy."
And then she began to clap her hands again and to laugh and to cry out: "We
are going to be so happy!"
At that moment, the cell resounded with the clang of arms and a galloping of
horses which seemed to be coming from the Pont Notre-Dame, amid advancing
farther and farther along the quay. The gypsy threw herself with anguish into
the arms of the sacked nun.
"Save me! save me! mother! they are coming!"
"Oh, heaven! what are you saying? I had forgotten! They are in pursuit of
you! What have you done?"
"I know not," replied the unhappy child; "but I am condemned to die."
"To die!" said Gudule, staggering as though struck by lightning; "to die!" she
repeated slowly, gazing at her daughter with staring eyes.
"Yes, mother," replied the frightened young girl, "they want to kill me. They
are coming to seize me. That gallows is for me! Save me! save me! They are
coming! Save me!"
The recluse remained for several moments motionless and petrified, then she
moved her head in sign of doubt, and suddenly giving vent to a burst of
laughter, but with that terrible laugh which had come back to her,
"Ho! ho! no! 'tis a dream of which you are telling me. Ah, yes! I lost her, that
lasted fifteen years, and then I found her again, and that lasted a minute! And
Thesaurus
credible: (adj) convincing, likely, (pron) another. ANTONYMS: (prep) prettily: (adv) beautifully, charmingly,
plausible, reasonable, faithful, within; (adv) nearer, closer. pleasantly, handsomely, finely,
specious, conceivable, persuasive, herself: (adj) oneself, self, himself, neatly, gracefully, picturesquely,
possible, probable; (adj, n) authentic. myself, yourself, yourselves, elegantly, delightfully, pleasingly.
ANTONYMS: (adj) unbelievable, themselves, ourselves, itself. ANTONYMS: (adv) unattractively,
incredible, unconvincing, unlikely, infant: (n) child, babe, minor, nursling, unpleasantly.
impossible, doubtful, inaccurate, youngster, chick, toddler, suckling, treasure: (n) gem, fortune, riches,
unrealistic. kid, pappoose; (adj, n) juvenile. funds; (n, v) hoard, prize, store; (v)
farther: (adj, adv, prep) beyond; (adj) jewel: (n) gemstone, darling, cherish, appreciate; (adj, n) jewel,
additional, more, distant; (adv) diamond, jewelry, trinket, treasure, precious stone. ANTONYMS: (v)
furthermore, besides, abroad, in ornament, idol; (adj, n) bijou, dislike, disparage, scorn, neglect; (n)
addition, too; (adj, prep) outside; precious stone; (adj) brilliant. dud, poverty.
Victor Hugo 591
they would take her from me again! And now, when she is beautiful, when she
is grown up, when she speaks to me, when she loves me; it is now that they
would come to devour her, before my very eyes, and I her mother! Oh! no! these
things are not possible. The good God does not permit such things as that."
Here the cavalcade appeared to halt, and a voice was heard to say in the
distance,
"This way, Messire Tristan! The priest says that we shall find her at the Rat-
Hole." The noise of the horses began again.%
The recluse sprang to her feet with a shriek of despair. "Fly! fly! my child! All
comes back to me. You are right. It is your death! Horror! Maledictions! Fly!"
She thrust her head through the window, and withdrew it again hastily.
"Remain," she said, in a low, curt, and lugubrious tone, as she pressed the
hand of the gypsy, who was more dead than alive. "Remain! Do not breathe!
There are soldiers everywhere. You cannot get out. It is too light."
Her eyes were dry and burning. She remained silent for a moment; but she
paced the cell hurriedly, and halted now and then to pluck out handfuls of her
gray hairs, which she afterwards tore with her teeth.
Suddenly she said: "They draw near. I will speak with them. Hide yourself
in this corner. They will not see you. I will tell them that you have made your
escape. That I released you, i' faith!"
She set her daughter (down for she was still carrying her), in one corner of
the cell which was not visible from without. She made her crouch down,
arranged her carefully so that neither foot nor hand projected from the shadow,
untied her black hair which she spread over her white robe to conceal it, placed
in front of her her jug and her paving stone, the only articles of furniture which
she possessed, imagining that this jug and stone would hide her. And when
this was finished she became more tranquil, and knelt down to pray. The day,
which was only dawning, still left many shadows in the Rat-Hole.
At that moment, the voice of the priest, that infernal voice, passed very close
to the cell, crying,
Thesaurus
crouch: (v) bend, couch, cringe, squat, advertise, clarify. courage, boldness; (n, v) pull.
sneak, bow, huddle, stoop, lie down, hurriedly: (adv) rapidly, quickly, ANTONYMS: (n) cowardice,
crawl, hunch. swiftly, abruptly, promptly, fast, in gutlessness; (v) undercharge.
dawning: (n) daybreak, sunrise, start, haste, suddenly, speedily, rashly, possessed: (adj) mad, obsessed,
beginning, aurora, cockcrow, precipitately. ANTONYMS: (adv) frantic, hysterical, furious, fanatical,
dayspring, morning, birth, first light, calmly, unhurriedly, patiently, infatuated, insane; (v) ought, owed,
break of day. ANTONYM: (n) sunset. carefully, gradually, thoroughly. behoove. ANTONYM: (adj)
hide: (n, v) cover, disguise, shelter, imagining: (n) conception, daydream, uninterested.
veil; (adj, v) obscure; (n) fur, fell, coat; fantasy, opinion; (v) imagine; (adj) thrust: (n, v) poke, stab, jab, drive,
(v) bury, mask; (adj, n, v) darken. imaginant. shove, force, punch, boost, cast, dig;
ANTONYMS: (v) show, expose, pluck: (adj, n) nerve; (v) cull, jerk, (v) ram. ANTONYM: (n) inertia.
express, divulge, unearth, amplify, gather, pick, fleece, grab; (n) grit,
"This way, Captain Phoebus de Châteaupers."

At that name, at that voice, la Esmeralda, crouching in her corner, made a
movement.%
"Do not stir!" said Gudule.
She had barely finished when a tumult of men, swords, and horses halted
around the cell. The mother rose quickly and went to post herself before her
window, in order to stop it up. She beheld a large troop of armed men, both
horse and foot, drawn up on the Grève.
The commander dismounted, and came toward her.
"Old woman!" said this man, who had an atrocious face, "we are in search of
a witch to hang her; we were told that you had her."
The poor mother assumed as indifferent an air as she could, and replied,
"I know not what you mean."
The other resumed, "Tête Dieu! What was it that frightened archdeacon said?
Where is he?"
"Monseigneur," said a soldier, "he has disappeared."
"Come, now, old madwoman," began the commander again, "do not lie. A
sorceress was given in charge to you. What have you done with her?"
The recluse did not wish to deny all, for fear of awakening suspicion, and
replied in a sincere and surly tone,
"If you are speaking of a big young girl who was put into my hands a while
ago, I will tell you that she bit me, and that I released her. There! Leave me in
peace."
The commander made a grimace of disappointment. "Don't lie to me, old
spectre!" said he. "My name is Tristan l'Hermite, and I am the king's gossip.
Tristan the Hermit, do you hear?" He added, as he glanced at the Place de Grève
around him, "'Tis a name which has an echo here."
Thesaurus
atrocious: (adj) monstrous, awful, animating; (v) awake. ANTONYM: rebound, reply; (v) reproduce,
heinous, abominable, wicked, (n) suppression. reverberate, imitate; (n) repercussion,
dreadful, frightful, terrible, bad, disappointment: (n) anticlimax, reaction, replication.
horrible; (adj, n) outrageous. failure, letdown, comedown, indifferent: (adj) apathetic, impassive,
ANTONYMS: (adj) humane, frustration, shame, disillusionment, cold, cool, callous, fair, insensible,
benevolent, drivable, elegant, annoyance, dismay, setback, unconcerned, careless, dull, average.
virtuous, good, passable, fine, kind, misfortune. ANTONYMS: (n) ANTONYMS: (adj) enthusiastic,
admirable, tasteful. satisfaction, boost, happiness, fervent, keen, obsessive, energetic,
awakening: (n) arousal, waking up, pleasure, hopefulness, fulfillment, eager, involved, surprised,
revival, disenchantment, comfort, idealism, climax, bonus, exceptional, concerned, shocked.
awakenment, introduction, gratification.
provocation; (adj) arousing, moving, echo: (n, v) answer, repeat, resound,
Victor Hugo 593
"You might be Satan the Hermit," replied Gudule, who was regaining hope,
"but I should have nothing else to say to you, and I should never be afraid of
you."
"Tête-Dieu," said Tristan, "here is a crone! Ah! So the witch girl hath fled!
And in which direction did she go?" Gudule replied in a careless tone,
"Through the Rue du Mouton, I believe."
Tristan turned his head and made a sign to his troop to prepare to set out on
the march again. The recluse breathed freely once more.%
"Monseigneur," suddenly said an archer, "ask the old elf why the bars of her
window are broken in this manner."
This question brought anguish again to the heart of the miserable mother.
Nevertheless, she did not lose all presence of mind.
They have always been thus," she stammered.
"Bah!" retorted the archer, "only yesterday they still formed a fine black cross,
which inspired devotion."
Tristan east a sidelong glance at the recluse.
"I think the old dame is getting confused!"
The unfortunate woman felt that all depended on her self- possession, and,
although with death in her soul, she began to grin. Mothers possess such
strength.
"Bah!" said she, "the man is drunk. 'Tis more than a year since the tail of a
stone cart dashed against my window and broke in the grating. And how I
cursed the carter, too."
"'Tis true," said another archer, "I was there."
Always and everywhere people are to be found who have seen everything.
This unexpected testimony from the archer re-encouraged the recluse, whom this
interrogatory was forcing to cross an abyss on the edge of a knife. But she was
condemned to a perpetual alternative of hope and alarm.
Thesaurus
careless: (adj) forgetful, inattentive, forcing: (adj) pressing, constraining, interrogatory: (n, v) interrogation; (adj,
insouciant, haphazard, cursory, penetrating, compulsatory; (n) push. n) interrogative; (n) examination,
reckless, lax, unwary, sloppy; (adj, grin: (n, v) beam; (v) laugh, sneer, leer, question, inquiry, query, hearing,
adv) thoughtless; (adj, v) heedless. quib, quip, satire, skit; (n) smirk, problem, doubt, questionnaire; (adj)
ANTONYMS: (adj) cautious, prudent, grinning, simper. ANTONYM: (v) asking. ANTONYM: (adj) declarative.
meticulous, thoughtful, diligent, frown. possess: (adj, v) own; (v) hold, wield,
attentive, thorough, wary, guarded, inspired: (adj) ingenious, adopted, occupy, bear, keep, enjoy, contain,
methodical, strict. elysian, creative, imaginative, elected, retain, to have, maintain.
carter: (n) whip, carrier, coachman, inventive, unearthly, brilliant, ANTONYMS: (v) lack, remove.
Jehu, drayman, wagoner, teamster, stimulated, enthusiastic. self: (n) ego, person, me, individual,
delivery service, cartman, hauler, ANTONYMS: (adj) bland, being; (pron) myself, herself, itself;
charioteer. unimaginative, abysmal, mediocre. (adj) same; (v) own; (adv) personally.
"If it was a cart which did it," retorted the first soldier, "the stumps of the bars
should be thrust inwards, while they actually are pushed outwards."
"Ho! ho!" said Tristan to the soldier, "you have the nose of an inquisitor of the
Châtelet. Reply to what he says, old woman."
"Good heavens!" she exclaimed, driven to bay, and in a voice that was full of
tears in despite of her efforts, "I swear to you, monseigneur, that 'twas a cart
which broke those bars. You hear the man who saw it. And then, what has that
to do with your gypsy?"
"Hum!" growled Tristan.%
"The devil!" went on the soldier, flattered by the provost's praise, "these
fractures of the iron are perfectly fresh."
Tristan tossed his head. She turned pale.
"How long ago, say you, did the cart do it?"
"A month, a fortnight, perhaps, monseigheur, I know not."
"She first said more than a year," observed the soldier.
"That is suspicious," said the provost.
"Monseigneur!" she cried, still pressed against the opening, and trembling
lest suspicion should lead them to thrust their heads through and look into her
cell; "monseigneur, I swear to you that 'twas a cart which broke this grating. I
swear it to you by the angels of paradise. If it was not a cart, may I be eternally
damned, and I reject God!"
"You put a great deal of heat into that oath;" said Tristan, with his
inquisitorial glance.
The poor woman felt her assurance vanishing more and more. She had
reached the point of blundering, and she comprehended with terror that she was
saying what she ought not to have said.
Here another soldier came up, crying,
Thesaurus
assurance: (n) confidence, guarantee, inquisitorial: (adj) extortionate, compliment, honor, glory, acclaim;
belief, pledge, security, promise, inquisitional, nosy, inquisitive, (n) applause. ANTONYMS: (n)
sureness, poise, conviction, nerve, inquisitorious, inquisiturient, criticism, disparagement; (v)
warrant. ANTONYMS: (n) doubt, oppressive, withering, causidical, reprimand, disparage, reproach,
uncertainty, mistrust, lie, fiction, analytic; (v) catechetical. ANTONYM: scold, belittle, rebuke, chastise,
awkwardness, timidity, clumsiness. (adj) accusatorial. denigrate, sully.
blundering: (adj) clumsy, tactless, inwards: (adv) in, indoors, inwardly, reject: (v) deny, decline, disapprove,
inept, maladroit, ungainly, within, at home, here; (n) gut; (adj) eliminate, dismiss, exclude, rebuff,
unthinking, ridiculous, obtuse, inner, interior, domestic, intimate. discard, repel, ignore; (n) cull.
oblivious, lumbering, insensitive. ANTONYMS: (adv) out, outward. ANTONYMS: (v) approve, choose,
ANTONYMS: (adj) graceful, praise: (v) approve, extol, flatter, select, grant, acknowledge, agree,
sensitive, dexterous. celebrate, glorify; (n, v) commend, pass, welcome, propose, prefer, keep.
Victor Hugo 595
"Monsieur, the old hag lies. The sorceress did not flee through the Rue de
Mouton. The street chain has remained stretched all night, and the chain guard
has seen no one pass."
Tristan, whose face became more sinister with every moment, addressed the
recluse,
"What have you to say to that?"
She tried to make head against this new incident,
"That I do not know, monseigneur; that I may have been mistaken. I believe,
in fact, that she crossed the water."
"That is in the opposite direction," said the provost, "and it is not very likely
that she would wish to re-enter the city, where she was being pursued. You are
lying, old woman."
"And then," added the first soldier, "there is no boat either on this side of the
stream or on the other."
"She swam across," replied the recluse, defending her ground foot by foot.%
"Do women swim?" said the soldier.
"Tête Dieu! old woman! You are lying!" repeated Tristan angrily. "I have a
good mind to abandon that sorceress and take you. A quarter of an hour of
torture will, perchance, draw the truth from your throat. Come! You are to
follow us."
She seized on these words with avidity.
"As you please, monseigneur. Do it. Do it. Torture. I am willing. Take me
away. Quick, quick! let us set out at once!--During that time," she said to herself,
"my daughter will make her escape."
"'S death!" said the provost, "what an appetite for the rack! I understand not
this madwoman at all."
An old, gray-haired sergeant of the guard stepped out of the ranks, and
addressing the provost,
Thesaurus
abandon: (v) relinquish, renounce, avidity: (adj, n) greed, greediness; (n) ANTONYMS: (adj) accurate, wise,
resign, vacate, waive, evacuate, eagerness, ardor, covetousness, lust, right.
desert, give up, leave, depart, throw desire, enthusiasm, rapacity, sergeant: (n) police sergeant, noncom,
away. ANTONYMS: (v) keep, cupidity, avidness. serjeant, sergeant major, staff
support, maintain, adopt, retain, gray-haired: (adj) old, long in the sergeant, technical sergeant, corporal,
continue, defend; (n) restraint, tooth. master sergeant, officer, deskman,
inhibition, deliberation, control. madwoman: (n) madman, madperson, gunnery sergeant.
appetite: (n, v) desire; (n) appetence, maniac, insane person. stretched: (adj) extended, stiff, tight,
appetency, relish, inclination, mistaken: (adj) wrong, erroneous, tense, stretched out, strained,
stomach, taste, thirst, passion, liking, false, misguided, inaccurate, expanded, outstretched, elongated,
gusto. ANTONYMS: (n) dislike, fallacious, untrue, misleading, outspread, prolonged. ANTONYMS:
repulsion, revulsion, apathy, distaste. confused, improper, error. (adj) loose, short.
"Mad in sooth, monseigneur. If she released the gypsy, it was not her fault,
for she loves not the gypsies. I have been of the watch these fifteen years, and I
hear her every evening cursing the Bohemian women with endless imprecations.
If the one of whom we are in pursuit is, as I suppose, the little dancer with the
goat, she detests that one above all the rest."
Gudule made an effort and said,
"That one above all."
The unanimous testimony of the men of the watch confirmed the old
sergeant's words to the provost. Tristan l'Hermite, in despair at extracting
anything from the recluse, turned his back on her, and with unspeakable anxiety
she beheld him direct his course slowly towards his horse.%
"Come!" he said, between his teeth, "March on! let us set out again on the
quest. I shall not sleep until that gypsy is hanged."
But he still hesitated for some time before mounting his horse. Gudule
palpitated between life and death, as she beheld him cast about the Place that
uneasy look of a hunting dog which instinctively feels that the lair of the beast is
close to him, and is loath to go away. At length he shook his head and leaped
into his saddle. Gudule's horribly compressed heart now dilated, and she said
in a low voice, as she cast a glance at her daughter, whom she had not ventured
to look at while they were there, "Saved!"
The poor child had remained all this time in her corner, without breathing,
without moving, with the idea of death before her. She had lost nothing of the
scene between Gudule and Tristan, and the anguish of her mother had found its
echo in her heart. She had heard all the successive snappings of the thread by
which she hung suspended over the gulf; twenty times she had fancied that she
saw it break, and at last she began to breathe again and to feel her foot on firm
ground. At that moment she heard a voice saying to the provost: "Corboeuf!
Monsieur le Prevôt, 'tis no affair of mine, a man of arms, to hang witches. The
rabble of the populace is suppressed. I leave you to attend to the matter alone.
You will allow me to rejoin my company, who are waiting for their captain."
Thesaurus
compressed: (adj) flat, condensed, reluctant, loth, indisposed, backward, strangled, repressed, downtrodden,
dense, concentrated, compacted, hesitant, antipathetic, antipathetical, buried, hidden, pent-up, latent,
tight, pointed, packed, concise, close, loathe, shy of. ANTONYMS: (adj) untold; (n) subordinate.
brief. eager, willing, disposed, keen. ANTONYMS: (adj) publicized, overt.
horribly: (adv) horrifically, awfully, quest: (n) pursuit, investigation, twenty: (adj) vigesimal; (n) large
terrifically, hideously, atrociously, exploration, chase, research, inquest; integer, twenty dollar bill.
appallingly; (adj, adv) frightfully, (n, v) probe, hunt, inquiry, unanimous: (adj) consentaneous,
terribly, fearfully, shockingly; (adj) examination; (v) call for. harmonious, consentient, strong,
ghastly. ANTONYMS: (adv) rejoin: (v) reply, retort, respond, join, firm, of one mind, concordant,
pleasantly, wonderfully, kindly, return, come back, riposte, meet, accordant, compact, collective, cubic.
sweetly. rebut, answer back, react. ANTONYMS: (adj) narrow,
loath: (adj) unwilling, disinclined, suppressed: (adj) stifled, smothered, individual.
Victor Hugo 597
The voice was that of Phoebus de Châteaupers; that which took place within
her was ineffable. He was there, her friend, her protector, her support, her
refuge, her Phoebus. She rose, and before her mother could prevent her, she had
rushed to the window, crying,
"Phoebus! aid me, my Phoebus!"
Phoebus was no longer there. He had just turned the corner of the Rue de la
Coutellerie at a gallop. But Tristan had not yet taken his departure.
The recluse rushed upon her daughter with a roar of agony. She dragged her
violently back, digging her nails into her neck. A tigress mother does not stand
on trifles. But it was too late. Tristan had seen.%
"Hé! hé!" he exclaimed with a laugh which laid bare all his teeth and made
his face resemble the muzzle of a wolf, "two mice in the trap!"
"I suspected as much," said the soldier.
Tristan clapped him on the shoulder,
"You are a good cat! Come!" he added, "where is Henriet Cousin?"
A man who had neither the garments nor the air of a soldier, stepped from
the ranks. He wore a costume half gray, half brown, flat hair, leather sleeves,
and carried a bundle of ropes in his huge hand. This man always attended
Tristan, who always attended Louis XI.
"Friend," said Tristan l'Hermite, "I presume that this is the sorceress of whom
we are in search. You will hang me this one. Have you your ladder?"
"There is one yonder, under the shed of the Pillar-House," replied the man.
"Is it on this justice that the thing is to be done?" he added, pointing to the stone
gibbet.
"Yes."
"Ho, hé!" continued the man with a huge laugh, which was still more brutal
than that of the provost, "we shall not have far to go."
"Make haste!" said Tristan, "you shall laugh afterwards."
Thesaurus
attended: (adj) attent, fraught, tended ANTONYMS: (adj) merciful, kind, marmots, hamsters, pests, Rodentia,
to. liberal, humane, generous, caring, vermin.
bare: (adj) naked, austere, bald, stark, friendly, nice, pleasant. neither: (conj) either, no-one, not
bleak, exposed, desolate, plain; (adj, digging: (n) excavation, excavating, either, nor, nother.
v) empty, vacant; (v) show. digs, dug, excavate, take, locality, shoulder: (v) carry, push, hold, jostle,
ANTONYMS: (adj) cultivated, ornate, mining, barb, creating by removal, sustain, support, assume, accept; (n,
concealed, elaborate, adorned, attack reception. v) elbow; (n) back, flange.
decorated, dressed, clothed, leather: (n) fur, fleece, skin, buckskin, suspected: (adj) supposed, doubted,
embellished; (v) cover, conceal. fell, pelt, doeskin; (v) drub, thresh, suspicious, suspicion, inspiring
brutal: (adj) barbaric, barbarous, thrash; (n, v) hit. distrust, distrusted.
bestial, hard, cruel, unkind, vicious, mice: (n) rats, agoutis, guinea pigs, trifles: (n) jests, nonsense, nugae,
savage, harsh, truculent, barbarian. beavers, gophers, order Rodentia, trivia.
In the meantime, the recluse had not uttered another word since Tristan had
seen her daughter and all hope was lost. She had flung the poor gypsy, half
dead, into the corner of the cellar, and had placed herself once more at the
window with both hands resting on the angle of the sill like two claws. In this
attitude she was seen to cast upon all those soldiers her glance which had
become wild and frantic once more. At the moment when Rennet Cousin
approached her cell, she showed him so savage a face that he shrank back.
"Monseigneur," he said, returning to the provost, "which am I to take?"
"The young one."
"So much the better, for the old one seemeth difficult."
"Poor little dancer with the goat!" said the old sergeant of the watch.%
Rennet Cousin approached the window again. The mother's eyes made his
own droop. He said with a good deal of timidity,
"Madam"
She interrupted him in a very low but furious voice,
"What do you ask?"
"It is not you," he said, "it is the other."
"What other?"
"The young one."
She began to shake her head, crying,
"There is no one! there is no one! there is no one!"
"Yes, there is!" retorted the hangman, "and you know it well. Let me take the
young one. I have no wish to harm you."
She said, with a strange sneer,
"Ah! so you have no wish to harm me!"
"Let me have the other, madam; 'tis monsieur the provost who wills it."
She repeated with a look of madness,
Thesaurus
angle: (n, v) hook, incline, tilt; (v) lean; unusual, spasmodic. (adj) ferocious, brutal, cruel,
(n) view, viewpoint, aspect, position, resting: (adj) idle, quiescent, inactive, bloodthirsty, rough, pitiless; (adj, n)
point of view, pitch, perspective. dormant, quiet, sleeping, reclining, brute; (n) vandal. ANTONYMS: (adj)
madam: (n) dame, lady, ma'am, obligatory, unemployed, asleep; (n) civilized, gentle, nice.
gentlewoman, missis, Mrs, brothel repose. shake: (n, v) jolt, beat, jar, quiver,
keeper, madames, signora, female, returning: (adj) regressive, return, wave; (v) agitate, excite, disturb; (adv,
bawd. reversive, recurrent, coming back, v) brandish; (adj, v) quake, totter.
repeated: (adj) continual, recurrent, ebbing, flowing back, new, newly ANTONYMS: (v) soothe, steady.
frequent, persistent, repeat, double, appointed, newly elected, next. sill: (n) ledge, threshold, doorstep,
habitual, chronic, again, common, ANTONYMS: (adj) outgoing, unique, rung, step, round, stone, cornerstone,
continuous. ANTONYMS: (adj) occasional. sole, window sill, windowsill.
temporary, rare, unique, alternate, savage: (adj, v) fierce, wild, furious;
Victor Hugo 599
"There is no one here."

"I tell you that there is!" replied the executioner. "We have all seen that there
are two of you."
"Look then!" said the recluse, with a sneer. "Thrust your head through the
window."
The executioner observed the mother's finger-nails and dared not.
"Make haste!" shouted Tristan, who had just ranged his troops in a circle
round the Rat-Hole, and who sat on his horse beside the gallows.
Rennet returned once more to the provost in great embarrassment. He had
flung his rope on the ground, and was twisting his hat between his hands with
an awkward air.%
"Monseigneur," he asked, "where am I to enter?"
"By the door."
"There is none."
"By the window."
"'Tis too small."
"Make it larger," said Tristan angrily. "Have you not pickaxes?"
The mother still looked on steadfastly from the depths of her cavern. She no
longer hoped for anything, she no longer knew what she wished, except that she
did not wish them to take her daughter.
Rennet Cousin went in search of the chest of tools for the night man, under
the shed of the Pillar-House. He drew from it also the double ladder, which he
immediately set up against the gallows. Five or six of the provost's men armed
themselves with picks and crowbars, and Tristan betook himself, in company
with them, towards the window.
"Old woman," said the provost, in a severe tone, "deliver up to us that girl
quietly."
She looked at him like one who does not understand.
Thesaurus
chest: (n) bosom, ark, bust, box, chest pride, shortage. permanently, staunchly.
of drawers, case, hutch, bureau, observed: (adj) ascertained, empirical, ANTONYMS: (adv) unreliably,
caisson, casket, dresser. discovered, viewed, experimental, irresolutely, unfaithfully.
circle: (n) association, field, range, experiential, determined, visual, tools: (n) tackle, apparatus, gear,
beat, set; (n, v) ring, band, compass, disclosed. appliance, machinery, utensil,
turn, whirl; (v) encircle. rennet: (n) reed, renning, compound, rigging, knowledge, skill, factory,
embarrassment: (n) abashment, coagulant, chemical compound, calf expertise.
difficulty, quandary, discomfiture, stomach, runnet. twisting: (adj) tortuous, winding,
humiliation, bewilderment, steadfastly: (adv) steadily, solidly, sinuous, crooked, zigzag,
mortification, uneasiness, shame; (n, unwaveringly, resolutely, meandering; (n) distortion, turn, spin,
v) distress; (adj, n) dilemma. unfalteringly, unswervingly, torsion, overrefinement.
ANTONYMS: (n) confidence, honor, determinedly, faithfully, persistently,
"Tête Dieu!" continued Tristan, "why do you try to prevent this sorceress
being hung as it pleases the king?"
The wretched woman began to laugh in her wild way.
"Why? She is my daughter."
The tone in which she pronounced these words made even Henriet Cousin
shudder.
"I am sorry for that," said the provost, "but it is the king's good pleasure."
She cried, redoubling her terrible laugh,
"What is your king to me? I tell you that she is my daughter!"
"Pierce the wall," said Tristan.%
In order to make a sufficiently wide opening, it sufficed to dislodge one
course of stone below the window. When the mother heard the picks and
crowbars mining her fortress, she uttered a terrible cry; then she began to stride
about her cell with frightful swiftness, a wild beasts' habit which her cage had
imparted to her. She no longer said anything, but her eyes flamed. The soldiers
were chilled to the very soul.
All at once she seized her paving stone, laughed, and hurled it with both fists
upon the workmen. The stone, badly flung (for her hands trembled), touched no
one, and fell short under the feet of Tristan's horse. She gnashed her teeth.
In the meantime, although the sun had not yet risen, it was broad daylight; a
beautiful rose color enlivened the ancient, decayed chimneys of the Pillar-
House. It was the hour when the earliest windows of the great city open
joyously on the roofs. Some workmen, a few fruit-sellers on their way to the
markets on their asses, began to traverse the Grève; they halted for a moment
before this group of soldiers clustered round the Rat-Hole, stared at it with an air
of astonishment and passed on.
The recluse had gone and seated herself by her daughter, covering her with
her body, in front of her, with staring eyes, listening to the poor child, who did
not stir, but who kept murmuring in a low voice, these words only, "Phoebus!
Thesaurus
decayed: (adj) spoiled, corrupt, primitive, aboriginal, chief, foremost, mining: (n) minelaying, digging,
dilapidated, rank, rusty, rotting, opening. ANTONYMS: (adj) latest, extraction, dig, ore, production,
decaying, rotted, putrid; (adj, v) subsequent, contemporary. taking out, drawing out, withdrawal,
wasted; (v) stale. ANTONYMS: (adj) enlivened: (adj) bouncy, active, defense, defence.
matured, restored, strengthened. spirited, alive, bouncing. stride: (n, v) pace, tread, walk, stalk,
dislodge: (v) bump, shift, throw, habit: (n) clothing, practice, dress, rate, toddle, stump; (n) footstep, gait,
extrude, banish, discharge, dislocate, garb, attire, convention, character, progress; (v) march.
expel, eject, free, move. ANTONYMS: ritual, addiction, clothes; (n, v) use. sufficiently: (adv) fully, satisfactorily,
(v) wedge, root, seat, replace, plant, ANTONYM: (n) innovation. enough, amply, quite, properly,
embed, stick, restore. horse: (n, v) mount; (n) buck, heroin, competently, decently, abundantly,
earliest: (adj) earlier, early, initial, junk, charger, knight, pony, rider, goodly, completely. ANTONYM:
primordial, matutinal, original, trestle, eohippus, dog. (adv) inadequately.
Victor Hugo 601
Phoebus!" In proportion as the work of the demolishers seemed to advance, the

mother mechanically retreated, and pressed the young girl closer and closer to
the wall. All at once, the recluse beheld the stone (for she was standing guard
and never took her eyes from it), move, and she heard Tristan's voice
encouraging the workers. Then she aroused from the depression into which she
had fallen during the last few moments, cried out, and as she spoke, her voice
now rent the ear like a saw, then stammered as though all kind of maledictions
were pressing to her lips to burst forth at once.
"Ho! ho! ho! Why this is terrible! You are ruffians! Are you really going to
take my daughter? Oh! the cowards! Oh! the hangman lackeys! the wretched,
blackguard assassins! Help! help! fire! Will they take my child from me like this?
Who is it then who is called the good God?"
Then, addressing Tristan, foaming at the mouth, with wild eyes, all bristling
and on all fours like a female panther,
"Draw near and take my daughter! Do not you understand that this woman
tells you that she is my daughter? Do you know what it is to have a child? Eh!
lynx, have you never lain with your female? have you never had a cub? and if
you have little ones, when they howl have you nothing in your vitals that
moves?"
"Throw down the stone," said Tristan; "it no longer holds."
The crowbars raised the heavy course. It was, as we have said, the mother's
last bulwark.%
She threw herself upon it, she tried to hold it back; she scratched the stone
with her nails, but the massive block, set in movement by six men, escaped her
and glided gently to the ground along the iron levers.
The mother, perceiving an entrance effected, fell down in front of the
opening, barricading the breach with her body, beating the pavement with her
head, and shrieking with a voice rendered so hoarse by fatigue that it was hardly
audible,
"Help! fire! fire!"
Thesaurus
beating: (n) reverse, defeat, whipping, attach, join, connect, fasten, trickle. lynx: (n) cat, bobcat, caracal, wildcat,
thrashing, battery, flogging, effected: (adj) completed, complete, bay lynx, common lynx, cougar,
pounding, pulsation, pulse, rout; (adj) finished, fulfilled, done, realized, desert lynx, Felis concolor.
pulsing. ANTONYMS: (n) victory, conventional, constituted, panther: (n) cougar, jaguar, leopard,
win. established. puma, mountain lion, painter, Felis
blackguard: (n) ruffian, rogue, dog, fatigue: (v) exhaust, tire, weary, onca, Felis concolor, cat; (adj) lion,
rascal, heel, hound, cad; (adj) base, harass, enervate, fag, jade, wear; (n) tiger.
vile; (v) vituperate, revile. exhaustion, weariness, tiredness. pressing: (adj, v) exigent, importunate,
burst: (adj, n, v) crack; (adj, v) split, ANTONYMS: (n) energy, liveliness, important; (adj) imperative,
blow up, explode, splinter, detonate; vitality, vigor, strength; (v) energize, immediate, imperious, instant,
(n, v) rupture, blast; (adj, n) flash; (v) renew, rejuvenate, restore, critical, insistent; (n) dishing, press.
break out, belch. ANTONYMS: (v) invigorate. ANTONYM: (adj) mild.
"Now take the wench," said Tristan, still impassive.

The mother gazed at the soldiers in such formidable fashion that they were
more inclined to retreat than to advance.
"Come, now," repeated the provost. "Here you, Rennet Cousin!"
No one took a step.
The provost swore,
"Tête de Christ! my men of war! afraid of a woman!"
"Monseigneur," said Rennet, "do you call that a woman?"
"She has the mane of a lion," said another.%
"Come!" repeated the provost, "the gap is wide enough. Enter three abreast,
as at the breach of Pontoise. Let us make an end of it, death of Mahom! I will
make two pieces of the first man who draws back!"
Placed between the provost and the mother, both threatening, the soldiers
hesitated for a moment, then took their resolution, and advanced towards the
Rat-Hole.
When the recluse saw this, she rose abruptly on her knees, flung aside her
hair from her face, then let her thin flayed hands fall by her side. Then great
tears fell, one by one, from her eyes; they flowed down her cheeks through a
furrow, like a torrent through a bed which it has hollowed for itself.
At the same time she began to speak, but in a voice so supplicating, so gentle,
so submissive, so heartrending, that more than one old convict-warder around
Tristan who must have devoured human flesh wiped his eyes.
"Messeigneurs! messieurs the sergeants, one word. There is one thing which
I must say to you. She is my daughter, do you see? my dear little daughter
whom I had lost! Listen. It is quite a history. Consider that I knew the sergeants
very well. They were always good to me in the days when the little boys threw
stones at me, because I led a life of pleasure. Do you see? You will leave me my
child when you know! I was a poor woman of the town. It was the Bohemians
who stole her from me. And I kept her shoe for fifteen years. Stay, here it is.
Thesaurus
flesh: (adj) carnality, concupiscence; fierce, caustic, violent, rough, dangerous, grave, sullen.
(n) mortality, beef, form, figure, hardhearted, abrupt, heavy, steep, ANTONYMS: (adj) reassuring, nice,
frame, person, mankind, humanity, sheer. approachable, pleasant, promising,
meat. inclined: (adj, v) given; (adj) prone, favorable, friendly, harmless,
furrow: (n, v) fold, crinkle, crease, willing, oblique, apt, predisposed, hospitable, soothing.
groove, line, chamfer, rut; (n) ready, minded, likely, liable, bowed. torrent: (n) flood, cloudburst,
channel, cut, ditch, trough. ANTONYMS: (adj) reluctant, overflow, stream, downpour, rain,
ANTONYMS: (n) ridge; (v) smooth. unwilling, disinclined, horizontal, shower, soaker, inundation; (adj, n)
gentle: (adj) easy, friendly, soft, kind, unbiased, vertical, impervious. volley, eruption. ANTONYMS: (n)
affable, balmy, mild, feeble, threatening: (adj) ominous, drought, trickle, shower.
compassionate; (adj, adv) calm; (adj, v) forbidding, sinister, minatory, black,
tame. ANTONYMS: (adj) harsh, loud, imminent, perilous, impending,
Victor Hugo 603
That%was the kind of foot which she had. At Reims! La Chantefleurie! Rue
Folle- Peine! Perchance, you knew about that. It was I. In your youth, then,
there was a merry time, when one passed good hours. You will take pity on me,
will you not, gentlemen? The gypsies stole her from me; they hid her from me for
fifteen years. I thought her dead. Fancy, my good friends, believed her to be
dead. I have passed fifteen years here in this cellar, without a fire in winter. It is
hard. The poor, dear little shoe! I have cried so much that the good God has
heard me. This night he has given my daughter back to me. It is a miracle of the
good God. She was not dead. You will not take her from me, I am sure. If it
were myself, I would say nothing; but she, a child of sixteen! Leave her time to
see the sun! What has she done to you? nothing at all. Nor have I. If you did
but know that she is all I have, that I am old, that she is a blessing which the
Holy Virgin has sent to me! And then, you are all so good! You did not know
that she was my daughter; but now you do know it. Oh! I love her! Monsieur,
the grand provost. I would prefer a stab in my own vitals to a scratch on her
finger! You have the air of such a good lord! What I have told you explains the
matter, does it not? Oh! if you have had a mother, monsiegneur! you are the
captain, leave me my child! Consider that I pray you on my knees, as one prays
to Jesus Christ! I ask nothing of any one; I am from Reims, gentlemen; I own a
little field inherited from my uncle, Mahiet Pradon. I am no beggar. I wish
nothing, but I do want my child! oh! I want to keep my child! The good God,
who is the master, has not given her back to me for nothing! The king! you say
the king! It would not cause him much pleasure to have my little daughter
killed! And then, the king is good! she is my daughter! she is my own daughter!
She belongs not to the king! she is not yours! I want to go away! we want to go
away! and when two women pass, one a mother and the other a daughter, one
lets them go! Let us pass! we belong in Reims. Oh! you are very good, messieurs
the sergeants, I love you all. You will not take my dear little one, it is impossible!
It is utterly impossible, is it not? My child, my child!"
We will not try to give an idea of her gestures, her tone, of the tears which she
swallowed as she spoke, of the hands which she clasped and then wrung, of the
heart-breaking smiles, of the swimming glances, of the groans, the sighs, the
Thesaurus
belong: (v) appertain, pertain, lie, go, finger: (v) feel, handle, touch, thumb, inundated, overcome, overwhelmed,
belong to, attach, dwell, consist, indicate, point; (n) digit, dactyl, flooded, overpowered, enclosed.
come, rank, stand. ANTONYMS: (v) forefinger, pointer; (n, v) hand. swimming: (n) swim, natation, diving,
separate, disagree, disassociate, ANTONYM: (v) clear. bathing, skin diving; (adj) vertigo,
leave, quit, differ. scratch: (n, v) mark, graze, notch, naiant, liquid, natatorial, oily, overly
blessing: (n) benediction, approval, scrape, nick, scrabble, dent, scar; (v) diluted.
mercy, felicity, benison, benefit, luck, rub, chafe, rake. ANTONYM: (v) utterly: (adv) completely, absolutely,
advantage, boon, bless, godsend. soothe. totally, entirely, extremely,
ANTONYMS: (n) curse, misfortune, stab: (n, v) thrust, impale, jab, pierce, altogether, expressly, purely, dead,
disaster, condemnation, adversity, prod, dig, stick, pink; (n) try, prick; fully, wholly. ANTONYMS: (adv)
desecration, refusal, veto, (v) spike. partly, uncertain, slightly,
disadvantage. swallowed: (adj) engulfed, gulped, incompletely, hardly, somewhat.
miserable and affecting cries which she mingled with her disordered, wild, and
incoherent words. When she became silent Tristan l'Hermite frowned, but it was
to conceal a tear which welled up in his tiger's eye. He conquered this weakness,
however, and said in a curt tone,
"The king wills it."
Then he bent down to the ear of Rennet Cousin, and said to him in a very low
tone,
"Make an end of it quickly!" Possibly, the redoubtable provost felt his heart
also failing him.
The executioner and the sergeants entered the cell. The mother offered no
resistance, only she dragged herself towards her daughter and threw herself
bodily upon her. The gypsy beheld the soldiers approach. The horror of death
reanimated her,
"Mother!" she shrieked, in a tone of indescribable distress, "Mother! they are
coming! defend me!"
"Yes, my love, I am defending you!" replied the mother, in a dying voice; and
clasping her closely in her arms, she covered her with kisses. The two lying thus
on the earth, the mother upon the daughter, presented a spectacle worthy of
pity.%
Rennet Cousin grasped the young girl by the middle of her body, beneath her
beautiful shoulders. When she felt that hand, she cried, "Heuh!" and fainted.
The executioner who was shedding large tears upon her, drop by drop, was
about to bear her away in his arms. He tried to detach the mother, who had, so
to speak, knotted her hands around her daughter's waist; but she clung so
strongly to her child, that it was impossible to separate them. Then Rennet
Cousin dragged the young girl outside the cell, and the mother after her. The
mother's eyes were also closed.
At that moment, the sun rose, and there was already on the Place a fairly
numerous assembly of people who looked on from a distance at what was being
Thesaurus
affecting: (adj) poignant, emotional, unhook, remove, disentangle, cut off, waist: (n) waistline, shank, middle,
moving, stirring, pathetic, emotive, disconnect, separate, dissociate; (n, v) belly, isthmus, hourglass,
piteous, pitiful, heartbreaking, detail. ANTONYMS: (v) fasten, add, undersurface; (adj) stricture, middle
mournful; (adj, v) sad. ANTONYMS: associate, connect, unite, couple, link. constriction, neck, wasp.
(adj) emotionless, unemotional. distress: (n, v) pain, torment, trouble, weakness: (adj, n) failing, fault,
bodily: (adj) material, corporeal, concern, torture, upset, worry; (n) debility, defect, infirmity, fragility,
corporal, animal, carnal, somatic, anguish, agony; (adj, n) difficulty, feebleness, deficiency, imperfection,
real, personal, sensual; (adv) grief. ANTONYMS: (n, v) comfort; (v) foible; (n) flaw. ANTONYMS: (n)
altogether, fleshly. ANTONYMS: please, soothe, relieve; (n) peace, power, dislike, intensity, supremacy,
(adj) mental, spiritual, soulful, encouragement, straightforwardness, determination, advantage,
intellectual; (adv) mentally. solace, relieving, relief, prosperity. brightness, superiority, resistance,
detach: (v) disengage, part, break off, reanimated: (adj) animated, alive. robustness, energy.
Victor Hugo 605
thus dragged along the pavement to the gibbet. For that was Provost Tristan's
way at executions. He had a passion for preventing the approach of the curious.
There was no one at the windows. Only at a distance, at the summit of that
one of the towers of Notre-Dame which commands the Grève, two men outlined
in black against the light morning sky, and who seemed to be looking on, were
visible.
Rennet Cousin paused at the foot of the fatal ladder, with that which he was
dragging, and, barely breathing, with so much pity did the thing inspire him, he
passed the rope around the lovely neck of the young girl. The unfortunate child
felt the horrible touch of the hemp. She raised her eyelids, and saw the fleshless
arm of the stone gallows extended above her head. Then she shook herself and
shrieked in a loud and heartrending voice: "No! no! I will not!" Her mother,
whose head was buried and concealed in her daughter's garments, said not a
word; only her whole body could be seen to quiver, and she was heard to
redouble her kisses on her child. The executioner took advantage of this moment
to hastily loose the arms with which she clasped the condemned girl. Either
through exhaustion or despair, she let him have his way. Then he took the
young girl on his shoulder, from which the charming creature hung, gracefully
bent over his large head. Then he set his foot on the ladder in order to ascend.%
At that moment, the mother who was crouching on the pavement, opened
her eyes wide. Without uttering a cry, she raised herself erect with a terrible
expression; then she flung herself upon the hand of the executioner, like a beast
on its prey, and bit it. It was done like a flash of lightning. The headsman
howled with pain. Those near by rushed up. With difficulty they withdrew his
bleeding hand from the mother's teeth. She preserved a profound silence. They
thrust her back with much brutality, and noticed that her head fell heavily on the
pavement. They raised her, she fell back again. She was dead.
The executioner, who had not loosed his hold on the young girl, began to
ascend the ladder once more.
Thesaurus
brutality: (n) atrocity, barbarity, exhaustion: (n) consumption, forte. ANTONYMS: (adj) tasteful,
violence, cruelty, ferocity, enervation, tiredness, lassitude, gentle, quiet, subtle, subdued, low,
savageness, harshness, callousness, attrition, weakening, weariness, muted, weak, tranquil, thin; (adv)
viciousness, ferociousness, savagery. inanition, weakness; (adj, n) collapse; softly.
ANTONYMS: (n) friendliness, (adj) prostration. ANTONYMS: (n) prey: (n) chase, game, victim,
kindness, caring, gentility, vitality, pep, restoration, vim. immolation, quarry, target, mark,
humaneness, humanity. hemp: (n) cannabis, dope, ganja, grass, capture; (n, v) plunder, raven; (v) eat.
buried: (adj) hidden, covert, interred, flax, halter, rope, abaca, gage; (adj) ANTONYMS: (n) hunter, predator.
underground, inhumed, profound, marijuana, pot. summit: (n) peak, apex, acme, top,
covered, ulterior; (v) perdu, imbed, loud: (adj) flashy, garish, gaudy, height, crown, point, crest, tip,
embed. ANTONYMS: (adj) explicit, blatant, brassy, boisterous, high, climax, culmination. ANTONYMS:
overt. jazzy, brazen, piercing; (adj, adv) (n) nadir, bottom, dip, trough.
Victor Hugo 607
CHAPTER II
THE BEAUTIFUL CREATURE CLAD IN WHITE

(DANTE)
When Quasimodo saw that the cell was empty, that the gypsy was no longer
there, that while he had been defending her she had been abducted, he grasped
his hair with both hands and stamped with surprise and pain; then he set out to
run through the entire church seeking his Bohemian, howling strange cries to all
the corners of the walls, strewing his red hair on the pavement. It was just at the
moment when the king's archers were making their victorious entrance into
Notre-Dame, also in search of the gypsy. Quasimodo, poor, deaf fellow, aided
them in their fatal intentions, without suspecting it; he thought that the outcasts
were the gypsy's enemies. He himself conducted Tristan l'Hermite to all possible
hiding-places, opened to him the secret doors, the double bottoms of the altars,
the rear sacristries. If the unfortunate girl had still been there, it would have
been he himself who would have delivered her up.%
When the fatigue of finding nothing had disheartened Tristan, who was not
easily discouraged, Quasimodo continued the search alone. He made the tour of
the church twenty times, length and breadth, up and down, ascending and
descending, running, calling, sbouting, peeping, rummaging, ransacking,
thrusting his head into every hole, pushing a torch under every vault,
Thesaurus
abducted: (adj) kidnapped. depressed, despondent, dispirited, (adj) fore; (n) head; (v) level.
bottoms: (n) swamp, lees, residue. demoralized, disappointed, sad, seeking: (n) hunt, pursuit, hunting,
discouraged: (adj) despondent, downcast, down, low, daunted. effort, pursuance; (adj) searching,
downhearted, downcast, ANTONYMS: (adj) cheerful, zetetic; (prep) looking for.
demoralized, dejected, dispirited, enthusiastic, happy, positive, strewing: (n) scatter, spreading,
disheartened, frustrated, crestfallen, hopeful. spread, sprinkling, sprinkle,
pessimistic, depressed. ANTONYMS: peeping: (n) cheeping, tweeting, dispersion.
(adj) uplifted, heartened, cheered, chirping; (adj) inquisitive. torch: (n) brand, light, flambeau,
inspired, cheerful, encouraged, rear: (v) breed, raise, bring up, burner, great mullein, blowlamp,
hopeful, happy, calm, positive, nurture, educate, foster, nurse; (adj, v) Verbascum Thapsus, flannel mullein,
enthusiastic. erect; (n) tail; (adj, n) posterior; (adj) common mullein, blowtorch; (v)
disheartened: (adj) dejected, after. ANTONYMS: (adj, n) front; burn.
despairing, mad. A male who has lost his female is no more roaring nor more
haggard.%
At last when he was sure, perfectly sure that she was no longer there, that all
was at an end, that she had been snatched from him, he slowly mounted the
staircase to the towers, that staircase which he had ascended with so much
eagerness and triumph on the day when he had saved her. He passed those
same places once more with drooping head, voiceless, tearless, almost
breathless. The church was again deserted, and had fallen back into its silence.
The archers had quitted it to track the sorceress in the city. Quasimodo, left
alone in that vast Notre-Dame, so besieged and tumultuous but a short time
before, once more betook himself to the cell where the gypsy had slept for so
many weeks under his guardianship.
As he approached it, he fancied that he might, perhaps, find her there. When,
at the turn of the gallery which opens on the roof of the side aisles, he perceived
the tiny cell with its little window and its little door crouching beneath a great
flying buttress like a bird's nest under a branch, the poor man's heart failed him,
and he leaned against a pillar to keep from falling. He imagined that she might
have returned thither, that some good genius had, no doubt, brought her back,
that this chamber was too tranquil, too safe, too charming for her not to be there,
and he dared not take another step for fear of destroying his illusion. "Yes," he
said to himself, "perchance she is sleeping, or praying. I must not disturb her."
At length he summoned up courage, advanced on tiptoe, looked, entered.
Empty. The cell was still empty. The unhappy deaf man walked slowly round
it, lifted the bed and looked beneath it, as though she might be concealed
between the pavement and the mattress, then he shook his head and remained
stupefied. All at once, he crushed his torch under his foot, and, without uttering
a word, without giving vent to a sigh, he flung himself at full speed, head
foremost against the wall, and fell fainting on the floor.
When he recovered his senses, he threw himself on the bed and rolling about,
he kissed frantically the place where the young girl had slept and which was still
warm; he remained there for several moments as motionless as though he were
Thesaurus
buttress: (n, v) support, prop; (n) destroying: (v) destroy; (adj) deadly, tutelage, conservation, protection,
crutch, stay, reinforcement; (v) deleterious, murderous; (n) disposal. wardship; (adj, n) ward; (adj) guard.
underpin, fortify, sustain, bolster, eagerness: (n, v) desire, aspiration; (n) roaring: (n) bellowing, roar, bellow,
reinforce, strengthen. ANTONYM: enthusiasm, avidity, cupidity, thunder; (adj) booming, prosperous,
(v) undermine. readiness, passion, keenness, thriving, flourishing, deafening,
despairing: (adj) hopeless, desperate, ambition, fervor, avidness. noisy, boisterous.
despondent, forlorn, desolate, ANTONYMS: (n) indifference, voiceless: (adj) silent, unvoiced, surd,
dejected, pessimistic, sad, unwillingness, aloofness, disinterest, breathed, mute, speechless,
brokenhearted, miserable, lethargy, listlessness, patience, inarticulate, tacit, dumb, tongueless,
inconsolable. ANTONYMS: (adj) gloom, reluctance. unspoken. ANTONYMS: (adj) sonant,
hopeful, optimistic, rosy, happy, guardianship: (n) custody, care, voiced.
confident, cheerful. charge, keeping, safekeeping,
Victor Hugo 609
about to expire; then he rose, dripping with perspiration, panting, mad, and
began to beat his head against the wall with the frightful regularity of the
clapper of his bells, and the resolution of a man determined to kill himself. At
length he fell a second time, exhausted; he dragged himself on his knees outside
the cell, and crouched down facing the door, in an attitude of astonishment.%
He remained thus for more than an hour without making a movement, with
his eye fixed on the deserted cell, more gloomy, and more pensive than a mother
seated between an empty cradle and a full coffin. He uttered not a word; only at
long intervals, a sob heaved his body violently, but it was a tearless sob, like
summer lightning which makes no noise.
It appears to have been then, that, seeking at the bottom of his lonely
thoughts for the unexpected abductor of the gypsy, he thought of the
archdeacon. He remembered that Dom Claude alone possessed a key to the
staircase leading to the cell; he recalled his nocturnal attempts on the young girl,
in the first of which he, Quasimodo, had assisted, the second of which he had
prevented. He recalled a thousand details, and soon he no longer doubted that
the archdeacon had taken the gypsy. Nevertheless, such was his respect for the
priest, such his gratitude, his devotion, his love for this man had taken such deep
root in his heart, that they resisted, even at this moment, the talons of jealousy
and despair.
He reflected that the archdeacon had done this thing, and the wrath of blood
and death which it would have evoked in him against any other person, turned
in the poor deaf man, from the moment when Claude Frollo was in question, into
an increase of grief and sorrow.
At the moment when his thought was thus fixed upon the priest, while the
daybreak was whitening the flying buttresses, he perceived on the highest story
of Notre-Dame, at the angle formed by the external balustrade as it makes the
turn of the chancel, a figure walking. This figure was coming towards him. He
recognized it. It was the archdeacon.
Claude was walking with a slow, grave step. He did not look before him as
he walked, he was directing his course towards the northern tower, but his face
Thesaurus
abductor: (n) crook, kidnapper, ANTONYMS: (v) inhale, start, repentance, remorse; (adj, n) sadness,
abductor muscle, criminal, felon, commence, begin, thrive, inspire, misery; (adj, n, v) distress.
malefactor, outlaw, kidnaper, captor, appear, survive. ANTONYMS: (n) joy, delight,
snatcher, crimper. regularity: (n) constancy, evenness, happiness, peace, hopefulness,
assisted: (adj) aided. punctuality, orderliness, uniformity, cheerfulness, shamelessness, calm,
attempts: (adj) trying. steadiness, method, accuracy, content; (v) rejoice.
chancel: (n) sanctuary, Golgotha, discipline, system, exactness. whitening: (n) lightening, bleaching,
quire, transept, vestry, crypt, nave, ANTONYMS: (n) lateness, whiting, change of color, dealbation,
presbytery, choir, calvary, asylum. asymmetry, irregularity, disorder, etiolation, white dyeing, white
expire: (v) end, conclude, decease, variability, variety, abnormality. specks.
elapse, pass away, depart, run out, sorrow: (n, v) regret, lament, grieve;
succumb, perish, exhale, exit. (v) mourn; (n) mourning, heartache,
was turned aside towards the right bank of the Seine, and he held his head high,
as though trying to see something over the roofs. The owl often assumes this
oblique attitude. It flies towards one point and looks towards another. In this
manner the priest passed above Quasimodo without seeing him.%
The deaf man, who had been petrified by this sudden apparition, beheld him
disappear through the door of the staircase to the north tower. The reader is
aware that this is the tower from which the Hôtel-de-Ville is visible. Quasimodo
rose and followed the archdeacon.
Quasimodo ascended the tower staircase for the sake of ascending it, for the
sake of seeing why the priest was ascending it. Moreover, the poor bellringer
did not know what he (Quasimodo) should do, what he should say, what he
wished. He was full of fury and full of fear. The archdeacon and the gypsy had
come into conflict in his heart.
When he reached the summit of the tower, before emerging from the shadow
of the staircase and stepping upon the platform, he cautiously examined the
position of the priest. The priest's back was turned to him. There is an openwork
balustrade which surrounds the platform of the bell tower. The priest, whose
eyes looked down upon the town, was resting his breast on that one of the four
sides of the balustrades which looks upon the Pont Notre-Dame.
Quasimodo, advancing with the tread of a wolf behind him, went to see what
he was gazing at thus.
The priest's attention was so absorbed elsewhere that he did not hear the deaf
man walking behind him.
Paris is a magnificent and charming spectacle, and especially at that day,
viewed from the top of the towers of Notre- Dame, in the fresh light of a summer
dawn. The day might have been in July. The sky was perfectly serene. Some
tardy stars were fading away at various points, and there was a very brilliant
one in the east, in the brightest part of the heavens. The sun was about to
appear; Paris was beginning to move. A very white and very pure light brought
out vividly to the eye all the outlines that its thousands of houses present to the
east. The giant shadow of the towers leaped from roof to roof, from one end of
Thesaurus
cautiously: (adv) guardedly, (adj) disappearing, paling, grammar, contents, rudiments,
prudently, warily, circumspectly, weakening, decaying. ANTONYMS: synopsis, textbook, ABC.
charily, discreetly, vigilantly, timidly, (adj) thriving, increasing, growing. tardy: (adj, adv, v) late; (adj, v) slow,
attentively, watchfully, sparingly. fury: (n) anger, exasperation, force, remiss; (adj, adv) backward, dilatory,
ANTONYMS: (adv) openly, resentment, delirium, furor, frenzy, behindhand; (adj) belated, slack,
irresponsibly, imprudently, bravely, indignation, craze; (adj, n) wrath, overdue, delayed, sluggish.
recklessly, incautiously, ferocity. ANTONYMS: (n) ANTONYMS: (adj) early, punctual,
thoughtlessly, wastefully, tactlessly, composure, calmness, mildness, premature, speedy.
rashly, liberally. calm, pleasure, serenity. tread: (n, v) pace, walk, rate, march,
fading: (n) attenuation, bleaching, openwork: (n) lace, net. tramp; (n) gait, stride, footstep,
discoloration, disappearance, outlines: (n) elements, conspectus, footfall, track; (v) trample.
evaporation, colour fading, decay; prospectus, syllabus, alphabet,
Victor Hugo 611
the great city to the other. There were several quarters from which were already
heard voices and noisy sounds. Here the stroke of a bell, there the stroke of a
hammer, beyond, the complicated clatter of a cart in motion.%
Already several columns of smoke were being belched forth from the
chimneys scattered over the whole surface of roofs, as through the fissures of an
immense sulphurous crater. The river, which ruffles its waters against the arches
of so many bridges, against the points of so many islands, was wavering with
silvery folds. Around the city, outside the ramparts, sight was lost in a great
circle of fleecy vapors through which one confusedly distinguished the indefinite
line of the plains, and the graceful swell of the heights. All sorts of floating
sounds were dispersed over this half-awakened city. Towards the east, the
morning breeze chased a few soft white bits of wool torn from the misty fleece of
the hills.
In the Parvis, some good women, who had their milk jugs in their hands,
were pointing out to each other, with astonishment, the singular dilapidation of
the great door of Notre-Dame, and the two solidified streams of lead in the
crevices of the stone. This was all that remained of the tempest of the night. The
bonfire lighted between the towers by Quasimodo had died out. Tristan had
already cleared up the Place, and had the dead thrown into the Seine. Kings like
Louis XI. are careful to clean the pavement quickly after a massacre.
Outside the balustrade of the tower, directly under the point where the priest
had paused, there was one of those fantastically carved stone gutters with which
Gothic edifices bristle, and, in a crevice of that gutter, two pretty wallflowers in
blossom, shaken out and vivified, as it were, by the breath of air, made
frolicsome salutations to each other. Above the towers, on high, far away in the
depths of the sky, the cries of little birds were heard.
But the priest was not listening to, was not looking at, anything of all this. He
was one of the men for whom there are no mornings, no birds, no flowers. In
that immense horizon, which assumed so many aspects about him, his
contemplation was concentrated on a single point.
Thesaurus
crater: (n) hole, cavity, acrasia, acrasy, frolicsome: (adj) frisky, frolic, sulphurous: (adj) stifling, acerb, hot,
collector, basin, cleft, crack, punch waggish, coltish, gay, rollicking, sulphureous, infernal, brimstony,
bowl; (adj, n) pit, well. ANTONYM: frolicky, jocose, airy, lively, jocular. virulent, caustic, containing acid,
(n) hump. ANTONYMS: (adj) serious, lethargic. sultry, burning hot.
crevice: (n) cleft, break, chink, cranny, ramparts: (n) rampart, fortification. wavering: (adj, v) vacillating; (n)
chap, fissure, interstice, rift, gap, salutations: (n) respects. fluctuation, hesitation, vacillation;
hole, fracture. solidified: (adj) fixed, firm, stiff, (adj) irresolute, indecisive,
fleece: (v) extort, bilk, pluck, deceive, concrete, curdled, thick, coagulate, undecided, hesitant, uncertain,
rip off, swindle, strip, pigeon, shear; grumous, grumose; (v) consolidated, variable, changeable. ANTONYMS:
(adj, v) bleed; (n) wool. joined. (adj) decided, constant, resolute,
fleecy: (adj) fluffy, hairy, brushed, soft, sorts: (n) varieties, sorting, running pi, stable, decisive; (n) resolution,
woolly, silky, napped. batter. stability.
Quasimodo was burning to ask him what he had done with the gypsy; but
the archdeacon seemed to be out of the world at that moment. He was evidently
in one of those violent moments of life when one would not feel the earth
crumble. He remained motionless and silent, with his eyes steadily fixed on a
certain point; and there was something so terrible about this silence and
immobility that the savage bellringer shuddered before it and dared not come in
contact with it. Only, and this was also one way of interrogating the archdeacon,
he followed the direction of his vision, and in this way the glance of the unhappy
deaf man fell upon the Place de Grève.%
Thus he saw what the priest was looking at. The ladder was erected near the
permanent gallows. There were some people and many soldiers in the Place. A
man was dragging a white thing, from which hung something black, along the
pavement. This man halted at the foot of the gallows.
Here something took place which Quasimodo could not see very clearly. It
was not because his only eye had not preserved its long range, but there was a
group of soldiers which prevented his seeing everything. Moreover, at that
moment the sun appeared, and such a flood of light overflowed the horizon that
one would have said that all the points in Paris, spires, chimneys, gables, had
simultaneously taken fire.
Meanwhile, the man began to mount the ladder. Then Quasimodo saw him
again distinctly. He was carrying a woman on his shoulder, a young girl dressed
in white; that young girl had a noose about her neck. Quasimodo recognized
her.
It was she.
The man reached the top of the ladder. There he arranged the noose. Here
the priest, in order to see the better, knelt upon the balustrade.
All at once the man kicked away the ladder abruptly, and Quasimodo, who
had not breathed for several moments, beheld the unhappy child dangling at the
end of the rope two fathoms above the pavement, with the man squatting on her
shoulders. The rope made several gyrations on itself, and Quasimodo beheld
horrible convulsions run along the gypsy's body. The priest, on his side, with
Thesaurus
dangling: (adj) suspended, pendent, conspicuously, palpably. (n) hill, mountain; (adj, v) ride.
pendant, limp, floppy, pendulous; (n) ANTONYMS: (adv) doubtfully, ANTONYMS: (v) drop, decrease,
suspension, abeyance, break, imperceptibly, obscurely, wane, dismount; (n) valley, hollow.
abatement; (adv) adangle. questionably, actually, ambiguously, steadily: (adv) constantly, stably,
ANTONYM: (adj) upright. inconspicuously. regularly, fixedly, strongly,
dressed: (adj) attired, clad, garbed, flood: (n, v) flow, torrent, pour, continually, steadfastly, uniformly,
appareled, spruced up, spiffed up, stream, glut, rush, gush; (v) drench, tightly, calmly, determinedly.
covered, polished, garmented; (v) inundate, drown; (n, prep) tide. ANTONYMS: (adv) unsteadily,
clothed, habited. ANTONYMS: (n) drought, shortage, nervously, loosely, weakly, rapidly,
evidently: (adv) clearly, patently, slump, deficit; (v) disperse, dry. suddenly, excitedly, haphazardly,
plainly, obviously, manifestly, mount: (n, v) rise, climb, frame; (v) inconsistently, unevenly.
openly, certainly, overtly, markedly, board, arise, advance, jump, increase;
Victor Hugo 613
outstretched neck and eyes starting from his head, contemplated this horrible
group of the man and the young girl,--the spider and the fly.%
At the moment when it was most horrible, the laugh of a demon, a laugh
which one can only give vent to when one is no longer human, burst forth on the
priest's livid face.
Quasimodo did not hear that laugh, but he saw it.
The bellringer retreated several paces behind the archdeacon, and suddenly
hurling himself upon him with fury, with his huge hands he pushed him by the
back over into the abyss over which Dom Claude was leaning.
The priest shrieked: "Damnation!" and fell.
The spout, above which he had stood, arrested him in his fall. He clung to it
with desperate hands, and, at the moment when he opened his mouth to utter a
second cry, he beheld the formidable and avenging face of Quasimodo thrust
over the edge of the balustrade above his head.
Then he was silent.
The abyss was there below him. A fall of more than two hundred feet and
the pavement.
In this terrible situation, the archdeacon said not a word, uttered not a groan.
He merely writhed upon the spout, with incredible efforts to climb up again;
but his hands had no hold on the granite, his feet slid along the blackened wall
without catching fast. People who have ascended the towers of Notre-Dame
know that there is a swell of the stone immediately beneath the balustrade. It
was on this retreating angle that miserable archdeacon exhausted himself. He
had not to deal with a perpendicular wall, but with one which sloped away
beneath him.
Quasimodo had but to stretch out his hand in order to draw him from the
gulf; but he did not even look at him. He was looking at the Grève. He was
looking at the gallows. He was looking at the gypsy.
The deaf man was leaning, with his elbows on the balustrade, at the spot
where the archdeacon had been a moment before, and there, never detaching his
Thesaurus
avenging: (adj) justificatory, bay, loch, cove, abysm, gap, gorge, leaning: (adj, n) bent, disposition,
vindictive, vengeful, rigorous, bight. partiality; (n) propensity, bias,
ruthless, retributive, retributory; (n) incredible: (adj, n) astonishing, tendency, incline, lean; (adj) tilted,
revenge, vengeance, eye for an eye, marvelous; (adj, v) inconceivable; canted, inclined. ANTONYMS: (n)
reprisal. (adj) fabulous, extraordinary, antipathy, dislike; (adj) upright.
climb: (v) ascend, arise, scale, escalate, unbelievable, implausible, fantastic, swell: (n, v) rise, heave, increase,
go up, scramble; (n, v) clamber, unlikely, preposterous, wonderful. wave, billow; (v) enlarge, expand,
mount, increase; (n) ascent, jump. ANTONYMS: (adj) credible, puff, grow, bloat; (adj, n) dandy.
ANTONYMS: (n, v) drop; (n) descent; believable, conceivable, ANTONYMS: (v) deflate, desiccate,
(v) wane, dismount, plummet. unspectacular, likely, mundane, shrink, compress, concentrate, wane;
efforts: (n) pains. unremarkable, plausible, awful, (n, v) decline; (adj) bad, horrible,
gulf: (n) abyss, depth, creek, vortex, sensible, real. shabby, awful.
gaze from the only object which existed for him in the world at that moment, he
remained motionless and mute, like a man struck by lightning, and a long stream
of tears flowed in silence from that eye which, up to that time, had never shed
but one tear.%
Meanwhile, the archdeacon was panting. His bald brow was dripping with
perspiration, his nails were bleeding against the stones, his knees were flayed by
the wall.
He heard his cassock, which was caught on the spout, crack and rip at every
jerk that he gave it. To complete his misfortune, this spout ended in a leaden
pipe which bent under the weight of his body. The archdeacon felt this pipe
slowly
giving way. The miserable man said to himself that, when his hands should
be worn out with fatigue, when his cassock should tear asunder, when the lead
should give way, he would be obliged to fall, and terror seized upon his very
vitals. Now and then he glanced wildly at a sort of narrow shelf formed, ten feet
lower down, by projections of the sculpture, and he prayed heaven, from the
depths of his distressed soul, that he might be allowed to finish his life, were it to
last two centuries, on that space two feet square. Once, he glanced below him
into the Place, into the abyss; the head which he raised again had its eyes closed
and its hair standing erect.
There was something frightful in the silence of these two men. While the
archdeacon agonized in this terrible fashion a few feet below him, Quasimodo
wept and gazed at the Grève.
The archdeacon, seeing that all his exertions served only to weaken the
fragile support which remained to him, decided to remain quiet. There he hung,
embracing the gutter, hardly breathing, no longer stirring, making no longer any
other movements than that mechanical convulsion of the stomach, which one
experiences in dreams when one fancies himself falling. His fixed eyes were
wide open with a stare. He lost ground little by little, nevertheless, his fingers
slipped along the spout; he became more and more conscious of the feebleness of
Thesaurus
crack: (n, v) chink, fracture, split, unconcerned, unaffected. active; (n) agitation; (v) eventful,
fissure, crevice, burst, snap, breach, jerk: (n, v) jump, yank, shake, twitch, brisk. ANTONYMS: (adj) depressing,
clap, check; (n) cleft. ANTONYMS: jar, tug, bump, heave, pull; (v) fling, boring, inactive, dull, conciliatory,
(n, v) mend; (v) set, misunderstand, flip. ANTONYM: (v) ease. asleep, uninspiring, unimpressive; (n)
misinterpret, fix, compose; (adj) sculpture: (v) carve, sculpt, mold, suppression.
mediocre, lowly, inferior, deficient. model, shape; (n, v) engrave, grave, weaken: (n, v) dilute; (v) lessen,
distressed: (adj) worried, distraught, cut; (n) carving, statue, engraving. diminish, debilitate, break, attenuate,
anxious, sad, disturbed, downcast, shelf: (n) ledge, rack, bank, flat, relax, undermine, enervate, thin; (adj,
hurt, distracted, wretched, shocked, projection, bookshelf, shelves, board, v) enfeeble. ANTONYMS: (v) bolster,
troubled. ANTONYMS: (adj) frame, shallows; (adj, n) shallow. grow, escalate, increase, refresh,
composed, content, euphoric, happy, stirring: (adj) lively, exciting, alive, improve, enhance, continue,
comforted, glad, joyful, collected, rousing, spirited, touching, thrilling, condense, concentrate, boost.
Victor Hugo 615
his arms and the weight of his body. The curve of the lead which sustained him
inclined more and more each instant towards the abyss.%
He beheld below him, a frightful thing, the roof of Saint- Jean le Rond, as
small as a card folded in two. He gazed at the impressive carvings, one by one,
of the tower, suspended like himself over the precipice, but without terror for
themselves or pity for him. All was stone around him; before his eyes, gaping
monsters; below, quite at the bottom, in the Place, the pavement; above his head,
Quasimodo weeping.
In the Parvis there were several groups of curious good people, who were
tranquilly seeking to divine who the madman could be who was amusing
himself in so strange a manner. The priest heard them saying, for their voices
reached him, clear and shrill: "Why, he will break his neck!"
Quasimodo wept.
At last the archdeacon, foaming with rage and despair, understood that all
was in vain. Nevertheless, he collected all the strength which remained to him
for a final effort. He stiffened himself upon the spout, pushed against the wall
with both his knees, clung to a crevice in the stones with his hands, and
succeeded in climbing back with one foot, perhaps; but this effort made the
leaden beak on which he rested bend abruptly. His cassock burst open at the
same time. Then, feeling everything give way beneath him, with nothing but his
stiffened and failing hands to support him, the unfortunate man closed his eyes
and let go of the spout. He fell.
Quasimodo watched him fall.
A fall from such a height is seldom perpendicular. The archdeacon, launched
into space, fell at first head foremost, with outspread hands; then he whirled
over and over many times; the wind blew him upon the roof of a house, where
the unfortunate man began to break up. Nevertheless, he was not dead when he
reached there. The bellringer saw him still endeavor to cling to a gable with his
nails; but the surface sloped too much, and he had no more strength. He slid
rapidly along the roof like a loosened tile, and dashed upon the pavement.
There he no longer moved.
Thesaurus
amusing: (adj) humorous, fun, chief, capital, leading, cardinal, precipice: (n) abyss, chasm,
pleasant, entertaining, risible, principal, main; (adj) best, front, escarpment, gulf, steep, crag, verge,
comical, diverting, enjoyable, central, top. ANTONYMS: (adj) last, brink, abysm, ravine, drop.
laughable, agreeable, pleasing. insignificant, inferior, worst, sustained: (adj) prolonged, long,
ANTONYMS: (adj) tragic, boring, secondary. continuous, constant, chronic, free
unpleasant, unfunny, tiring, grim, gable: (n) pediment, gable end, wall, burning, perennial, supported,
depressing, sad, annoying, heavy, gable wall, William Clark gable, bell permanent, sostenuto, protracted.
serious. gable, corbie gable, gavel, Clark ANTONYM: (adj) brief.
folded: (adj) plaited, pleated, doubled, gable. tile: (n) roof, thatch, bonnet, pantile,
artful, braided, corrugated, doubled loosened: (adj) disentangled, loose, castor, ceiling, roofing tile, wimple,
over, fluted. freed, disengaged, extricated, tiling, paving stone; (v) cover.
foremost: (adj, adv, v) first; (adj, n) unsnarled.
Then Quasimodo raised his eyes to the gypsy, whose body he beheld
hanging from the gibbet, quivering far away beneath her white robe with the last
shudderings of anguish, then he dropped them on the archdeacon, stretched out
at the base of the tower, and no longer retaining the human form, and he said,
with a sob which heaved his deep chest,-- "Oh! all that I have ever loved!"%
Thesaurus
base: (adj) abject, mean, dishonorable, higher. being, homo, gay, party; (adj, adv)
low, vile, ignoble, bad, contemptible; deep: (adj) thick, profound, strong, fleshly; (adj) humane, earthly,
(n) foundation; (n, v) ground; (v) rich, broad, sound, absorbed, wide, corporeal, worldly. ANTONYMS:
found. ANTONYMS: (n) top, abstruse, dark; (adj, v) intense. (adj) nonhuman, otherworldly,
summit, frill, ceiling, apex; (adj) ANTONYMS: (adj) superficial, high, heavenly, immortal.
noble, honest, good, principled, weak, soft, light, open, frivolous, raised: (adj) embossed, erect, convex,
grand, pleasant. lightweight, narrow, straightforward, inflated, brocaded, high, uplifted,
beneath: (adv, prep) below, under; (adj) simple. lifted, exultant; (v) in relief, repousse.
low, inferior; (adv) downward, infra, dropped: (adj) dropping, fallen, retaining: (adj) retentive; (n)
at a lower place; (prep) lower than, decreased, drop, fall, degraded, dead, employment, reservation.
less than, unworthy of, unbefitting. born, abandoned.
ANTONYMS: (adv, prep) over; (adv) human: (n) person, man, human
Victor Hugo 617
CHAPTER III
THE MARRIAGE OF PHOEBUS
Towards evening on that day, when the judiciary officers of the bishop came
to pick up from the pavement of the Parvis the dislocated corpse of the
archdeacon, Quasimodo had disappeared.
A great many rumors were in circulation with regard to this adventure. No
one doubted but that the day had come when, in accordance with their compact,
Quasimodo, that is to say, the devil, was to carry off Claude Frollo, that is to say,
the sorcerer. It was presumed that he had broken the body when taking the soul,
like monkeys who break the shell to get at the nut.
This is why the archdeacon was not interred in consecrated earth.
Louis XI. died a year later, in the month of August, 1483.
As for Pierre Gringoire, he succeeded in saving the goat, and he won success
in tragedy. It appears that, after having tasted astrology, philosophy,
architecture, hermetics,-- all vanities, he returned to tragedy, vainest pursuit of
all. This is what he called "coming to a tragic end." This is what is to be read, on
the subject of his dramatic triumphs, in 1483, in the accounts of the "Ordinary:"
"To Jehan Marchand and Pierre Gringoire, carpenter and composer, who have
made and composed the mystery made at the Chãtelet of Paris, at the entry of
Thesaurus
carpenter: (n) woodman, woodsman, imperturbable, temperate, level, divine, devoted, adopted; (adj, prep)
woodworker, Joseph; (v) build. impassive, unflappable. set apart; (prep) dedicate.
compact: (n) arrangement, covenant, ANTONYMS: (adj) distressed, ANTONYM: (adj) secular.
bargain; (adj, v) close, condense; (v) trembling, nervous, excited, tense, corpse: (n) carcass, body, carcase, dead
compress; (n, v) contract; (adj) dense, ruffled, jumpy, intemperate, person, stiff, dead body, remains,
solid, thick, compendious. discomposed, upset, worried. corse, clay, dry bones; (adj) lich.
ANTONYMS: (adj) loose, sprawling, composer: (n) musician, penman, judiciary: (adj, n) judicatory; (adj)
sparse, bulky, large, cumbersome, instrumentalist, creator, harmonist, judicial, legal; (n) judicature, bench,
long, lengthy, unwieldy; (v) expand, maker, writer, songwriter, weber, judicial system, judge, organization,
loosen. handy, maestro. organisation, system, court.
composed: (adj) calm, dispassionate, consecrated: (adj) consecrate, blessed, monkeys: (n) Anthropoidea,
cool, peaceable, pacific, staid, sanctified, hallowed, holy, dedicated, hominids, suborder Anthropoidea.
Monsieur the Legate, and have ordered the personages, clothed and dressed the
same, as in the said mystery was required; and likewise, for having made the
scaffoldings thereto necessary; and for this deed,-- one hundred livres."
Phoebus de Châteaupers also came to a tragic end. He married. %
Thesaurus
likewise: (adv) besides, in addition, craft, perplexity, poser, inscrutability, mandatory, needed, needful,
furthermore, alike, moreover, further, whodunit; (adj, n) secret. prerequisite, bound, require, desired.
too, similarly; (adj, adv) as well, ANTONYMS: (n) explanation, ANTONYMS: (adj) free, undesirable,
equally; (adj) even. openness. voluntary, inessential.
married: (adj) wedded, conjugal, ordered: (adj) regular, arranged, tragic: (adj) calamitous, disastrous,
matrimonial, connubial, nuptial, methodical, trim, orderly, lawful, dreadful, grievous, catastrophic,
united, mixed, connected, marrying, logical, consistent, coherent, unlucky, unfortunate, woeful,
attached, unite. ANTONYMS: (adj) commanded, organized. tragical, comic, heartbreaking.
unmarried, unattached, divorced, ANTONYMS: (adj) disordered, ANTONYMS: (adj) humorous,
public. disarranged, inconsistent. heartwarming, blessed,
mystery: (n) arcanum, enigma, required: (adj) compulsory, essential, advantageous, lucky, fortunate,
mysteriousness, secrecy, puzzle, obligatory, indispensable, joyous.
Victor Hugo 619
CHAPTER IV
THE MARRIAGE OF QUASIMODO
We have just said that Quasimodo disappeared from Notre- Dame on the day
of the gypsy's and of the archdeacon's death. He was not seen again, in fact; no
one knew what had become of him.%
During the night which followed the execution of la Esmeralda, the night
men had detached her body from the gibbet, and had carried it, according to
custom, to the cellar of Montfauçon.
Montfauçon was, as Sauval says, "the most ancient and the most superb
gibbet in the kingdom." Between the faubourgs of the Temple and Saint Martin,
about a hundred and sixty toises from the walls of Paris, a few bow shots from
La Courtille, there was to be seen on the crest of a gentle, almost imperceptible
eminence, but sufficiently elevated to be seen for several leagues round about, an
edifice of strange form, bearing considerable resemblance to a Celtic cromlech,
and where also human sacrifices were offered.
Let the reader picture to himself, crowning a limestone hillock, an oblong
mass of masonry fifteen feet in height, thirty wide, forty long, with a gate, an
external railing and a platform; on this platform sixteen enormous pillars of
rough hewn stone, thirty feet in height, arranged in a colonnade round three of
Thesaurus
bearing: (n, v) demeanor; (n) manner, complementary, final; (adj, v) limestone: (n) lyme, Warsaw
direction, deportment, conduct, paramount, supreme; (n) tapering, limestone, chalk, rock, limestones,
attitude, aspect, approach, coronation, finishing piece; (v) lime, mineral, lime stone, sandstone,
appearance, respect, air. preeminent. ANTONYMS: (adj) sedimentary rock, stone.
ANTONYMS: (n) insignificance, bathetic, indecisive. sacrifices: (n) holocaust.
irrelevance; (adj) nonbearing. custom: (n) habit, convention, usage, superb: (adj) beautiful, brilliant,
crest: (n, v) crown, top, peak, climax; practice, consuetude, fashion, magnificent, exquisite, gorgeous,
(n) summit, brow, cockscomb, acme, method, mores; (n, v) use, accustom; super, rich, marvelous, grand,
pinnacle, zenith; (v) cap. (adj) bespoke. ANTONYMS: (n) fad, excellent, glorious. ANTONYMS:
ANTONYMS: (n) base, bottom, nadir, innovation, phenomenon, rage, (adj) poor, inferior, terrible, meager,
trough. rarity. abysmal, dire, humble, inglorious,
crowning: (adj) top, ultimate, topmost, hewn: (adj) downed. ugly, unattractive, unimpressive.
the four sides of the mass which support them, bound together at their summits
by heavy beams, whence hung chains at intervals; on all these chains, skeletons;
in the vicinity, on the plain, a stone cross and two gibbets of secondary
importance, which seemed to have sprung up as shoots around the central
gallows; above all this, in the sky, a perpetual flock of crows; that was
Montfauçon.%
At the end of the fifteenth century, the formidable gibbet which dated from
1328, was already very much dilapidated; the beams were wormeaten, the chains
rusted, the pillars green with mould; the layers of hewn stone were all cracked at
their joints, and grass was growing on that platform which no feet touched. The
monument made a horrible profile against the sky; especially at night when there
was a little moonlight on those white skulls, or when the breeze of evening
brushed the chains and the skeletons, and swayed all these in the darkness. The
presence of this gibbet sufficed to render gloomy all the surrounding places.
The mass of masonry which served as foundation to the odious edifice was
hollow. A huge cellar had been constructed there, closed by an old iron grating,
which was out of order, into which were cast not only the human remains, which
were taken from the chains of Montfauçon, but also the bodies of all the
unfortunates executed on the other permanent gibbets of Paris. To that deep
charnel-house, where so many human remains and so many crimes have rotted
in company, many great ones of this world, many innocent people, have
contributed their bones, from Enguerrand de Marigni, the first victim, and a just
man, to Admiral de Coligni, who was its last, and who was also a just man.
As for the mysterious disappearance of Quasimodo, this is all that we have
been able to discover.
About eighteen months or two years after the events which terminate this
story, when search was made in that cavern for the body of Olivier le Daim, who
had been hanged two days previously, and to whom Charles VIII. had granted
the favor of being buried in Saint Laurent, in better company, they found among
all those hideous carcasses two skeletons, one of which held the other in its
embrace. One of these skeletons, which was that of a woman, still had a few
Thesaurus
dated: (adj) archaic, outmoded, appearing, arrival, renaissance, (adj) doubtful.
obsolete, outdated, old-fashioned, revitalization, show, emergence, terminate: (v) close, end, complete,
dowdy, behind the times, survival. stop, cease, conclude, drop, dismiss,
antediluvian, ancient, unfashionable, flock: (n, v) crowd, cluster, pack, mass; discontinue, dissolve, halt.
old. ANTONYMS: (adj) (adj, n) bevy; (adj, n, v) swarm; (n) ANTONYMS: (v) start, establish,
contemporary, new, trendy, fresh, band, horde, congregation, herd; (v) open, continue, create, hire, initiate,
fashionable, chic, modern, in. assemble. ANTONYM: (v) disperse. commence, prolong, sustain, rise.
disappearance: (n) vanishing, loss, mould: (n, v) mildew, cast, form, vicinity: (n) region, district, proximity,
going, fade, evaporation, model; (v) make, frame, knead, place, neighbourhood, locality,
disappearing, departure, passing, fashion, forge; (n) molding, matrix. environs, vicinage, area, propinquity,
death, receding, ending. swayed: (adj) persuaded, susceptible, nearness.
ANTONYMS: (n) recurrence, touched, convinced. ANTONYM:
Victor Hugo 621
strips of a garment which had once been white, and around her neck was to be
seen a string of adrézarach beads with a little silk bag ornamented with green
glass, which was open and empty. These objects were of so little value that the
executioner had probably not cared for them. The other, which held this one in a
close embrace, was the skeleton of a man. It was noticed that his spinal column
was crooked, his head seated on his shoulder blades, and that one leg was
shorter than the other. Moreover, there was no fracture of the vertebrae at the
nape of the neck, and it was evident that he had not been hanged. Hence, the
man to whom it had belonged had come thither and had died there. When they
tried to detach the skeleton which he held in his embrace, he fell to dust.%
Thesaurus
evident: (adj) obvious, distinct, ANTONYM: (n) repair. body, cadaver, chassis, corpse; (n, v)
discernible, clear, manifest, garment: (n, v) garb, apparel; (n) outline.
conspicuous, patent, plain, habiliment, habit, gown, vest, things, spinal: (adj) vertebral, rachidian; (n)
noticeable, open, certain. guise; (v) clothe, tog, raiment. spinal anaesthesia, anesthetic,
ANTONYMS: (adj) unnoticed, nape: (n) nucha, scruff, occiput, rear, regional anaesthesia, regional
obscure, concealed, hidden, back end, backside, chine. anesthesia, saddle block anesthesia,
inconspicuous, uncertain, unknown, shorter: (adj) smaller, inferior. spinal anesthesia, saddle block
imperceptible, disputable, silk: (adj) silky, down, silken, velure, anaesthesia.
ambiguous, undetectable. velvet; (n) silks, satin, cloth, animal vertebrae: (n) backbone, back, spinal
fracture: (n, v) crack, rupture, burst, fiber, fabric, dental floss. column, vertebral column.
breach; (n) cleft, fissure, breaking, skeleton: (n) carcass, frame,
crevice, disruption; (v) bust, smash. framework, bones, anatomy, scaffold,
Victor Hugo 623
NOTE %ADDED TO THE DEFINITIVE EDITION
It is by mistake that this edition was announced as augmented by many new

chapters. The word should have been unpublished. In fact, if by new, newly
made is to be understood, the chapters added to this edition are not new. They
were written at the same time as the rest of the work; they date from the same
epoch, and sprang from the same thought, they have always formed a part of the
manuscript of "Notre-Dame-de-Paris." Moreover, the author cannot comprehend
how fresh developments could be added to a work of this character after its
completion. This is not to be done at will. According to his idea, a romance is
born in a manner that is, in some sort, necessary, with all its chapters; a drama is
born with all its scenes. Think not that there is anything arbitrary in the numbers
of parts of which that whole, that mysterious microcosm which you call a drama
or a romance, is composed. Grafting and soldering take badly on works of this
nature, which should gush forth in a single stream and so remain. The thing
once done, do not change your mind, do not touch it up. The book once
published, the sex of the work, whether virile or not, has been recognized and
proclaimed; when the child has once uttered his first cry he is born, there he is,
he is made so, neither father nor mother can do anything, he belongs to the air
and to the sun, let him live or die, such as he is. Has your book been a failure? So
much the worse. Add no chapters to an unsuccessful book. Is it incomplete?
You should have completed it when you conceived it. Is your tree crooked?
Thesaurus
augmented: (adj) amplified, enlarged, figment, intrigue, affair, tale, vagary; (adj) unlucky, unfortunate, futile,
greater than before, inflated, plus, (v) flirt, court, exaggerate. ineffective, stillborn, unhappy, vain,
more. soldering: (n) bonding, welding, failed, ineffectual. ANTONYMS: (adj)
chapters: (n) contents. brazing, attachment, soft soldering, successful, lucky, persuasive, fruitful,
conceived: (adj) formed. fastening; (v) sticking. lucrative, effective, competent,
manuscript: (n, v) writing; (n) book, unpublished: (v) untold, untalked of, useful, glorious.
handwriting, record, copy, text, unsung, unsaid, unwritten; (adj) virile: (adj) strong, manly, male,
document, Ms, holograph, transcript, unexpressed, undisclosed, potent, forceful, manful, vigorous,
palimpsest. unbreathed, not edited, hitherto robust, mature, full grown, grown
microcosm: (adj) Elzevir edition, unpublished, secret. ANTONYM: up. ANTONYMS: (adj) unmanly,
epitome; (n) example, world. (adj) published. effeminate.
romance: (n) love affair, fiction, story, unsuccessful: (adj, v) fruitless, sterile;
You cannot straighten it up. Is your romance consumptive? Is your romance not
capable of living? You cannot supply it with the breath which it lacks. Has your
drama been born lame? Take my advice, and do not provide it with a wooden
leg.%
Hence the author attaches particular importance to the public knowing for a
certainty that the chapters here added have not been made expressly for this
reprint. They were not published in the preceding editions of the book for a very
simple reason. At the time when "Notre-Dame-de-Paris" was printed the first
time, the manuscript of these three chapters had been mislaid. It was necessary
to rewrite them or to dispense with them. The author considered that the only
two of these chapters which were in the least important, owing to their extent,
were chapters on art and history which in no way interfered with the
groundwork of the drama and the romance, that the public would not notice
their loss, and that he, the author, would alone be in possession of the secret. He
decided to omit them, and then, if the whole truth must be confessed, his
indolence shrunk from the task of rewriting the three lost chapters. He would
have found it a shorter matter to make a new romance.
Now the chapters have been found, and he avails himself of the first
opportunity to restore them to their place.
This now, is his entire work, such as he dreamed it, such as he made it, good
or bad, durable or fragile, but such as he wishes it.
These recovered chapters will possess no doubt, but little value in the eyes of
persons, otherwise very judicious, who have sought in "Notre-Dame-de-Paris"
only the drama, the romance. But there are perchance, other readers, who have
not found it useless to study the aesthetic and philosophic thought concealed in
this book, and who have taken pleasure, while reading "Notre-Dame-de-Paris,"
in unravelling beneath the romance something else than the romance, and in
following (may we be pardoned these rather ambitious expressions), the system
of the historian and the aim of the artist through the creation of the poet.
Thesaurus
avails: (n) Vail. sluggishness, apathy; (adj, n) sloth. nonphilosophical.
consumptive: (adj) hectic, wasteful, ANTONYMS: (n) energy, reprint: (n, v) reissue; (n) offprint, new
harmful, emaciated, constitutional, nimbleness, activity, bustle, edition, reprinting, separate,
cadaverous, phthisical; (n) sufferer, liveliness, vigor. reimpression, republication, new
wasting, lunger, invalid. mislaid: (adj) misplaced, absent, printing, copy; (v) reproduce, print.
groundwork: (n) bottom, basis, base, disordered, gone astray, not there, rewriting: (n) rescript, revisal, revise,
foundation, bed, ground, footing, missing, lost temporarily. revising, rewrite, rephrasing,
bedrock, fundament, background, ANTONYM: (adj) found. redaction, recasting, editing,
substructure. philosophic: (v) platonic, staid, stayed, rewording.
indolence: (n) laziness, inaction, stoical; (adj) thoughtful, rational, shrunk: (adj) contracted, wizened,
lethargy, inertia, inactivity, patient, learned, ideologic, withered, shrivelled, shriveled,
listlessness, slowness, torpor, ideological. ANTONYM: (adj) wizen, insipid, drawn grain, wearish.
Victor Hugo 625
For such people especially, the chapters added to this edition will complete
"Notre-Dame-de-Paris," if we admit that "Notre-Dame-de-Paris" was worth the
trouble of completing.%
In one of these chapters on the present decadence of architecture, and on the
death (in his mind almost inevitable) of that king of arts, the author expresses
and develops an opinion unfortunately well rooted in him, and well thought out.
But he feels it necessary to say here that he earnestly desires that the future may,
some day, put him in the wrong. He knows that art in all its forms has
everything to hope from the new generations whose genius, still in the germ, can
be heard gushing forth in our studios. The grain is in the furrow, the harvest
will certainly be fine. He merely fears, and the reason may be seen in the second
volume of this edition, that the sap may have been withdrawn from that ancient
soil of architecture which has been for so many centuries the best field for art.
Nevertheless, there are to-day in the artistic youth so much life, power, and,
so to speak, predestination, that in our schools of architecture in particular, at the
present time, the professors, who are detestable, produce, not only
unconsciously but even in spite of themselves, excellent pupils; quite the reverse
of that potter mentioned by Horace, who dreamed amphorae and produced pots.
Currit rota, urcens exit.
But, in any case, whatever may be the future of architecture, in whatever
manner our young architects may one day solve the question of their art, let us,
while waiting for new monument, preserve the ancient monuments. Let us, if
possible, inspire the nation with a love for national architecture. That, the author
declares, is one of the principal aims of this book; it is one of the principal aims of
his life.
"Notre-Dame-de-Paris" has, perhaps opened some true perspectives on the
art of the Middle Ages, on that marvellous art which up to the present time has
been unknown to some, and, what is worse, misknown by others. But the author
is far from regarding as accomplished, the task which he has voluntarily
imposed on himself. He has already pleaded on more than one occasion, the
cause of our ancient architecture, he has already loudly denounced many
Thesaurus
detestable: (adj) hateful, abhorrent, (adv) indifferently, insincerely, thrower, ceramicist.
damnable, odious, offensive, unconcernedly, jokingly. rota: (n) round, stated time, routine,
despicable, execrable, horrible, fears: (n) worries, uncertainties, roster, timetable, roll, register, list,
infamous; (adj, v) cursed; (adj, adv) doubts, qualms, misgivings. calendar, period, diary.
atrocious. ANTONYMS: (adj) gushing: (adj) pouring, enthusiastic, unconsciously: (adv) instinctively,
admirable, adorable, sweet, loveable, burbly, alive to, burbling, emotional, unintentionally, unthinkingly,
lovable, likable, delightful, cherished, effusive, garrulous, torrential; (n) unwittingly, ignorantly, innocently,
honorable, desirable, nice. sincere, passionate. ANTONYM: (adj) comatosely, automatically,
earnestly: (adj, adv) seriously; (adv) taciturn. obliviously, unsuspectingly,
eagerly, intently, zealously, solemnly, potter: (v) tinker, mess around, putter, inadvertently. ANTONYMS: (adv)
ardently, fervently, heartily, gravely, monkey, muck around, muddle, consciously, deliberately, knowingly,
warmly, passionately. ANTONYMS: dabble, fiddle, monkey around; (n) purposely.
profanations, %many demolitions, many impieties. He will not grow weary. He

has promised himself to recur frequently to this subject. He will return to it. He
will be as indefatigable in defending our historical edifices as our iconoclasts of
the schools and academies are eager in attacking them; for it is a grievous thing
to see into what hands the architecture of the Middle Ages has fallen, and in
what a manner the botchers of plaster of the present day treat the ruin of this
grand art, it is even a shame for us intelligent men who see them at work and
content ourselves with hooting them. And we are not speaking here merely of
what goes on in the provinces, but of what is done in Paris at our very doors,
beneath our windows, in the great city, in the lettered city, in the city of the
press, of word, of thought. We cannot resist the impulse to point out, in
concluding this note, some of the acts of vandalism which are every day planned,
debated, begun, continued, and successfully completed under the eyes of the
artistic public of Paris, face to face with criticism, which is disconcerted by so
much audacity. An archbishop's palace has just been demolished, an edifice in
poor taste, no great harm is done; but in a block with the archiepiscopal palace a
bishop's palace has been demolished, a rare fragment of the fourteenth century,
which the demolishing architect could not distinguish from the rest. He has torn
up the wheat with the tares; 'tis all the same. They are talking of razing the
admirable chapel of Vincennes, in order to make, with its stones, some
fortification, which Daumesnil did not need, however. While the Palais
Bourbon, that wretched edifice, is being repaired at great expense, gusts of wind
and equinoctial storms are allowed to destroy the magnificent painted windows
of the Sainte-Chapelle. For the last few days there has been a scaffolding on the
tower of Saint Jacques de la Boucherie; and one of these mornings the pick will
be laid to it. A mason has been found to build a little white house between the
venerable towers of the Palais de-Justice. Another has been found willing to
prune away Saint-Germain-des-Pres, the feudal abbey with three bell towers.
Another will be found, no doubt, capable of pulling down Saint-Germain
l'Auxerrois. All these masons claim to be architects, are paid by the prefecture or
from the petty budget, and wear green coats. All the harm which false taste can
inflict on good taste, they accomplish. While we write, deplorable spectacle! one
Thesaurus
demolishing: (n) devastation, fortification: (n) castle, fort, bastion, snip; (adj, n, v) lop. ANTONYMS: (v)
destruction, disposal, leveling, consolidation, defense, bulwark, lengthen, augment.
razing, tearing down. stronghold, barrier, entrenchment, razing: (n) demolishing, leveling,
disconcerted: (adj) confused, fortress, safeguard. demolition, devastation, tearing
confounded, bewildered, blank, prefecture: (n) region, county, down, equalisation, laying waste,
embarrassed, disturbed, troubled, situation, spot, wardenship, grading, equalization, destruction.
worried, ashamed, discombobulated, administrative district, area, recur: (v) resort, repeat, go back,
bemused. ANTONYMS: (adj) administrative division, position, reappear, duplicate, revert, return,
composed, soothed, unabashed, place, state. persist, fall back, cycle, circulate.
relaxed. provinces: (n) distance. ANTONYM: (v) cease.
equinoctial: (n) equinoctial line, prune: (v) pare, cut, cut back, crop, tares: (adj) weeds.
equinoctial circle. trim, curtail, abbreviate, dress, shear,
Victor Hugo 627
of %them holds possession of the Tuileries, one of them is giving Philibert

Delorme a scar across the middle of his face; and it is not, assuredly, one of the
least of the scandals of our time to see with what effrontery the heavy
architecture of this gentleman is being flattened over one of the most delicate
façades of the Renaissance!
PARIS, October 20, 1832.
Thesaurus
architecture: (n) frame, constitution, presumption, face, boldness, minimal, littlest, lowest, insignificant,
structure, framework, construction, insolence, nerve, impertinence, minutest, negligible; (adj, n) smallest
formation, architectonics, impudence, rudeness, assurance. amount; (adv) at least, fully.
composition, makeup, edification, ANTONYMS: (n) timidity, deference, ANTONYMS: (adj) maximum,
fabric. courtesy. greatest; (adj, adv) most.
delicate: (adj) accurate, tender, dainty, heavy: (adj, n) dull; (adj) deep, fat, paris: (n) genus Paris, French capital,
refined, breakable, fragile, beautiful, dense, grave, dark, full, gross, thick, City of Light, capital of France.
brittle, soft, nice, frail. ANTONYMS: bulky; (adj, adv) hard. ANTONYMS: possession: (n) occupation,
(adj) inelegant, robust, heavy, sturdy, (adj) slim, easy, thin, slight, skinny, ownership, keeping, goods,
tough, careless, inaccurate, rough, puny, gentle, insubstantial, animated, substance, tenure, property, grasp,
well, substantial, unscrupulous. nimble, entertaining. estate, domain; (n, v) acquisition.
effrontery: (n) audacity, brass, least: (n) minimum; (adj) smallest, ANTONYMS: (n) vacancy, sale.
Victor Hugo 629
GLOSSARY
abashed: (adj, v) discomfited; (adj) nice, lovable, admirable, alluring, famous, established, distinguished
mortified, sheepish, embarrassed, appealing, commendable, laudable, acclamation: (n) applause, ovation,
ashamed, confused, humiliated, delightful, desirable, enjoyable, plaudit, praise, cheer, eclat,
afraid, shamefaced, confounded; (v) likable approval, commendation, vox
dashed. ANTONYMS: (adj) proud, abomination: (n) abhorrence, populi, adulation, hand.
undaunted, reassured, pleased, revulsion, atrocity, hatred, ANTONYMS: (n) razzing, jeers,
heartened, emboldened, cool, detestation, execration, hate, hisses, heckles, catcalls,
confident, composed, relaxed, loathing, repugnance, outrage, vituperation, disapproval
unabashed aversion. ANTONYMS: (n) accompaniments: (n) equipment,
abbatial: (adj) abbatical adoration, affection, appreciation, trimmings, fixing
abbe: (n) cure, father, abbot approval, benefit, delight, esteem, accomplish: (v) perform, reach, do,
abdication: (n) resignation, gratification, joy, kindness, blessing compass, perfect, attain, make,
abandonment, surrender, abreast: (adv) opposite, acquainted, fulfill, realize, execute, carry out.
retirement, renunciation, waiver, off, au fait, alongside, on one side, ANTONYMS: (v) abandon, neglect,
withdrawal, relinquishment, abeam; (adj) near, aligned, choke, blow, lose
cession, abjuration; (v) usurpation knowledgeable; (prep) against. accomplishments: (n) benefit,
abduct: (v) kidnap, abduce, hijack, ANTONYMS: (adv) uninformed, actions, background, Comings and
ravish, pull, crimp, draw, force, lost, unaware Goings, deeds, events, happenings,
steal, take, seize. ANTONYMS: (v) abrogated: (adj) abrogate activities
release, adduct, free, restore, return absent-minded: (adj) forgetful, accordance: (n) harmony, agreement,
abducted: (adj) kidnapped oblivious, inattentive, preoccupied, conformity, unison, concordance,
abductor: (n) crook, kidnapper, abstracted coincidence, accordancy, admission,
abductor muscle, criminal, felon, abstain: (v) desist, forbear, avoid, fitness, consensus, concent
malefactor, outlaw, kidnaper, give up, eschew, withhold, cease, according: (adj) pursuant, consonant,
captor, snatcher, crimper decline, fast, neglect; (adj, v) deny equal, agreeable, harmonious,
abeyance: (n) inaction, waiting, oneself. ANTONYMS: (v) consume, conformable, consistent,
interruption, suspense, cessation, yield, use, surrender, partake, corresponding, respondent; (adv)
pause, reprieve, intermission, indulge, imbibe, persist, vote, eat correspondingly, accordingly
stoppage, inactiveness; (v) abstracted: (adj) absentminded, accost: (v) hail, greet, solicit, salute,
interregnum. ANTONYMS: (n) separate, absent-minded, abstract, approach, call, buttonhole, welcome,
action, activity, continuance, distrait, inattentive, pensive, speak, greeting, speak to.
continuation, prolongation, revival preoccupied, remote, lost, vacant. ANTONYMS: (v) avoid, dodge,
abhorred: (adj) disgusted, unpopular ANTONYM: (adj) alert shun
abject: (adj) contemptible, pitiful, abyss: (n) gorge, ravine, chasm, gulf, accoutrement: (n) accouterment,
low, wretched, despicable, sordid, deep, purgatory, depth, hell, gap, accessory, clothes, wear, clothing,
base, mean, vile; (n) ignominious, Gehenna, pit. ANTONYMS: (n) vesture, attachment, appointment,
dirty. ANTONYMS: (adj) honorable, junction, juncture accessary, belt, apparatus
hopeful, magnificent, esteemed, acanthus: (n) cartouche, zigzag, accoutrements: (n) accouterments,
proud, dignified, commendable, astragal trappings, paraphernalia,
noble, exalted, worthy, happy accented: (adj) strong, emphatic, equipment, gear, dress, clothes,
abode: (n) dwelling, house, residence, heavy apparel, attire
place, domicile, lodge, abidance, accentuation: (n) stress, emphasis, accursed: (adj) execrable, abominable,
mansion, lodging, address, seat inflection, emphasizing, prosody, detestable, accurst, hateful, damned,
abominable: (adj, v) odious, foul; accenting, stressing, intonation, beat, damnable, maledict, blasted; (v)
(adj) abhorrent, detestable, dreadful, accent mark atrocious, stranded
awful, execrable, terrible, loathsome, acclaimed: (adj) celebrated, well- accustom: (v) acquaint, habituate,
cursed, wicked. ANTONYMS: (adj) known, reputable, renowned, noted, season, adjust, teach, acclimate,
harden, adapt, inure, train, custom praise; (adj, n) devotion, passion. naturally
acolyte: (n) acolouthite, acolythist, ANTONYMS: (n) hatred, affections: (n) bosom
acholithite, server, supporter, detestation, despising, affirm: (v) prove, assert, declare,
helper, assistant, altar boy, help, disparagement, revulsion, repulsion, protest, avow, maintain, approve,
acolyth. ANTONYM: (n) leader disgust, disdain accept, assure, profess, promise.
acquainted: (adj) knowledgeable, adore: (v) worship, idolize, admire, ANTONYMS: (v) negate, veto,
informed, aware, cognizant, glorify, cherish, appreciate; (n, v) nullify, refute, repress
conversant, hand and glove, honor; (adj) adoring, worshipping, affirmative: (adj) positive,
intimate, thick; (adv) abreast; (v) worshiping; (adv) adoringly. affirmatory, assertive, ratifying,
inform, acquaint ANTONYMS: (v) detest, despise, concurring; (adv) yes; (n)
acrid: (adj, v) pungent; (adj) bitter, condemn, loathe, disrespect, abhor, affirmation, avowal, assenting; (adj,
acerbic, caustic, sour, sharp, acerb, scorn v) predicatory, declaratory.
corrosive, hot, harsh, tart. adorn: (v) deck, dress, embellish, ANTONYMS: (adj) dissenting; (n)
ANTONYMS: (adj) mild, savory, ornament, beautify, enrich, grace, no
palatable, nice, flattering, delicious, trim, garnish, gild, blazon. affirmatively: (adv) optimistically,
kind, complimentary, amicable ANTONYMS: (v) mar, disfigure, confirmatively, confirmatorily,
addicted: (adj) habituated, dedicated, deform, deface, damage, hurt confirmingly, assertively, agreeably,
habitual, hooked, devoted, adorned: (adj) decorated, ornate, concurringly, declaratorily,
accustomed, captivated, devote, bedecked, decked out, fancy, favoringly
obsessive, obsessed; (v) dedicate. garnished, ornamented, decked, affirmed: (adj) acknowledged,
ANTONYMS: (adj) unaccustomed, beautiful, inscribed, festooned avowed, guaranteed
averse, disinclined, independent, adroit: (adj) dexterous, ingenious, affixed: (adj) additional
opposed, unenthusiastic, occasional slick, intelligent, expert, artful, able, afflicted: (adj) miserable, distressed,
adieu: (int, n) farewell; (n) vale, clever, adept, politic, sharp. stricken, pitiful, sorrowful, ill,
valediction, goodbye, leave, cheerio, ANTONYMS: (adj) awkward, woeful, dejected, sorry; (v) afflict,
adios, bye, so long, parting; (int) bon maladroit, dim, inept, bumbling, displeased
voyage. ANTONYM: (n) greeting stupid, unskilled, dense, fumbling, affray: (n) fray, riot, quarrel, fracas,
adjudge: (v) adjudicate, condemn, naive, incompetent affrayment, brawl, clash, hubbub,
award, acknowledge, decide, adroitly: (adv) aptly, dexterously, melee, ado, scrap
declare, convict, pronounce, admit, deftly, ingeniously, cleverly, agilely, affright: (v) frighten, scare, horrify,
sentence; (n) give craftily, skillfully, proficiently, startle, terrorize, terrify, intimidate;
administering: (adj) administrative; neatly, handily. ANTONYMS: (adv) (n) dread, alarm, fear; (n, v) fright
(n) administration maladroitly, ineptly, incompetently, affront: (n, v) insult, abuse, outrage,
admirably: (adv) superbly, perfectly, awkwardly slight, snub; (v) face, offend; (n)
excellently, admirable, adroitness: (n) cleverness, ability, disgrace, slur, offense, mortification.
marvellously, heroically, bravely, skill, deftness, facility, nimbleness, ANTONYMS: (n, v) praise; (v)
brilliantly, nicely, creditably, ably. skillfulness, knack, finesse, art; (n, v) please, placate, mollify, gratify,
ANTONYMS: (adv) badly, address. ANTONYMS: (n) flatter, assuage, appease, adulate; (n)
inadequately, dishonorably, uselessness, inaccuracy pleasantry, appeasement
execrably, incompetently, poorly adversary: (n) antagonist, foe, enemy, aflame: (adj) ablaze, burning, excited,
admirer: (n) enthusiast, fan, devotee, competitor, rival, opposition, afire, passionate, fiery, on fire,
supporter, votary, worshiper, opposer, contestant, match, flaming, alight, reddened, red.
wooer, beau, fancier; (adj) suitor; somebody; (adj) hostile. ANTONYM: (adj) pale
(adj, n) lover ANTONYMS: (n) ally, supporter, afresh: (adv) again, newly, over
admiring: (adj) admire, admiringly, friend, partner, helper, assistant again, new, once again, freshly, once
loving, respectful, glowing, aesculapius: (n) Hippocrates more, often; (adj) the other day, just
affectionate, amatory, appreciative, afar: (adv) off, away, far away, now, only yesterday
enthusiastic, flattering, approving. distantly, beyond, Afar off, in the agglomeration: (n) bunch, lump,
ANTONYMS: (adj) defamatory, distance, by far, apart; (adj) cumulation, clump, chunk, cluster,
critical, disdainful, disapproving, outlying, far. ANTONYMS: (adv) collection, clod, conglomeration,
disrespectful, uncomplimentary close, nearby, near; (prep) within aggregation, agglutination
adorable: (adj) lovely, attractive, affectation: (n) pretension, feint, aggrandizement: (n) elevation,
delightful, endearing, pleasing, pose, display, airs, affectedness, exaggeration, exaltation, growth,
glamorous, delicious, wonderful, ostentation, show, pretense, increase, promotion, rise,
winning, appealing, cute. mannerism, sham. ANTONYMS: (n) aggravation, dilation, rarefaction,
ANTONYMS: (adj) despicable, artlessness, honesty, modesty spread
disgusting, wicked, unappealing, affectedly: (adv) pretentiously, aggregation: (n) accumulation, heap,
repulsive, monstrous, gross pompously, insincerely, stiltedly, congregation, agglomeration, lot,
adorably: (adv) delightfully unnaturally, theatrically, feignedly, pile, corpus, assembly, group,
adoration: (n) admiration, adulation, snobbishly, contrivedly, collection; (n, v) assemblage
cult, appreciation, reverence, pedantically, pedanticly. agile: (adj) active, nimble, spry,
glorification, idolization, homage, ANTONYMS: (adv) modestly, quick, adroit, deft, lively, dapper,
Victor Hugo 631
supple, lithe, astute. ANTONYMS: (n) aversion, reservation, reluctance, involved, approachable, sociable,
(adj) stiff, ponderous, brittle, logical, indifference, hesitance, dullness, outgoing, open, enthusiastic,
oafish, slow, sluggish, unfit, disinclination, apathy, tardiness, relaxed, communicative, affable,
awkward, heavy, inflexible delay respectful
agility: (n) quickness, lightness, alchemical: (adj) spagyrical, chemical altercation: (n, v) quarrel, squabble;
alacrity, adroitness, promptitude, alchemy: (n) pseudoscience, alchymy, (n) affray, scrap, fight, hassle,
mobility, legerdemain, liveliness, interpersonal chemistry, alchemist, disagreement, fracas, strife,
rapidity, speed, activity. alchemistic, magic, sorcery, controversy, contest. ANTONYMS:
ANTONYMS: (n) slowness, alchemistry (n) union, harmony, concord,
oafishness, inflexibility, heaviness, alderman: (n) councilman, constable, agreement, unity, consensus
awkwardness portreeve, warden, ealdorman, alternately: (adv) alternatively, by
agitated: (adj) upset, excited, deputy mayor, seneschal, turns, in turn, secondarily,
nervous, restive, tumultuous, councilwoman, burgomaster, reciprocally, mutually, off-and-on,
distressed, tense, jumpy, Corregidor rather, anthemwise, secondly; (adj,
overwrought, anxious, alarmed. alembic: (n) retort, can, kettle, adv) on and off
ANTONYMS: (adj) calm, lethargic, capsule, matrix, bolthead, flask, alternating: (adj) intermittent,
tranquil, relaxed, assured, cool, still limbec, matrass, receiver; (n, v) recurrent, irregular, regular, every
agonized: (adj) distressed, painful, crucible other, blinking, successive; (adv)
woeful, tormented, suffering, alexandrine: (adj) sesquipedalia back and forth. ANTONYM: (adj)
miserable, hurt Verba, macrology direct
agonizing: (adj, v) excruciating; (adj) algebra: (v) Nilpotent algebra, amalgamate: (v) combine, blend,
painful, harrowing, poignant, geometry, fluxions, analytical unite, mix, alloy, affiliate, fuse,
grievous, agonising, torturous, geometry, quadratics, arithmetic, merge, compound, intermix, mingle.
heartbreaking, sore, anguished, analysis ANTONYMS: (v) diffuse, divide,
aching. ANTONYMS: (adj) restful, algiers: (n) Algerian capital disperse, split
painless, enjoyable, easy, bearable, allegorical: (adj) figurative, amalgamated: (adj) amalgamate,
wonderful, unemotional metaphorical, symbolic, parabolic, mixed, fused, merged, combined,
aground: (adj, adv, v) shipwrecked; anagogical, allusive, emblematic, consolidated, integrated, joined,
(adv, v) grounded, foundered, illustrative, typical, tralatitious, coalesced, incorporated, unified.
swamped, wrecked; (adj, v) high representative ANTONYM: (adj) disjointed
and dry; (adv) ashore; (v) capsized, allegory: (n) fable, parable, figure of amass: (v) accumulate, collect, gather,
cast away; (adj, adv) marooned, speech, metaphor, symbol, emblem, hoard, pile, heap, accrue, store,
stuck. ANTONYM: (adj) sunken apologue, story, symbolization; (adj, stock, stack, save. ANTONYMS: (v)
aides: (n) Aidoneus, Pluto n) simile; (adj) type. ANTONYMS: distribute, divide, scatter, spend,
aiding: (adj) healthy, subventitious, (n) history, fact, chronicle disburse, dissipate, disband,
subsidiary, serviceable, auxiliary, allotted: (adj) agreed, chosen, fixed, dwindle
convenient selected ambassadors: (n) ambassador
aiglet: (n) aiguilette, braid, braiding, all-powerful: (adj) almighty, amending: (n) correction
sheath omnipotent, autocratic, amiably: (adv) kindly, affably,
aigrette: (n) egret, panache, plume, predominant, powerful, divine, graciously, decently, courteously,
crest, brush discharge, feather, formidable thoughtfully, cordially, lovelily, in a
pompom allusion: (n) innuendo, reference, friendly way, favorably, pleasantly.
ailing: (adj) sickly, poorly, ill, unwell, cue, suggestion, mention, ANTONYMS: (adv) unkindly,
bad, indisposed, unhealthy, invalid, intimation, pointer, insinuation, disagreeably
morbid, weak; (n) illness. implication, indication, clue amice: (n) ames, amess, amict,
ANTONYMS: (adj) well, healthy, fit, alluvium: (n) alluvion, alluvial almuce, capouch
robust, vigorous deposit, alluvial sediment, deposit, amorous: (adj) amatory, romantic,
airy: (adj) light, windy, aery, aerial, flood, inundation; (adj) slime, sposh, amative, affectionate, passionate,
ethereal, insubstantial, sprightly, slosh, sludge, slush fond, warm, ardent, erotic, tender,
perky, volatile, aeriform, aired. alms: (n) handout, charity, impassioned. ANTONYMS: (adj)
ANTONYMS: (adj) airless, hot, benefaction, gift, donation, cold, hateful, repulsed, unfriendly,
massive, wooden, weighty, contribution, offering, bounty; (n, v) cool
substantial, stifling, sluggish, sportula, largess; (v) relieve amorously: (adv) fondly, lovingly,
ponderous, musty, lumbering aloft: (adj, adv) overhead; (adv) up, erotically, tenderly, affectionately,
ajar: (v) dissentient, unclosed, on high, over, aloof, upwards, romanticly, amatorily, romantically,
unstopped, wide open, out of tune; uphill, above ground; (prep) upon; dotingly, amatively, adoringly
(adj) open, gaping, partly open, not (adj) eminent, lofty amour: (n) affair, affaire, love, love
closed aloof: (adj) distant, reserved, cool, affair, liaison, flirtation, romance,
alacrity: (n) rapidity, speed, standoffish, unconcerned, relationship, passion; (n, v) intrigue;
promptness, activity, preparedness, indifferent, unfriendly, frigid, (adj) amourette
velocity, haste, swiftness, quickness, arrogant, cold; (adv) afar. amphibious: (adj) amorphous,
expedition; (adj) life. ANTONYMS: ANTONYMS: (adj) friendly, epicene, half blood, hybrid, aquatic,
heteroclite, heterogeneous, mongrel. declaration, Lady Day, one. ANTONYM: (adv) together
ANTONYM: (adj) terrestrial Annunciation Day apoplectic: (adj) motionless
amphitheatre: (n) amphitheater, anointed: (adj) hallowed, divine, apostate: (n) deserter, traitor,
arena, stadium, gallery, bowl, greasy; (v) anoint turncoat, heretic, quitter; (adj, n)
coliseum, colosseum ante: (n) wager, stake, craps, roulette, recreant, craven; (v) pervert, rat;
amulet: (n) talisman, fetish, mascot, pitch and toss, farthing, cup tossing, (adj) unfaithful, false. ANTONYMS:
periapt, charm, telesm, philter, spell, chuck, faro, gamble; (adv, prep) (n) follower, loyalist, adherent,
phylactery, keepsake, good luck before faithful
charm antediluvian: (adj) ancient, apostrophe: (n) address,
amuse: (v) please, beguile, absorb, outmoded, archaic, old, obsolete, interpellation, invocation,
entertain, enjoy, disport, distract, dated, antique, musty, outdated, punctuation, salutation, monologue,
delight, occupy, recreate, rejoice. prehistoric, primeval. ANTONYMS: stream of consciousness, soliloquy,
ANTONYMS: (v) bore, dull, tire, (adj) new, late, young, motion, appeal, digression
annoy, anger, cloy, depress, weary, contemporary apothecary: (n) druggist, pharmacy,
disappoint anterior: (adj, adv) antecedent, fore; chemist, caregiver, dispensing
amusingly: (adv) drolly, comically, (adj) prior, previous, preceding, chemist, medical attendant,
humorously, divertingly, wittily, forward, former, precedent, pothecary, potecary, pill pusher,
pleasingly, jocularly, funnily, foregoing, ventral; (adj, n) front. pharmacopolist, pharmacologist
interestingly, pleasantly, charmingly ANTONYMS: (adj) posterior, after, apparition: (n) ghost, phantom,
anachronism: (n) anomaly, artefact, ending, following spirit, spectre, hallucination, spook,
artifact, parachronism, prochronism, anthem: (n) song, hymn, chorale, shade, eidolon, wraith, advent; (n, v)
timekeeping, mistiming, canticle, chant, choral, carol, psalm, vision
antichronism, misdating paean, national anthem, chaunt appease: (n, v) allay, alleviate; (adj, v)
analyze: (n, v) scrutinize; (v) review, anthill: (n) formicary, ant-hill, pacify, still; (v) placate, quiet,
assay, consider, study, check, mound conciliate, calm, mollify, abate,
canvass, break down, investigate, antichrist: (n) heretic reconcile. ANTONYMS: (v)
anatomize, analyse. ANTONYMS: antiquarian: (adj) antique, ancient. provoke, annoy, antagonize, enrage,
(v) assemble, overlook, unite, ANTONYMS: (adj) young, modern, exacerbate, excite, irritate, intensify
integrate, ignore, construct, new appeased: (adj) content, pacate
compound, combine, compose, antiquary: (n) antiquarian, expert, appertaining: (adj) appertinent
neglect archaeologist, antiquist appetizing: (adj) delectable,
analyzing: (n) study antiquated: (adj) old, aged, delicious, appetising, luscious,
anarchical: (adj) lawless, anarchistic, antediluvian, archaic, obsolete, savory, palatable, scrumptious,
anarchist, uncontrolled, insurgent, musty, old-fashioned, outdated, alluring, exquisite; (adj, v)
chaotic, anarchal dowdy, outmoded, antique. tantalizing, spicy. ANTONYMS:
anchored: (adj) fixed, immobile, ANTONYMS: (adj) new, (adj) tasteless, unsavory, sickening,
stationary, secure, stable, firm; (v) contemporary, fresh, modernistic, nauseating, inedible, distasteful,
rock solid, moored, on a rock, recent, current repulsive, revolting, unappealing
tethered antonius: (n) Mark Antony, Anthony, applaud: (v) praise, eulogize, cheer,
andiron: (n) dog, handiron, fire-dog, Antony, Marcus Antonius extol, hail, admire, clap, commend,
gridiron, support, dogiron antwerp: (n) Antwerpen approve, compliment, exalt.
anent: (adj) anenst anvil: (n) stithy, anvil blade, ANTONYMS: (v) criticize,
anew: (adv) again, newly, lately, fulciment, block, stiddy, prop, anvil disparage, lament, hiss, censure,
recently, over again, once more, roll, Stith, stand commiserate, condemn
once again, new; (adj) only apathetic: (adj) indifferent, applauded: (adj) famous, highly
yesterday, the other day, just now uninterested, cool, impassive, praised, commended
angelic: (adj) cherubic, heavenly, perfunctory, dull, spiritless, apprehend: (v) arrest, comprehend,
seraphic, virtuous, celestial, nonchalant, casual, lukewarm, lazy. grasp, catch, understand, fathom,
beautiful, angelical, divine, good, ANTONYMS: (adj) enthusiastic, realize, sense, follow, nail; (adj, v)
holy, saintly. ANTONYMS: (adj) inquisitive, fervent, energetic, conceive. ANTONYMS: (v)
devilish, demonic, dark, wicked concerned, interested, keen, excited, misunderstand, discharge, free,
angelus: (n) prayer, Angelus bell passionate, ambitious, caring liberate
animosity: (n) hatred, enmity, anger, aperture: (n) breach, slit, puncture, apprehended: (adj) arrested, seized,
malice, rancor, resentment, venom, opening, gap, cleft, perforation, understood, under arrest, in
bad blood, antagonism, spite, loophole, mouth, hiatus, outlet. custody, detained, appreciated,
abhorrence. ANTONYMS: (n) ANTONYM: (n) closure comprehended
companionship, affection, love, apes: (n) Anthropoidea, suborder apricot: (n) apricot tree, peach,
friendship, harmony, goodwill, Anthropoidea abricock, abricot, apricots, pink,
cooperation apiece: (adj, adv) each; (adj) one by orange, salmon pink, yellowish pink
annotating: (n) expansion one; (pron) all, both, each one; (adv) apropos: (adj) appropriate,
annunciation: (n) enunciation, individually, singly, for each, for applicable, apposite, eligible, apt,
promulgation, proclamation, each one, from each one, to each pertinent, germane, pat; (adv)
Victor Hugo 633
timely, seasonably, incidentally. demonstrative, characteristic askew: (adj) lopsided, cockeyed,
ANTONYMS: (adj) inappropriate, armpit: (n) cavum, cavity, axillary crooked, oblique, askant,
irrelevant, malapropos, unsuitable; fossa, axillary cavity catawampus; (adj, adv) wrong,
(adv) irrelevantly, untimely, arquebus: (n) matchlock, carbine, crookedly; (adj, v) wry; (adv) skew,
inopportunely musketoon, harquebuss, hagbut, agley. ANTONYMS: (adj) level,
apse: (n) apsis, niche, belfry, tribune, hackbut, fusil, rifle, firelock, plumb, true, centered, aligned, even
recess musketry, caliver assailant: (n) raider, attacker,
arabian: (n) Arab, Saracen, Beduin, arrant: (adj) rank, unmitigated, assaulter, invader, enemy, fighter,
Bedouin; (adj) arabesque thorough, stark, utter, ill, gross, opponent, antagonist, foe, mugger;
archangel: (n) angelica, angelica infamous, bad, blatant, base. (adj) aggressive
Archangelica, angelique, garden ANTONYM: (adj) minor asses: (n) equidae
angelica, seraph arrayed: (adj) armored, panoplied, assiduous: (adj) industrious, active,
archdeacon: (n) reverend, suffragan, clothed, clad, armed; (v) habited, busy, sedulous, thorough,
prelate, archbishop, bishop, accustomed hardworking, painstaking, careful,
eminence, elder, diocesan, dean, arsenic: (n) as, arsenic trioxide, devoted, untiring, studious.
metropolitan, primate element, trioxide, white arsenic, ANTONYMS: (adj) lazy, neglectful,
archduke: (n) elector, doge, grandee American Samoa, arsenous oxide, negligent, casual, lax, weary,
archiepiscopal: (adj) hierarchical arsenous anhydride slapdash, indolent, inconsistent,
architrave: (n) frieze, cornice, arterial: (n) arterials, cardinal, sloppy
molding, moulding, pediment, foremost, central, principal, prime, assuredly: (adv) certainly,
sconce, support, zoophorus, capital, arteries, master, capital, major, basic confidently, positively, securely,
coping stone, epistyle arteries: (adj) arterial indeed, definitely, undoubtedly,
arcs: (n) advanced RISC computing artful: (adj) crafty, cunning, admittedly, safely, insuredly,
specification scheming, wily, shrewd, insidious, decidedly
ardent: (adj, n) enthusiastic, glowing; designing, sly, adroit, subtle, astonish: (adj, v) astound; (adj, n, v)
(adj, v) burning, fervent, disingenuous. ANTONYMS: (adj) surprise; (adj) astonishing,
impassioned; (adj) keen, vehement, artless, unskillful, inept, ingenuous, surprised; (v) flabbergast, daze,
eager, warm, acute, fervid. unskilled, open, straight confound, dazzle, stun, alarm,
ANTONYMS: (adj) apathetic, cool, artisan: (n) craftsman, artist, nonplus. ANTONYMS: (v) expect,
unenthusiastic, traitorous, mild, operative, machinist, journeyman, bore
frigid, dispassionate, cold, disloyal, worker, workman, Wright, astounded: (adj) amazed, stunned,
impassive, calm carpenter, tradesman; (adj) flabbergasted, bewildered,
ardently: (adv) fervently, warmly, mechanic dumbfounded, surprised, staggered,
eagerly, intensely, fierily, avidly, artistically: (adv) ingeniously, astonied, dazed, astound, aghast
enthusiastically, burningly, pleasingly, inventively, astray: (adj, adv) adrift, off course;
zealously, fervidly; (adj, adv) hotly. imaginatively, creatively, elegantly, (adj) lost, wrong, disoriented, awry;
ANTONYMS: (adv) indifferently, originally, resourcefully, (adv) amiss, widely, far, afield,
apathetically, unenthusiastically, productively, innovatively, aside. ANTONYM: (adj) accurate
halfheartedly, calmly harmoniously astrologer: (n) forecaster, predictor,
ardor: (adj, n) eagerness, zeal; (n) ascend: (n, v) mount; (v) arise, scale, prognosticator, stargazer, Chaldean,
fervor, fervency, fire, flame, passion, uprise, climb, go up, come up, psychic, starmonger, Babylonian,
enthusiasm, ardency, heat, avidity. increase, elevate; (n) ascending, seer, oracle, medium
ANTONYMS: (n) apathy, coolness, ascent. ANTONYMS: (v) descend, astrology: (n) horoscope, astronomy,
coldness, hatred drop, decline, fall, lower, set, sink judicial astrology, pseudoscience,
argot: (n) lingo, cant, slang, ascendency: (n) ascendant, astrologies, starcraft, star divination,
vernacular, idiom, dialect, language, predominance, sway, ascendance, magic, genethlialogy
gobbledygook, speech, talk, patois advantage, ascendent, control, asunder: (adj, v) separate; (adv)
armenia: (n) Bagratid, Hayastan dominance, dominion, influence, aside, in two; (adj, adv) in Twain;
armenian: (n) Armenian alphabet, mastery (adj) loose, distant, adrift, aloof; (v)
Ermin ascending: (adj) uphill, rising, discrete, far between, free.
arming: (n) arms, militarisation, assurgent, climbing, ascendent; (n) ANTONYM: (adv) together
mobilization, militarization, ascension, ascent, rise, advance, athwart: (adj, adv, n, prep) across;
mobilisation, armed, outfitting, movement; (v) go up (adv, prep) aslant, cross; (adj, adv,
equipping ascends: (v) ascend, uprise prep) thwart; (adj, adv) crosswise;
armor: (n, v) armour, mask; (n) ashy: (adj) wan, ashen, pale, sallow, (adv) sideways, obliquely,
armature, defense, security, guard, pallid, grey, livid, gray, cadaverous, transversely, traverse, overthwart,
protection, safeguard, crust, shell, pasty, white crossways
skin askance: (adj) asquint, awry, askant, atrocious: (adj) monstrous, awful,
armorial: (v) typical, symptomatic, sidelong, oblique, indirect, squint; heinous, abominable, wicked,
symbolic, representative, (adv) suspiciously, obliquely, dreadful, frightful, terrible, bad,
pathognomonic, exponential, mistrustfully, edgewise. horrible; (adj, n) outrageous.
emblematic, diagnostic, diacritical, ANTONYM: (adv) trustingly ANTONYMS: (adj) humane,
benevolent, drivable, elegant, undermine, minimize, lower heaven; (adj) chromatic, bright blue,
virtuous, good, passable, fine, kind, augmentation: (n) addition, azurn, azureous
admirable, tasteful enlargement, aggrandizement, babe: (n) infant, baby, chick, sweetie,
atrophied: (adj) cadaverous, wasted, accession, development, expansion, suckling, nursling, child, newborn,
diminished; (v) shrivel. ANTONYM: growth, increment, multiplication; chit, girl, darling. ANTONYMS: (n)
(adj) hypertrophied (n, v) extension, augment. grownup, adult, adolescent
attentive: (adj) assiduous, diligent, ANTONYMS: (n) diminishment, babel: (n) pandemonium, racket,
heedful, watchful, observant, reduction, lessening, drop, decline tumult, Babylon, uproar, din, noise;
advertent, mindful, careful, aware, avails: (n) Vail (adj) Saturnalia, most admired
alert, respectful. ANTONYMS: (adj) avenging: (adj) justificatory, disorder, donnybrook, confusion
unfocused, negligent, neglectful, vindictive, vengeful, rigorous, worse confounded
forgetful, heedless, unobservant, ruthless, retributive, retributory; (n) babes: (n) babies, babe
rude, unprepared, unconscious, revenge, vengeance, eye for an eye, bacchanal: (n) Bacchanalia, revel,
uncaring, inconsiderate reprisal orgy, Saturnalia, bacchant, toper,
attentively: (adv) carefully, aviary: (v) beehive; (n) building, devotee, drinker, imbiber; (v)
mindfully, watchfully, observantly, birdhouse, volery, ornithon, carouser; (adj) bacchic
heedfully, vigilantly, cautiously, enclosure, bird sanctuary, apiary, bacchanalian: (adj) bacchantic,
considerately, diligently, alertly, volary, pen, alveary bacchant, carousing, orgiastic,
obligingly. ANTONYMS: (adv) avidity: (adj, n) greed, greediness; (n) bacchic; (v) thirsty soul, carouser,
unhelpfully, neglectfully, abruptly, eagerness, ardor, covetousness, lust, reveler
carelessly, hastily, casually desire, enthusiasm, rapacity, bacchanals: (v) deep potations; (n)
attire: (n, v) array, garb, apparel, cupidity, avidness bacchanalianism, Bacchanalia
wear; (n) costume, garment, outfit, avow: (v) affirm, assert, declare, bacchante: (n) votary, maenad
clothes; (v) enrobe, clothe, dress up. protest, confess, attest, asseverate; bacchic: (adj) bacchanal,
ANTONYMS: (v) disrobe, bare, (adj, v) admit, acknowledge, own; bacchanalian, bacchiac, Bacchical,
strip, unclothe; (n) nakedness (n, v) aver. ANTONYMS: (v) drunk, orgiastic, carousing
attired: (adj) clad, appareled, clothed, disavow, renounce, refute, disclaim, bailiff: (n) officer, underwriter,
garbed, habilimented, robed; (adj, condemn, censure castellan, solicitor, seneschal,
prep) garmented avowed: (adj) acknowledged, secretary, proctor, official,
attorneys: (n) lawyers, bar attested, ostensible, sworn, stated, middleman, functionary, broker
auctioneer: (n) broker, agent, confirmed, declared, pretended, bailiwick: (n) domain, jurisdiction,
attorney, secretary, solicitor, clerk, known, authenticated, apparent shrievalty, department, area, region,
seller, underwriter, proctor, awaken: (v) arouse, wake, rouse, call, province, sphere, walk, technology,
commission agent; (v) auction off stir, kindle, get up, raise, wake up, ward
audacious: (adj) brash, arrogant, waken, revive. ANTONYMS: (v) bakehouse: (n) bakeshop, backhouse,
barefaced, bold, daring, impudent, dampen, calm, retire, suppress, washhouse, patisserie, hothouse
intrepid, brave, shameless, spoil, quench, douse, stifle bakery: (n, v) bakehouse; (n) baker,
enterprising, insolent. ANTONYMS: awakened: (adj) excited, aroused, bakeshop, patisserie, oven, candy
(adj) modest, timid, cautious, polite, awakens, awoke, interested store, confectionery, supermarket,
reserved, meek, humble, fearful, awakening: (n) arousal, waking up, grocery, sweet shop
discreet, respectful revival, disenchantment, balked: (adj) frustrated, baffled,
audaciously: (adv) daringly, awakenment, introduction, discouraged, at sea
impudently, boldly, brazenly, provocation; (adj) arousing, moving, ballad: (n) song, folk song, carol,
bravely, courageously, insolently, animating; (v) awake. ANTONYM: poem, ballade, recitative, solfeggio,
pluckily, fearlessly, valiantly, rashly. (n) suppression pastoral, recitativo, ditty, bravura
ANTONYMS: (adv) cautiously, awakens: (adj) awakened ballast: (n) weight, ballasting,
discreetly, carefully, fearfully, awaking: (n) waking, awakening counterbalance, substance, freight;
timidly awkwardness: (n) embarrassment, (adj) aplomb, unperturbed; (v)
audacity: (n) nerve, audaciousness, stiffness, unwieldiness, stabilize, load, poise, stabilise
effrontery, arrogance, temerity, inconvenience, gawkiness, balustrade: (n) fence, banisters,
cheek, impertinence, insolence, inelegance, troublesomeness, banister, bannister, barrier, handrail,
courage; (n, v) impudence; (adj, n) ineptitude, ineptness, gaucherie; pale, balusters, guardrail,
presumption. ANTONYMS: (n) (adj, n) delicacy. ANTONYMS: (n) circumvallation, ring fence
cowardice, propriety, decorum, gracefulness, grace, comfort, banded: (adj) connected, striped,
circumspection, courtesy, fear, coordination, pride, urbanity, ease, agouti, with stripes, stripy, belted
respect, spinelessness, reticence assurance, liveliness, confidence, bandit: (n) outlaw, robber, gangster,
augment: (v) amplify, add, enhance, cooperation enemy, thief, scoundrel, rascal,
enlarge, aggrandize, reinforce, axle: (n) pole, arbor, hinge, shaft, mosstrooper, freebooter,
boost, expand, improve, intensify; pivot, bobbin, mandrel, swivel, bushranger, burglar
(n, v) accrue. ANTONYMS: (v) axletree, spindle, journal banlieue: (adj) alentours, borderland,
reduce, decrease, attenuate, azure: (adj, n) cerulean, blue; (n) vicinage, neighborhood, confines;
degrade, drop, diminish, sapphire, blueness, indigo, lazuline, (adj, n) purlieus, suburbs, environs;
Victor Hugo 635
(n) outskirts, faubourgs, entourage soil, dip workplace, wharf, usine, receptacle,
banneret: (n) knight banneret, bathed: (adj) sweaty hairdo, forcing pit; (v) aviary,
banner, knight, bannerol, baron, batter: (v) hammer, baste, break, club, alveary
viscount, thane, earl slam, beat, mangle, buffet, smite, beelzebub: (n) Lucifer, Prince of
bantering: (adj) banteringly, satirical, pound; (n) batsman Darkness, fiend, Satan, Zamiel, the
jovial, facetious, humorous battering: (n) batter, beating, combat, Devil, Samael, Old Nick, the tempter
baptismal: (adj) eucharistical, fighting, fight, whipping, attack, beetles: (n) Coleoptera
Baptistic; (n) baptism mugging, physical attack, spanking, beggar: (n) mendicant, mumper,
baptist: (n) baptistry, baptistery, rough treatment pauper, tramp, sponger, joker, poor
dunker, ana, Tunker; (v) baptize; battlemented: (adj) castellated, man, cadger, bloke; (v) beg,
(adj) Baptistic securer, secure, castled, crenellated, pauperize. ANTONYM: (n) giver
barbarian: (n) Goth, vandal, brute; fancier, crenelated beggary: (n) poverty, want, begging,
(adj) heathen, barbaric, barbarous, bauble: (adj) gimcrack; (n) trinket, penury, pauperism, need, indigence,
uncivilized, uncultured, wild, rude, ornament, trifle, bagatelle, gaud, solicitation, misery, squalor,
foreign. ANTONYMS: (adj) bangle, novelty; (adj, n) toy, destitution
cultured, refined; (n) native, citizen gewgaw, plaything begone: (int) shoo, scat, out, off,
barbarous: (adj) barbaric, savage, bead: (n, v) drop; (n) astragal, avaunt; (v) take off, get out, clear
gothic, brutal, heathen, truculent, beading, pearl, dot, necklace, pellet, out; (adv) aside, absent
rude, fell, ferocious, fierce, droplet, beadwork, bubble; (v) begrudge: (v) envy, covet, resent,
uncivilized. ANTONYMS: (adj) nice, beautify stint, hang fire; (adj, v) pinch; (adj)
cultured, civilized, sophisticated, beadle: (n) verger, catchpoll, hold back, screw, gripe, withhold,
refined, humane almoner, functionary, sacristan, starve. ANTONYMS: (v)
bared: (adj) naked, unclothed, sexton, janitor, Suisse, tipstaff, congratulate, wish
exposed officer, George Wells beadle beguiled: (adj) entranced, rapt,
barefoot: (adj) shoeless, unshod, bare beaming: (adj) bright, radiant, fascinated, infatuated, enchanted,
footed. ANTONYM: (adj) shoed glowing, glad, beamy, cheerful, delighted, charmed, captive,
bareheaded: (adj) hatless, bare, bald, refulgent, sunny, luminous, captivated
unclothed, alone; (v) cap in hand, resplendent, incandescent. behavior: (n, v) bearing, demeanor;
obsequious, respectful, reverential, ANTONYMS: (adj) gloomy, dark, (n) carriage, conduct, deportment,
decorous, ceremonious dusky, frowning, sad, sullen, act, behaviour, manner, character,
bareness: (n) nakedness, nudity, tenebrous action, morality
austerity, starkness, emptiness, bearded: (adj) barbate, awny, beheld: (adj) visual
nudeness, bleakness, baldness, whiskered, hairy, aristate, coniform, behindhand: (adv) behind; (adj, adv)
blankness, barrenness, plainness. calamiform, gladiate, pilous, backward; (adj) tardy, slow, belated,
ANTONYMS: (n) lushness, clothed, shagged, echinate overdue, dilatory, untimely,
cheerfulness, warmth beastly: (adj) animal, disgusting, undone, serotine; (adj, v) remiss
baronial: (adj) lordly, noble, August, horrid, bestial, brute; (adj, v) nasty, behold: (v) see, view, contemplate,
royal, stately, impressive. abominable, offensive; (adv) ugly, regard, perceive, observe, look,
ANTONYM: (adj) humble brutally, brutely. ANTONYMS: consider, discern, descry, watch.
barricaded: (adj) blockaded (adv) civilized, cultured, kind, good, ANTONYMS: (v) Miss, disregard,
barring: (prep) besides; (n) except for, refined, humane, inoffensive; (adj) ignore, overlook
excepting, except, with the lovely, pleasant beholding: (n) fusion, seeing, visual
exception of, without, with a beatitude: (n) bliss, benediction, perception, look
reservation, ejection, save and beatification, felicity, happiness, belabor: (v) thrash, beat, pound,
except, riddance, expulsion. saying, expression, locution, trounce, beat soundly, belabour,
ANTONYMS: (n) entitlement; (prep) benison, blissfulness, blessing criticize, criticise, beat up; (n) buffet;
including beau: (adj, n) admirer, lover, (n, v) pelt
basilica: (n) Basilics, basilisk, church, follower; (n) swain, fop, dude, belfry: (n) apse, room, bell tower,
temple, tabernacle, minster, coxcomb, boyfriend, chap, love, head, pinnacle, belltower
meetinghouse, kirk, chapel, dandy bellies: (n) stomach
cathedral, Bethel beaut: (n) example, exemplar, bellowing: (n) roaring, roar, bellows,
bas-relief: (n) bass-relief stunner, looker, paragon; (adj) hollo, holloa, rout, yowl, boation,
bastille: (n, v) jail; (n) prison, praiseworthy, attractive, gorgeous mugiency, hollering; (adj) mugient
dungeon, fortress, stronghold, beavers: (n) Sciuromorpha, suborder bellows: (n) blower, lung, bellowing,
bridewell, lockup, donjon, defense; Sciuromorpha, Rodentia, blowpipe, organ; (v) air blower, air
(v) incarcerate, imprison Castoridae, agoutis, order Rodentia, pump, fan, punkah, ventilator
bateau: (n) battery, swamp boat, family Castoridae benediction: (n, v) blessing; (n) grace,
bully, boat bedizened: (adj) gingerbread orison, thanks, communion,
bathe: (adj, v) steep, lave, immerse, bedstead: (n) bed, berth, cot, doxology, hosanna, invocation,
soak; (v) take a bath, tub, clean, bedframe, furniture, shakedown, supplication, beatitude; (v) bless.
rinse, bath; (n, v) swim; (n) bathing. pallet, stretcher, tester, stead, hatch ANTONYMS: (n) damning,
ANTONYMS: (v) smudge, stain, beehive: (n) hive, skep, yard, malediction, anathema
benignity: (n) kindliness, amid; (adv) atwixt blight: (n, v) blast, decay, plague; (v)
benignancy, favor, graciousness, beverage: (n) potable, alcohol, damage, wither, blemish, perish; (n)
tenderness, friendliness, amiability, refresher, potion, drinkable, bane, pest, curse, rust. ANTONYMS:
benefaction; (adj, n) kindness, potation, draught, draft, libation; (v) (v) aid, help, guard, protect,
humanity; (adj) beneficence broth, soup. ANTONYM: (n) solid enhance, improve; (n) health, boon,
benumbed: (adj) torpid, asleep, stiff, bewailing: (n) cry, grief, noise; (adj) bounty
insensible, dull, dead, numbed, lamenting; (v) querulous blissful: (adj) happy, heavenly,
hardened, drugged, uninterested, bewilderment: (n) astonishment, merry, joyful, delighted, glad,
cold quandary, confusion, surprise, cheerful, delightful, ecstatic, elated,
bequeathed: (adj) hereditary wonder, bemusement, maze, chaos, blest. ANTONYMS: (adj) unhappy,
bern: (n) Berne, bear, capital of jumble, mess; (adj, n) perplexity. grieving, sad, sorrowful, depressed,
Switzerland ANTONYMS: (n) order, clarity unpleasant, down, dreadful
beseech: (v) beg, crave, implore, ask, bewitched: (adj) enchanted, blissfully: (adv) gladly, joyfully,
request, adjure, pray, sue, appeal, fascinated, infatuated, magical, blessedly, delightfully, joyously,
solicit, plead. ANTONYMS: (v) give, ensorcelled, doomed, captive, rapt, cheerfully, ecstatically, merrily,
offer, grant, reject enamored, obsessed. ANTONYM: delightedly, gleefully, contentedly.
besiege: (v) beset, beleaguer, (adj) disgusted ANTONYM: (adv) sadly
surround, blockade, attack, bigoted: (adj) fanatic, opinionated, blockhead: (n) dunderhead, ass,
compass, hem in, press, importune, narrow, fanatical, hidebound, bigot, idiot, beetlehead, dunce, dolt, fool,
assail, bombard. ANTONYMS: (v) insular, zealot, arbitrary, dogmatic, loggerhead, muttonhead,
help, please biased. ANTONYMS: (adj) knucklehead; (n, v) block
besieged: (adj) enclosed, under broadminded, tolerant, blossom: (adj, n, v) flower, blow; (n,
pressure, under attack, targeted, unprejudiced, humanitarian, liberal, v) bud; (n) blooming, heyday,
struggling, stressed, under fire, moderate, fair efflorescence; (v) prosper, flourish,
fraught, embattled, careworn, billhook: (n) pruning hook, account, thrive, progress, unfold.
harassed bank bill, bank note, banknote, beak, ANTONYMS: (v) wither,
besieging: (n) encirclement, Syracuse, hook, brush hook; (adj) cleaver, deteriorate, struggle, shrivel, shrink,
Orleans, Atlanta, beleaguering, cutter fade, die; (n) withering
Corregidor, Lucknow, military bishopric: (n) eparchy, episcopate, blossoming: (n) bloom, florescence,
blockade archdiocese, jurisdiction, see, flowering, anthesis, blossom,
bespoke: (adj) bespoken, custom, bishopdom efflorescence, inflorescence,
engaged, affianced, commissioned, blackbird: (n) ousel, merle, European ontogeny, ontogenesis; (adj)
customized, made to measure, made blackbird, Turdus Merula, oriole, budding, growing. ANTONYM:
to order, modified, personalized, thrush, grackle, bean, cowbird, new (adj) failing
specially made world blackbird, redwing blundering: (adj) clumsy, tactless,
bestial: (adj) animal, brutish, brute, blackened: (adj) sulphured, inept, maladroit, ungainly,
atrocious, savage, brutal, inhuman, blackening, colored, coloured, filthy, unthinking, ridiculous, obtuse,
cruel, grim, depraved; (adj, adv) achromatic, colorful oblivious, lumbering, insensitive.
beastly. ANTONYM: (adj) refined blackguard: (n) ruffian, rogue, dog, ANTONYMS: (adj) graceful,
bestow: (v) give, confer, grant, rascal, heel, hound, cad; (adj) base, sensitive, dexterous
impart, contribute, donate, apply, vile; (v) vituperate, revile blush: (n, v) glow, color; (v) redden,
award; (adj, v) accord, allow, blackly: (adv) darkly, threateningly, crimson; (n) red, bloom, rosiness,
present. ANTONYMS: (v) deprive, somberly, dismally, murkily, ruddiness, redness; (adj) bashful;
refuse, withhold, retrieve, withdraw bleakly, shamefully, obscurely, (adv) blushingly. ANTONYMS: (v)
bestowed: (adj) presented, conferred, dingily, wickedly, sinisterly blanch, pale, blench; (n) paleness
awarded, accurate blarney: (v) wheedle, coax, flatter, blushing: (adj) rosy, coy, blushful,
betake: (v) wend, apply, address, cajole, palaver, inveigle, persuade; flushed, red, shy, bashful,
accost, get, obtain, refer, acquire, (n) flattery, adulation, coaxing, overmodest, ruddy; (adv)
aim, beget, attach sweet talk blushingly, ablush. ANTONYM:
betoken: (v) augur, foreshadow, blaspheme: (adj, v) desecrate, (adj) pale
prognosticate, bode, foretell, mark, profane; (v) swear, defile, damn, blustering: (adj, v) stormy; (adj)
bespeak, presage, indicate, omen; (n, cuss, imprecate, utter, violate; (adj) raging, blusterous, blustery,
v) denote be impious, scoff. ANTONYM: (v) turbulent, loud, vaporing,
betrothal: (n) troth, espousal, consecrate vociferous, noisy, hectoring; (adv)
betrothment, affiance, betroth, bleat: (v) blat, kvetch, gripe, moan, blusteringly
battle, alliance, ritual, betrothing, whimper, cry, blate, quetch, utter, boatman: (n) rower, ferryman,
conflict, employment emit; (n) baaing gondolier, oarsman, boater,
betrothed: (adj) affianced, intended, bleating: (n) bleat, baaing longshoreman, lighterman, worker,
bespoken, busy, occupied, bled: (v) bleed; (n) bulla sailor, shipman, punter
contracted, attached, bargained for; bleed: (v) run, ooze, phlebotomize, bodyguard: (n) guard, guardian,
(n) fiance, fiancee; (v) engage leak, percolate, shed blood, trickle, beefeater, attendant, protector,
betwixt: (n) midst; (prep) among, hemorrhage, fleece; (n) ache, smart detachment, warden, sentry,
Victor Hugo 637
lifeguard, retinue; (v) champion (adj) limited, restricted, confined, chokingly, pulselessly
bohemian: (n) Gypsy, Romany, finite, incomplete, negligible, small breathlessness: (n) shortness of
palmer, hadji, pilgrim, bourbon: (n) reactionary, Bourbon breath, dyspnea, bastard, asshole
unconventional, vagabond, whiskey, bourdon coffee breeches: (n) knickers, inexpressibles,
maverick, nomad; (adj, n) bourse: (n) exchange, bazaar, stock knickerbockers, brogues, short,
nonconformist; (adj) raffish exchange, hall, guildhall, fair, staple smalls, overalls, small clothes, pants,
bole: (adj, n) trunk; (n) tree trunk, boustrophedon: (n) orthography trousers, pantaloons
shaft, body, clay; (adj) main part, bowels: (n) gut, compassion, pity, breton: (n) Armorican, Breton hat
major part, skeleton greater part, inside, bowel, viscera, innards, belly, breviary: (n) epitome, portass,
hull, hulk, principal part guts, insides, intestines portuary, condensation, synopsis
bolted: (adj) barred, Bolten, secured, bowing: (n) obeisance, playing, brickyard: (n) brickfield, shop,
firm, barricaded, blockaded, bolted gesticulation, capitulation, workshop, brickworks
attachment, fast, fastened, latched, genuflection, scraping, submission; bridal: (adj, v) spousal; (adj, n)
tight (adj) bowed, bent, fawning, wedding; (n) nuptials, matrimony,
bolting: (n) sifting submissive espousal, hymen, marriage
bombard: (v) bomb, attack, pelt, boxwood: (n) Turkish boxwood, ceremony, adoption, betrothal; (v)
shell, barrage, pepper, raid, assail, wood, bush, shrub, boxful, box seat hymeneal; (adj) marriage.
besiege; (n) shawm, shelling braced: (adj) prepared, buttressed, ANTONYM: (adj) unmarried
bonfire: (n) fire, balefire, blaze, firm bridle: (n, v) curb, check, control,
conflagration, firecracker, fireworks, bracelets: (n) trinkets, jewels, snaffle, rein, leash; (n) arrest, reins,
salute, beacon, campfire, feu de joie, necklaces, charms, costume jewelry, brake; (v) inhibit, contain.
flames ornaments ANTONYMS: (v) unbridle,
boniface: (n) Amphitryon, host, brahmin: (n) intellectual, sanyasi, unharness, release
innkeeper poonghie, guru, Brahma, Bos brigandage: (v) rapine, foray, razzia,
bookseller: (n) bookshop, bookstore, indicus raid; (n) highway robbery,
owner, proprietor, publisher braided: (adj) curled, decorated, depredation, brigandism
boon: (n) blessing, benefit, mercy, artful, tressed, breaded brilliancy: (n, v) brightness; (n)
concession, good, gratuity; (n, v) branched: (adj) bifurcate, branching, brilliance, lustre, luster, splendor,
benefaction, gift, grant; (adj) jocund, ramous, ramose, divided, biramous, glitter, glory, radiance, splendour;
hilarious. ANTONYMS: (n) branchy, prongy, bearing branches, (adj, n) gorgeousness; (v) gloss
disadvantage, privation, disaster, split, pronged brim: (n) rim, periphery, verge, edge,
minus branching: (n) branch, ramification, lip, hem, rand, margin, perimeter,
booty: (n) plunder, prize, loot, fork, divarication, arborescence; brink, limit
pillage, stolen goods, spoil, spoils, (adj) branched, branchy, diverging, bristle: (n) fiber, hair, whisker; (v)
swag, haul, prey, trophy forked, ramose; (n, v) forking teem, burn, seethe, rage, arise, fume,
bordered: (adj) fringed, edged, brandishing: (n) flourish blow up; (n, v) brustle. ANTONYM:
delimited, surrounded braque: (n) Georges Braque (v) calm
bosom: (n) heart, interior, boob, bravado: (n) boast, bluster, bristled: (adj) briary, briery, barbed,
thorax, chest, bust, tit; (n, v) braggadocio, bluff, bragging, bristling, burry, biting, burred,
embrace; (v) cherish, hug; (adj) swagger, defiance, ostentation, echinated, horrent, prickly, spiny
intimate. ANTONYMS: (n) outside, bravery, talk, swaggering. bristling: (n) brisling; (adj) thorny,
exteriority ANTONYMS: (n) restraint, humility, muricated, pectinated, studded,
bottomless: (adj) limitless, infinite, modesty thistly, bristled, bushy, teeming,
deep, unlimited, profound, brawny: (adj, n) hefty, burly; (adj) horrid, horrent
immeasurable, fathomless, strong, athletic, sturdy, strapping, broadside: (n, v) bill, poster; (n)
boundless, unfounded, groundless, beefy, powerful, robust, stalwart, pamphlet, hail, circular,
unplumbed. ANTONYMS: (adj) mighty. ANTONYMS: (adj) skinny, denunciation, denouncement, firing,
shallow, bottomed, limited, puny, weak, frail, powerless, salvo, leaflet; (v) affiche
restricted delicate, feeble brocade: (n) brocatelle, cloth, fabric,
boudoir: (n) bedchamber, bedroom, brazen: (adj) audacious, impudent, fringe, galloon, lace, trapping,
master bedroom brassy, insolent, bold, brash, edging, embroidery
bounded: (adj) restricted, limited, impertinent, blatant, flagrant, brocaded: (adj) raised, decorated,
delimited, encircled, enclosed, forward, saucy. ANTONYMS: (adj) kincob
confined, leap, spring, bordered, shy, abashed, prudish, reserved, broken-hearted: (adj) despairing
circumscribed, constrained. quiet, discreet, respectful, ashamed, browned: (adj) brunet, tanned,
ANTONYMS: (adj) unbounded, veiled, modest suntanned, brunette, done
unconfined, unlimited, free brazier: (n) warmer, heater, bucket, browse: (n) browsing; (v) scan, skim,
boundless: (adj) limitless, endless, barbecue crop, explore, leaf, surf, pasture,
unlimited, infinite, bottomless, breathlessly: (adv) pantingly, glance, peruse, wander.
incalculable, immense, eagerly, windedly, deadly, ANTONYMS: (v) study, scrutinize,
immeasurable, interminable, inanimately, breathtakingly, stare
unbounded, vast. ANTONYMS: impatiently, animatedly, hungrily, bruise: (n, v) hurt, wound; (v) crush,
pound, mash, contuse, grind, bray; humming, abuzz, bustling, lively, chamlet
(n) contusion, hematoma; (adj, n) droning, purring, vibrant, vivacious, camphor: (v) Sandalwood camphor
buffet full of beans candid: (adj) blunt, outspoken,
brunette: (adj) dark, brown, swarthy, byron: (n) Lord Byron, George ingenuous, direct, sincere, open,
tan, russet, chocolate; (n) tanned, Gordon Byron forthright, artless, equitable, honest,
person, somebody, soul, someone. cabal: (n) scheme, junto, faction, guileless. ANTONYMS: (adj)
ANTONYM: (n) blonde conspiracy, plot, intrigue, ring, scheming, tricky, artful, deceitful,
brushwood: (n) brush, underwood, camarilla; (v) conspire, machinate, dishonest, guarded, indirect,
undergrowth, brake, scrub, complot insincere, inhibited, disingenuous,
underbrush, firewood, spinney, cabalistic: (adj) mysterious, cryptic, evasive
thicket, bushes, copse esoteric, incantatory, phylacteric, candida: (n) torula
buckle: (n, v) clasp, warp; (v) curve, talismanic, cabalistical, cryptical, candlemas: (n) Holy Thursday,
crumple, distort, fasten; (adj, n) impenetrable, inscrutable; (adj, v) Ascension Day, Ash Wednesday,
button; (n) screw, hook, fastener; recondite agape, birthday, bissextile,
(adj) strap. ANTONYMS: (v) cabaret: (n) barrel house, floor show, Candlemas day, bicentennial
unbuckle, flatten, smooth, straighten chophouse, spot, tavern, candlestick: (n) candelabra, sconce,
buckled: (v) wreathy, frizzly, crepe; performance, ball club, vaudeville, chandelier, candle holder, girandole,
(adj) warped, misshapen, variety show, supper club, candleholder, holder, electrolier,
malformed, distorted, askew, spectacular gaselier, girandola, luster
deformed cain: (v) matador, garroter, thug, canonical: (adj) orthodox, standard,
buckshot: (n) pellet, bird shot, slug, bravo, assassin, sabreur, terrorist, basic, canonial, normative,
interference, projectile, cartridge, Moloch, cutthroat, slayer, butcher uncompromising, strict, rigid,
bullet, ammunition, shotgun shell, calabash: (n) gourd, gourd vine, positive, legitimate, classical.
shell, duck shot crucible, porringer, potager, pan, ANTONYMS: (adj) unorthodox,
buffoon: (n) fool, jester, clown, zany, saucer, tree, calabash tree, bottle, unsanctioned, unauthorized,
merry Andrew, mimic, pantaloon, dish unacceptable
joker, scaramouch, droll, buffo calamitous: (adj) fatal, evil, wretched, canonized: (adj) glorified, authorized
bulwark: (n, v) shield, safeguard, fateful, deplorable, unfortunate, sad, canons: (n) system of opinions,
guard; (n) rampart, wall, barrier, black, dreadful, cataclysmic; (adj, v) school, doctrine
breakwater, bastion, defense, ruinous. ANTONYMS: (adj) caparison: (v) bard, equip; (n)
battlement, buffer. ANTONYM: (n) wonderful, beneficial, blessed, trappings, housing, horsecloth,
weakness comforting, favorable accouterment, rigging, saddlery,
buntings: (n) family Fringillidae, calamity: (n) disaster, adversity, slops, suit, toggery
Fringillidae affliction, misfortune, plague, caparisoned: (adj) clad
burgomaster: (n) burghmaster, catastrophe, tragedy, blow, bale, capella: (n) genus Gallinago, genus
burghermaster, portreeve, constable, distress; (n, v) trouble. Capella
seneschal, warden, Corregidor, ANTONYMS: (n) blessing, boon, capitol: (v) castle, fortress, citadel,
mayor, alderman luck, joy, opportunity dungeon, keep, donjon; (n) Capitol
burgundy: (adj, n) red; (n) Chablis, calligraphy: (n) script, writing, building, booker Taliaferro
burgundy wine, Bourgogne; (adj) penmanship, lettering, chirography, Washington, American capital,
crimson, dark red, maroon, reddish handwriting, letters, pencraft, capital of the united States,
purple, ruby, scarlet beautiful handwriting, print Washington
burying: (n) entombment, callot: (n) calotte capitulate: (v) cede, submit, give in,
inhumation callous: (adj) heartless, insensible, give up, surrender, succumb, bow,
bushy: (adj) dense, shagged, shaggy, relentless, cruel, brutal, obdurate, resign, retreat, come to terms,
hairy, bearded, brushy, gross, hard, hardened, hardhearted, acquiesce. ANTONYMS: (v) fight,
bushies, pilous, pappous, hispid. indifferent, insensitive. overpower, resist, conquer
ANTONYMS: (adj) bald, neat, ANTONYMS: (adj) caring, merciful, capon: (n) chicken, volaille, stot,
unhealthy, tidy, thin, sparse, sleek compassionate, sensitive, poulet, steer, gelding, ox, rooster,
buttress: (n, v) support, prop; (n) sympathetic, tender, nice, fowl, hen, pullet
crutch, stay, reinforcement; (v) thoughtful, affectionate, concerned, caprice: (n) fancy, fantasy, humor,
underpin, fortify, sustain, bolster, flattering quirk, freak, notion, impulse, fit,
reinforce, strengthen. ANTONYM: calmed: (adj) composed, thankful. capriccio, fad, vagary. ANTONYMS:
(v) undermine ANTONYM: (adj) worried (n) plan, strategy, blueprint, reality
buttresses: (n) ramparts, defenses calming: (adj) sedative, reassuring, capricious: (adj) fanciful, whimsical,
buxom: (adj) bosomy, chubby, bonny, pacifying, lulling, assuasive, irregular, freakish, arbitrary, fickle,
plump, sonsy, voluptuous, soporific, tranquilizing, restful; (n) changeable, impulsive, volatile,
curvaceous, shapely, full, crummy, pacification, appeasement; (v) variable, unpredictable.
fat. ANTONYMS: (adj) skinny, bony soothe. ANTONYMS: (adj) ANTONYMS: (adj) dependable,
buzzed: (n) woozy; (adj) intoxicated, upsetting, stimulating, tense, predictable, stable, steady, steadfast,
drunk irritating, painful placid, logical, fixed, consistent,
buzzing: (n) noise, murmur; (adj) camlet: (n) chamolet, chamelot, serious
Victor Hugo 639
capriciousness: (n) whimsicality, censoriousness column, convoy; (adj) rank and file,
instability, fickleness, volatility, carrion: (n) carcass, offal, dead body, line of battle, cortege; (v) file
changeability, unpredictability, corpse, filth, ket, any filth, caroigne; cavalier: (adj) overbearing, arrogant,
arbitrariness, caprice, (adj) garbage haughty, offhand, supercilious,
changeableness, inconstancy, carthusian: (n) Trappist, domineering, bumptious,
moodiness. ANTONYMS: (n) Premonstatensian, Maturine, adventurous, flippant; (n) escort,
reliability, predictability Cistercian, Cluniac, Chartreux equestrian. ANTONYMS: (adj)
capstan: (v) windlass, derrick; (n) carver: (n) sculpturer, sculptress, humble, conscientious, obliging,
turret, cathead cutter, modeler, figuriste, woodman, careful, polite, considerate
capsule: (n) lozenge, boll, pill, tablet, woodsman, woodworker, diner, cavallo: (n) capel
condensation, bladder, abridgment, statuary, chaser cavern: (n) hollow, cove, vault, hole,
bolthead, alembic, space capsule; (v) cascade: (n) torrent, deluge, shower, enclosure, antrum, lair, antre,
encapsulate. ANTONYM: (adj) falls, cataract; (n, v) fall, stream, socket, den; (v) cavern out
lengthened spout, overflow; (v) gush, flow. cavernous: (adj) profound, concave,
captivated: (adj) spellbound, ANTONYMS: (n, v) trickle, dribble; echoing, resonant, sepulchral,
charmed, enchanted, absorbed, (v) drip, seep, drizzle; (n) drought yawning, huge, deep, depressed,
enthralled, engrossed, rapt, casement: (n) embrasure, casement sunken, vast. ANTONYMS: (adj)
enamored, delighted, beguiled, cloth cramped, claustrophobic, convex,
infatuated. ANTONYMS: (adj) cask: (n) bucket, butt, tun, tub, drum, crowded, shallow, small, tiny,
unenthusiastic, bored vat, hogshead, keg, coffin, confined, narrow
cardinals: (n) buntings, canaries, containerful, vessel celandine: (n) Chelidonium majus,
family Fringillidae, Fringillidae, casque: (v) helm, headpiece, siege Impatiens capensis, herb, poppy,
genus Richmondena, Richmondena cap, carapace, cowcatcher, hauberk, blood flower, greater celandine,
carelessly: (adv) incautiously, hastily, salade, scutum, morion, mask, mail orange balsam, action plant,
recklessly, heedlessly, casually, cassock: (n) clergyman, gown, casa, swallow wort, jewelweed
sloppily, imprudently, casino, vestment, frock, tunicle, celestial: (adj) ethereal, divine,
inconsiderately, rashly, negligently, priest, surplice, garment, Geneva supernal, angelic, holy, sacred,
unwarily. ANTONYMS: (adv) gown frock astronomical, unworldly,
thoroughly, diligently, carefully, castanets: (n) bones, maraca, finger superlunary, from on high; (n)
warily, laboriously, thoughtfully, cymbals, clappers heaven. ANTONYMS: (adj)
attentively, daintily, methodically, caste: (n) rank, class, sort, variety, mundane, secular, terrestrial, mortal
discreetly, economically estate, tribe, race, genus; (adj) celestine: (n) Celestinian
carelessness: (n) negligence, degree, baccalaureate, condition cellars: (n) cellar
inattention, indifference, castellated: (adj) castled, crenelated, censor: (n) critic, functionary,
nonchalance, thoughtlessness, battlemented, casemated, licenser; (v) ban, suppress,
abandon, incaution, disregard, crenellated; (v) machicolated, criminalize, evaluate, squelch,
omission, forgetfulness, dereliction. loopholed; (n) fancier illegalize, expurgate, muzzle.
ANTONYMS: (n) attention, caution, cataclysm: (n) disaster, upheaval, ANTONYMS: (v) sanction, endorse,
alertness, vigilance, carefulness, catastrophe, tragedy, wreck, deluge, approve, allow, divulge; (n) fan
thoughtfulness, assiduousness, wrack, flood, earthquake, centaur: (n) constellation, the
economy, regard, prudence, misfortune, bouleversement. Centaur, sagittary, monster
forethought ANTONYMS: (n) miracle, boon centipedes: (n) phylum Arthropoda
caress: (v) stroke, fondle, tickle, pat, catapult: (n, v) sling; (n) launcher, cerate: (n) cerote, ointment, balm,
pet, kiss, nuzzle, cuddle, coddle; (n, slingshot, balister, bow, ordnance, ceratum, unguent, cosmetic, lenitive,
v) touch; (n) endearment. plaything; (v) shoot, fling, launch, lotion, oil, camphor ice, salve
ANTONYM: (n) hit propel cerberus: (n) beadle, bokadam
caressing: (adj) caressive, soft; (n) caterpillar: (n) cutworm, larva, certified: (adj) accredited, official,
petting, foreplay, stimulation, Aurelia, cabbageworm, armyworm, guaranteed, authorized, approved,
dalliance, smooching, snuggling, bollworm, cankerworm, worm, certificated, certifiable, verified,
arousal, hugging, cuddling maggot, orphan, cocoon assured, licensed, clear.
carnival: (n) fair, feast, festival, catholicism: (n) universality, ANTONYMS: (adj) informal,
amusement park, funfair, show, Catholic, Romanist, Anglicanism, uncertified, amateur, uncertain,
fiesta, bazaar, gala, jamboree, ROMANISM, Romish, Roman unqualified
Saturnalia catiline: (n) conspirator, traitor, cesspool: (n) drain, septic tank, sink,
carousing: (n) revelry, revels, archtraitor, betrayer sump, cistern, latrine, night soil;
celebrations, skylarking, partying, cauldron: (n) caldron, copper, kettle, (adj) cess
party, merriment; (adj) orgiastic, pot, container chafing: (n) abrasion, soreness,
bacchic, bacchanal, bacchant cauliflowers: (n) genus brassica tenderness, rubbing, resistance,
carping: (adj, v) captious, critical, causa: (n) casing, suit, cause, caseful, roughness; (v) irritate, to chafe; (adj)
censorious; (adj) hypercritical, campaign, lawsuit impatient
picky, irritable, querulous; (n) cavalcade: (n) parade, pageant, chained: (adj) in chains, enchained,
faultfinding, criticism, cavil, caravan, spectacle, celebration, bound
chaldean: (adj, n) Chaldee, chatterer: (n) chatterbox, babbler, daydream; (adj) Minotaur.
Babylonian; (n) astrologer blabbermouth, prater, bellbird, ANTONYM: (n) truth
chalky: (adj) cretaceous, calcareous, flycatcher, prattler, blabber, cackler, chimerical: (adj) imaginary, fanciful,
candid, pale, powdery, white, tattletale, windbag fantastic, romantic, delusive,
achromatic, bloodless, cloudy, chattering: (n) chatter, cackle, yak, visionary, unreal, fictitious, utopian,
opaque, crumbly grabbing, claver; (adj) talkative, chimeral, insubstantial
chancel: (n) sanctuary, Golgotha, loquacious, noisy, gabby, garrulous; chimes: (n) bells, echo, refrain,
quire, transept, vestry, crypt, nave, (v) natter repetend, ritornello, glockenspiel
presbytery, choir, calvary, asylum cheated: (adj) embittered, resentful chisel: (v) cut, cheat, shape, beguile,
chancellery: (n) chancellory, building cheating: (n) cheat, dishonesty, screw, engrave, beat, victimize,
chancellorship: (n) position, post, imposition, imposture, fraud, sculpture, cozen; (n) burin
situation, spot, office, berth, duplicity, deception, chicanery; (adj) chops: (n, v) jaws; (n) orifice, chaps,
chancellery dirty, cunning, deceiving. jaw, fauces, propylon, portico,
chandelier: (n) candlestick, pendant, ANTONYMS: (adj) honest, faithful; porch, door, portal; (v) gob
candelabrum, sconce, lustre, luster, (n) honesty, truthfulness christendom: (n) apostleship, church,
girandole, candelabra, gaselier checkered: (adj) check, chequered, hierarch, priesthood, Christianism,
chanter: (n) pipe, vocalist, songster, varied, ever changing, motley, plaid, church government, ministry,
chantor, melody pipe dappled, variable, mutable, prelacy
chanting: (n) cantillation, vocalizing, multicolored, mottled christening: (n) naming,
sing, singing, intonation cheering: (adj, n) encouraging, denomination, chrism, designation,
chapped: (adj) cracked, balmy, inspiriting; (adj) comforting, hearty, identification
unsmooth, barmy, bats, batty, exhilarating, heartening, amusing; chronicles: (n) archives, history,
bonkers, buggy, roughened, coarse, (n) applause, acclaim, ovation, archive, records
alligatored cheers. ANTONYMS: (adj) chubby: (adj) fat, plump, fleshy,
chariot: (n) car, wagon, carriage, disheartening, heartbreaking, round, pudgy, stout, chunky, heavy,
waggon, vehicle, wain, equipage, discouraging, depressing, dejecting, tubby, overweight, ample.
char disturbing ANTONYMS: (adj) skinny, slim,
charmed: (adj) enchanted, delighted, cherish: (v) care for, nurture, bony, anorexic, slender
fascinated, spellbound, entranced, treasure, entertain, cultivate, bosom, cicero: (n) orator, rhetorician, solon,
captive, beguiled, infatuated, prize, esteem, harbor; (n, v) hug, speechmaker, statesman, pica,
absorbed, enamored, captive hours foster. ANTONYMS: (v) hate, scorn, Marcus Tullius Cicero; (v)
charmer: (n) warlock, enchanter, reject, denounce, despise, neglect Demosthenes
sorcerer, person, mortal, soul, cherished: (adj) dear, precious, loved, ciceronian: (v) Tullian; (adj) correct,
someone, somebody, phony, mage, treasured, prized, intimate, wanted, attic, classical, polished, elegant
individual valued, pet, valuable, close. cipher: (n) zero, nothing, number, nil,
charmingly: (adv) pleasingly, ANTONYMS: (adj) unremarkable, nobody, null; (n, v) figure, cypher,
prettily, alluringly, attractively, hated, distant code; (v) calculate; (adj, n)
fascinatingly, pleasantly, chestnuts: (n) Castanopsis, Fagaceae, nonentity. ANTONYMS: (n) infinity;
enchantingly, temptingly, Castanea, genus Castanea, beech (v) encode, decode, code, scramble
engagingly, sweetly, beautifully. family circling: (v) snaky, serpentine; (adj)
ANTONYMS: (adv) unpleasantly, chevalier: (n) maharaja, nawab, rotating, spinning, circular, spiral,
unattractively, horribly, awkwardly palsgrave, pasha, rajah, waldgrave, moving; (n) circulation, circuit,
charms: (n) trinkets, jewelry, jewels knight, Maurice chevalier cycling; (adv) around
chastely: (adv) continently, chevron: (n) chevron-molding, circuitous: (adj) roundabout,
innocently, immaculately, purely, chevron-work, banding, stripes, dirt winding, devious, tortuous,
morally, decently, modestly, band, band, badge, armorial meandering, oblique, complicated,
simplely, cleanly, refinedly, bearing, bearing, cockade, grade labyrinthine, crooked, collateral,
spotlessly insignia circumlocutional. ANTONYMS:
chastised: (adj) corrected chiding: (n) scolding, rebuke, blame, (adj) straight, direct
chastity: (n) honor, purity, reprehension, rap, censure, circumference: (n) circuit, border,
abstinence, virtue, innocence, upbraiding, wigging, brawl, perimeter, boundary, periphery,
chasteness, continence, modesty, admonition; (adv) scoldingly outline, brim, compass, circle, edge,
cleanliness, austerity; (adj) honesty. chilled: (adj) frozen, freezing, cool, rim. ANTONYMS: (n) middle,
ANTONYMS: (n) nymphomania, refrigerated, icy, inhibited, inside, interior, center
lewdness, adultery restrained, confined, shivering, iced, cistern: (n) water tank, sump, storage
chasuble: (n) Geneva gown frock, stiff tank, reservoir, container, cesspool,
robe, cassock, dalmatic, gown, chime: (n) carillon, melody; (adj) sac, pond, pool, sink, cesspit
pallium, scapulary, scarf, surplice, harmonize; (v) go, jingle, clang, peal, citadel: (n) castle, bastion,
tunicle, cope tinkle, buzz, ring, chimb fortification, bulwark, Acropolis,
chateau: (n) mansion, palace, villa, chimera: (n) fantasy, dream, illusion, fort, stronghold, tower, chateau; (n,
hall, place, rotunda, winery, rus in vision, chimaera, maggot, v) fortress; (v) keep
urbe, vineyard, wine grower, lodge imagination, phantom, fancy, clad: (adj) dressed, attired, clothed,
Victor Hugo 641
coated, garbed; (n) cladding; (prep) clatter: (n, v) rattle, jingle, bang, (adj) public, conspicuous, open
gowned; (v) costume, shod, dress, clank, clang, roll, clink; (v) clash, clothed: (adj) dressed, wrapped,
attire. ANTONYMS: (adj) chatter; (n) noise, racket. cloaked, robed, covered, attired,
undressed, unclothed ANTONYM: (n) quiet vested, absorbed, decent; (v)
clamor: (n, v) outcry, cry, clamour, claw: (n) chela, unguis, nipper, talon, accustomed, arrayed. ANTONYM:
hullabaloo, roar, shout; (n) noise, hook; (v) clapperclaw, lacerate, tear, (adj) unclothed
racket, uproar, exclamation, scratch, rip, clutch. ANTONYM: (v) clouded: (adj, n) cloudy; (adj)
hubbub. ANTONYMS: (n) silence, mend gloomy, dark, overcast, obscure,
serenity, tranquility; (v) whisper, clayey: (adj) heavy, weighty, blurred, foggy, misty, hazy, bleary;
mutter ponderous, strong, backbreaking, (v) cymophanous. ANTONYM: (adj)
clamorously: (adv) noisily, loudly, compacter, compact, cloggy, clear
obstreperously, vociferously, burdensome, burdened, bolar. clout: (n, v) cuff, punch, slap, swipe,
blatantly, importunately, urgently, ANTONYM: (adj) arenaceous knock, smack, whack, strike, crack;
uproariously, raucously, clearness: (n) clarity, brightness, (n) authority, control
turbulently, tumultuously distinctness, perspicuity, lucidity, clustered: (adj) agglomerated,
clang: (n, v) chime, clangor, ring, explicitness, sharpness, simplicity, agglomerative, bunched, bunchy,
clash, clank, clatter, sound; (adj, n, purity, limpidity, intelligibility. gregarious, concentrated,
v) peal; (v) boom, clink; (n) crash ANTONYMS: (n) ambiguity, conglomerate, collective
clanging: (adj) tinny, shrill, noisy, opacity, dirtiness, vagueness, clutches: (n) clasp, grip, grasp, hold,
metallic, clangorous unclearness, obscureness, clench, seizing, custody, talons; (v)
clap: (n, v) blast, boom, slam, rumble; indistinctness, clutter, haziness, vice, tongs, pliers
(n) applause, clapping, gonorrhoea, mustiness coals: (n) ashes, fire, residue, embers
smash; (v) acclaim, applaud, hit. clemency: (n) charity, tenderness, cobble: (n) cobblestone, sett, boulder,
ANTONYMS: (v) hiss, jeer leniency, compassion, pardon, pity, brick; (v) tinker, patch, vamp, botch,
clapper: (n) tongue, organ, striker, benevolence, quarter, grace; (adj, n) restore, patch up, refashion
spit, clack valve, bell, applauder, kindness, benignity. ANTONYMS: cockchafer: (n) May bug, chafer,
clapper type tool box, claw, (n) blame, cruelty, harshness, beetle, summer chafer, May beetle,
footboards, footboard strictness, unkindness, common cockchafer, bug
clapping: (n) clap, acclaim, hand, vindictiveness, mercilessness coffer: (n) box, chest, case, caisson,
clapping of hands, cheering, clench: (n, v) clasp, grip, hold, clinch, casket, trunk, safe, strongbox,
handclap, ovation, slapping, grasp, gripe; (v) embrace, grapple, treasury, crate, coffers
plaudit, round, approval tighten, ratify; (n) clamp. cohabitation: (n) living together, bed,
claret: (v) cider, Brazil tea, ice water; ANTONYMS: (v) release, flex, relax sexual intercourse, inhabitation,
(n) blood, red wine, Bordeaux, red; cleverly: (adv) cunningly, expertly, habitation, inhabitancy, married
(adj) dark red, burgundy, cherry, smartly, shrewdly, adroitly, state, sexual relations, coverture
crimson intelligently, dexterously, handily, coif: (v) groom, arrange, neaten,
clarion: (n) horn, trombone, craftily, skillfully, acutely. become gelatinous, set, act, adjust;
ophicleide; (v) trumpet, proclaim, ANTONYMS: (adv) clumsily, (n) cap, hood, kerchief, skullcap
promulgate, pibroch, exclaim, foolishly, honestly, ineptly, coiled: (adj) curled, curved, twined,
slogan; (adj) clear, fair. awkwardly, openly, incompetently coiling, twisted, convoluted, rolled,
ANTONYMS: (adj) soft, low, dull, clew: (n) cue, clod, glob, knob, wavy, bent, round; (adj, v) spiral.
muffled footmark, footprint, vestige; (v) ANTONYM: (adj) uncoiled
clashing: (adj, n) discordant; (n) point out; (adj) pellet, globule, coinage: (n) currency, money,
collision, interference, antagonism, Pelote mintage, coins, specie, invention,
discord; (adj) conflicting, clinking: (adj) tinkle, jingle, tinkling, coining, word, contrivance,
incompatible, opposed, contrary; cacophonous, reverberant, ringing fabrication, formation
(adv) clashingly; (v) bickering. cloaked: (adj) veiled, covered, coldness: (n) chilliness, coolness,
ANTONYM: (adj) consistent hidden, covert, disguised, indifference, distance, apathy,
clasp: (n, v) embrace, hug, grip, concealed, furtive, hidden away, iciness, reserve, frost, frigidity,
grasp, squeeze, clutch, buckle, draped, clothed, absorbed. unconcern; (adj, n) cold.
brooch; (adj, n, v) pin; (v) stick, ANTONYM: (adj) overt ANTONYMS: (n) friendliness,
cling. ANTONYMS: (v) unbuckle, clod: (adj, n) lump; (n) oaf, glebe, ball, sympathy, sensitivity, hotness, heat,
loose, unclasp, relax, detach clay, yokel, gawk, agglomeration, responsiveness, concern, brightness,
clasping: (adj) tendril lout, clump; (adj) block. kindness
classically: (adv) typically, refinedly, ANTONYM: (n) intellect colette: (n) Sidonie Gabrielle
ideally, modelly, exemplarily, cloister: (n) abbey, priory, monastery, Claudine Colette
archetypally, purely, correctly, arcade, friary, piazza, nunnery, colic: (n) Uterine colic , gripe,
primely, excellently, conventionally circus, veranda; (v) encircle, insulate hurting, mulligrubs, pain, stomach
classicism: (adj, n) classicalism; (adj) cloistered: (adj) secluded, solitary, pain, tummy ache, newborn colic,
atticism; (n) humanities, claustral, isolated, recluse, cloistral, enteralgia, intestinal colic, tummy
neoclassicism, arts. ANTONYM: (n) conventual, monastic, monastical, pain
romanticism private, sequestered. ANTONYMS: coliseum: (n) colosseum, stadium,
amphitheatre, arena, bowl, sports commanding, impressively, turbulence, awkwardness
arena, gymnasium, enclosure imperiously, superiorly, imposingly, comprehended: (adj) understood,
colloquy: (n) talk, conference, grandly, domineeringly, apprehended
conversation, dialog, chat, dialogue, imperatively, bossily, overbearingly. comprehending: (adj) intelligent,
collocution, verbal intercourse, ANTONYM: (adv) weakly general, observant, sympathetic,
meeting, parley, interview commonality: (n) generality, brotherly, conversant
colonnade: (n) arcade, circus, community, society, coarseness, comprehensible: (adj) intelligible,
construction, structure, stoa, portico, cohesion, common, common land, coherent, understandable, lucid,
column, crescent, mall, peristyle, commonness, commons, perspicuous, accessible, plain,
piazza commonwealth, commune. apprehensible, comprehendible,
color: (n, v) flush, blush, tint, tinge, ANTONYM: (n) discord readable, incomprehensible.
paint, stain; (adj, n, v) colour; (v) commotion: (n) tumult, ado, ANTONYMS: (adj) unintelligible,
redden; (n) guise, complexion; (adj, disturbance, turmoil, stir, din, illegible, unfathomable, obscure,
n) tone. ANTONYMS: (v) discolor, flurry, fuss, bedlam, tempest; (n, v) doubtful, incomplete, difficult,
pale, show, whiten, untwist, denote, agitation. ANTONYMS: (n) peace, unclear
depict, represent, blanch, blench order, calm, serenity, calmness, compromising: (adj) conciliatory,
colored: (adj) chromatic, black, stillness, quiet, tranquility, inactivity moderate, vulnerable, awkward,
tinged, tinted, colorful, dyed, compasses: (n) aesthesiometer intermediate, flexible, inculpatory;
coloured, partial, dark, bleached, compendium: (n) abridgement, (adv) halfway
biased. ANTONYMS: (adj) truthful, compend, digest, synopsis, manual, comptroller: (n) controller,
white, uncolored, unbiased, pale, epitome, anthology, outline, accountant, auditor, governor,
objective, honest, genuine, real abbreviation, brief, resume manager, bookkeeper, supervisor,
colors: (n) flag, colours, paints, compiler: (n) program, author, businessperson, rector, bourgeois,
banner, color, colour, ensign, compiling program, programme, certified public accountant
pigment, tint, dye, paint compiling, bookmaker, editor, comte: (n) count, Isidore Auguste
colossal: (adj) huge, gargantuan, translator, writer, compilator, Marie Francois comte, Auguste
prodigious, Brobdingnagian, vast, encyclopedist comte
enormous, great, mammoth, complicity: (n) collusion, guilt, concealing: (n) covering,
immense, massive, monstrous. guiltiness, conspiracy, agreement, concealment, burial, stealing,
ANTONYMS: (adj) tiny, small, connivance, participation, stealth, screening, burying,
insignificant, minute, compact, involvement, implication, screenings, activity; (adj)
microscopic, miniature, slight accomplice, plot suppressive
colossus: (n) behemoth, monster, compliments: (n) respects, concentric: (adj) homocentric,
Goliath, titan, personage, hulk, ogre, commendation, wish, greetings, unrelieved, coaxial, axial, focal,
anomaly, heavyweight salutation, respect, applause, azygous, umbilical
combative: (adj) aggressive, flattery, acclamation, regards, conciliator: (n) mediator, arbitrator,
pugnacious, argumentative, approbation moderator, intermediary, negotiator,
bellicose, agonistic, warlike, compline: (n) complin, evensong pacifier, referee, appeaser, judge,
agonistical, martial, quarrelsome, complying: (adj) compliant, intermediator, arbiter
fighting; (adj, v) contentious. submissive, consenting, conclave: (n) congress, caucus,
ANTONYMS: (adj) compromising, complaisant, assentive; (adj, v) convocation, meeting, vestry,
pacifistic, passive, peaceful, tractable; (v) willing, commodious, consistory, conventicle, convention,
peaceable chosen, causing ease; (n) agreement synod, gathering, conference
combing: (n) hairdressing, search, compose: (v) build, compile, write, concourse: (n) assemblage, swarm,
combing waste, cockscomb weave; (adj, v) appease, tranquilize, multitude, throng, company,
comedian: (n) clown, buffoon, comic, allay, lull; (n, v) calm, constitute, merging, crowd, aggregation,
actor, joker, performer, jester, settle. ANTONYMS: (v) destroy, meeting, gathering, legion
entertainer, zany, comedians, ruin, unsettle, annihilate, condensed: (adj) concise,
jokester discompose, demolish, disturb, compressed, concentrated, succinct,
comer: (n) newcomer, arriver, fluster compact, summary, compendious,
traveler, traveller, contender, composing: (v) compose, comprise, short, shortened; (adj, v) condense;
competitor, competition, visitor, constitute; (adj, v) component; (n) (n) tabloid. ANTONYMS: (adj)
whiz kid, Young Turk; (adj) fresh composition, arranging, loose, uncondensed, diluted,
comet: (n) Ariel, iris, Dendrocometes, arrangement, placement, makeup, expanded, convoluted, long
celestial body constitution, manufacturing condescension: (n) arrogance,
comical: (adj) funny, comic, composure: (n) calmness, serenity, lordliness, disparagement,
laughable, absurd, humorous, poise, calm, equanimity, temper, patronage, affability, disdain, pride,
ridiculous, zany, droll, jocose, aplomb, tranquillity, peace, superciliousness, contempt, stoop,
grotesque, jocular. ANTONYMS: temperament, disposition. depreciation. ANTONYMS: (n)
(adj) tragic, sad, grave, solemn, ANTONYMS: (n) panic, respect, acceptance, admiration
unfunny, dull, sensible discomposure, anger, nervousness, condiment: (n) relish, dressing,
commandingly: (adv) peremptorily, perturbation, anxiety, agitation, flavoring, sauce, catsup, chutney,
Victor Hugo 643
flavour, flavouring, seasoner, spice, conjured: (adj) invented, made up, corrosive; (v) grating, searching,
paste pretended, untrue. ANTONYM: grinding, racking; (n) consumption,
condone: (v) remit, pardon, tolerate, (adj) factual wasting
forgive, justify, overlook, permit, conjuring: (n) magic, hocus-pocus, consummated: (adj) perfected, done,
brook, let, condoning, let pass. incantation, sorcery, witchcraft, fulfilled; (v) completed, crowned
ANTONYMS: (v) censure, sleight of hand, adjuration, figgum, consumptive: (adj) hectic, wasteful,
denounce, prevent, punish, forbid, conjury, evocation; (adj) magical harmful, emaciated, constitutional,
acknowledge connoisseur: (n) critic, authority, cadaverous, phthisical; (n) sufferer,
confectionery: (n) sweet, candy store, specialist, expert, cognoscenti, wasting, lunger, invalid
candy, bakery, sweetmeat, comfit, savant, scholar, gourmet, arbiter, contagious: (adj) catching,
confectionary, goody, goodies, epicurean; (v) judge. ANTONYMS: communicable, pestiferous,
dessert, patisserie (n) dabbler, tyro transmissible, epidemic,
confessing: (v) confess conqueror: (n) champion, winner, transmittable, poisonous, spreading,
confessor: (n) priest, penitentiary, subjugator, vanquisher, hero, pestilent; (n) infection; (v) infect.
communicator, shriver, minister, superior, defeater, subduer, invader, ANTONYMS: (adj) noncontagious,
Holy Father, father colonist, Alexander. ANTONYM: (n) noninfectious
confiding: (adj) unsuspecting, loser contended: (adj) controversial
trustful, artless, credulous, consecrate: (n, v) sanctify; (v) devote, contending: (adj) contentious,
untutored, ingenu, inartificial, lain, commit, ordain, apply, dedicate, conflicting, competitive, competing,
simple, unaffected, unsophisticated hallow, vow, exalt; (adj) dedicated, competitory, combatant,
conflagration: (n) blaze, inferno, consecrated. ANTONYMS: (v) challenging, factious, militant,
flame, wildfire, combustion, despoil, revile, damage, defile, warlike, fighting
holocaust, burning, bonfire, deprecate; (adj) desecrated contends: (v) contend
empyrosis, flagration; (n, v) consecrated: (adj) consecrate, blessed, contented: (adj) content, happy,
deflagration sanctified, hallowed, holy, comfortable, quiet, cheerful, smug,
confound: (v) bewilder, baffle, dedicated, divine, devoted, adopted; complacent, satisfied, easy, proud,
nonplus, perplex, astonish, puzzle, (adj, prep) set apart; (prep) dedicate. delighted. ANTONYMS: (adj)
amaze, astound, mistake; (adj, v) ANTONYM: (adj) secular discontented, unhappy, depressed,
confuse, stupefy. ANTONYMS: (v) consecration: (adj, n) dedication; (n) unsatisfied, sad, anxious
explain, clarify, comfort, lose, blessing, devotion, celebration, contentment: (n) content, happiness,
distinguish; (n) understanding ordination, sanctification, pleasure, fulfillment, ease, delight,
confounded: (adj) bemused, canonization, loyalty, translation; comfort, complacency, bliss, joy,
accursed, execrable, baffled, cursed, (adj) enshrinement, glorification. contentedness. ANTONYMS: (n)
befuddled, confused, puzzled, ANTONYM: (n) violation dissatisfaction, sadness, discomfort,
aghast, perplexed; (adj, v) abashed consoling: (adj) consolatory, discontentment, misery,
confounding: (adj) baffling, puzzling, cheering, encouraging, grateful, unhappiness, displeasure,
contradictory, devious, difficult, reassuring, soothing, calming; (n) discontent, panic, anxiety
marvelous, misleading, astounding; encouragement. ANTONYM: (adj) contiguous: (adj) adjoining, close,
(v) confound; (n) misunderstanding, upsetting conterminous, abutting, near,
confusion constantinople: (n) Stambul, nearby, immediate, bordering upon,
confusedly: (adv) obscurely, Stamboul bordering, touching, connected.
disorderedly, perplexedly, cloudily, consternation: (n) alarm, shock, fear, ANTONYMS: (adj) remote,
dazedly, befuddledly, muddily, apprehension, astonishment, fright, removed, separated, apart
bemusedly, dizzily, bewilderedly, confusion; (adj, n) terror, awe, contingents: (n) reinforcements,
puzzledly dread, horror. ANTONYMS: (n) succors, supplies, reenforcements
congealed: (adj) firm, solidify, frozen, peacefulness, composure, continuance: (n) duration, abidance,
jelled, jellied, stiff, thick, concrete happiness, tranquility, hopefulness, existence, endurance, protraction,
congratulatory: (adj) gratulatory, comfort, equanimity adjournment, resumption,
festive, congratulant, triumphant, constrain: (v) confine, compel, force, prolongation, time, standing,
prideful, glowing, fulsome, make, drive, bind, curb, bridle, perseverance. ANTONYMS: (n)
admiring, felicitous, obligate, require, restrain. discontinuation, destruction
commemorative, appreciative ANTONYMS: (v) liberate, contorted: (adj) crooked, bent,
conical: (adj) pyramidal, tapering, encourage, free, release, broaden, writhed, writhen, deformed,
copped, conelike, coniform, taper, extend distorted, wry, twist, misshapen,
cone, tapered, coppled, pointed consubstantial: (adj) coessential, perverted, malformed
conjuncture: (n) event, coincidence, similar, consubstantiate contour: (n) contour line, outline,
case, condition, emergency, consul: (n) diplomat, chancellor, form, profile, shape, line,
situation, combination, connection, legate, diplomatist, internuncio, configuration, silhouette, curve,
accident, circumstances; (adj) crisis nuncio, proconsul, envoy, circuit, edge. ANTONYM: (n) core
conjure: (v) invoke, entreat, arouse, ambassador, provost, warden contrition: (n) compunction,
juggle, bewitch, beseech, bid, consuming: (adj) blazing, repentance, regret, remorse,
conjure up, evoke, implore, bring up overwhelming, burning, absorbing, contriteness, penance, sorrow,
shame, abrasion, attrition; (v) blockade, obstacle, bays, hurdle, counterbalanced, opposing,
confrication. ANTONYMS: (n) circle opposed, conflicting; (n) polyphony,
pride, apathy, indifference, cordova: (n) Cordoba, Francisco foiling, concerted music
shamelessness Fernandez Cordoba courteous: (adj, v) civil; (adj) affable,
contrive: (v) plan, invent, design, cordovan: (n) cordwain attentive, gracious, decorous,
concoct, devise, cast, concert, cords: (n) trousers, bands, line, chivalrous, bland, thoughtful,
excogitate, frame, formulate; (n, v) strings, corduroys, raised bands urbane, mannerly, gentlemanly.
manage. ANTONYMS: (v) corinthian: (n) Aristarchus, ANTONYMS: (adj) rude, impolite,
demolish, destroy, ruin, waste, euphemist, arbiter elegantiarum, boorish, insulting, unmannerly,
wreck, fail Stagirite, hedonist, virtuoso, critic, gruff, improper, vulgar, unhelpful,
converse: (n, v) chat, discourse, conoscente, dilettante, amateur, neglectful, graceless
argue; (v) confer, confabulate, speak; judge courtesan: (n) mistress, paramour,
(n) conversation, colloquy, contrast; cornice: (n) architrave, zoophorus, prostitute, concubine, advoutress,
(adj, n) opposite; (adj) counter. entablature, epistyle, framing, fille de joie, punk, fancy woman,
ANTONYMS: (adj, n) equal; (adj) framework, pediment, projection, harlot, strumpet, amorosa
similar, complementary; (n) sconce; (v) furnish, provide courtier: (n) aristocrat, official,
similarity corollary: (n) consequence, aftermath, attendant, suckling
convulsion: (adj, n, v) spasm; (n) fit, result, rider, effect, reasoning, courting: (n) wooing, courtship,
paroxysm, commotion, attack, outcome, upshot, implication, bundling, appeal, attraction, case,
clonus, shake, seizure, upheaval, ramification; (adj) consequent causa, cause, flirtation, suit
cramp; (adj, n) disturbance. coronet: (n) corona, chaplet, tiara, coverlet: (n) blanket, bedspread,
ANTONYM: (n) peace snood, necklace, circlet, wreath, cover, bedcover, bed cover,
convulsions: (n) convulsion, spasm, diadem, cap of maintenance, laurel, tarpaulin, drugget, coverlid, spread,
epilepsy, eclampsia, mirth ribbon mantle, quilt
convulsive: (adj) spastic, galvanic, correcting: (n) amendment, covertly: (adv) surreptitiously,
fitful, paroxysmal, violent, choreic, correction, rectification, adjustment, furtively, privately, clandestinely,
unsteady, hysterical; (v) unquiet, compensation, reading stealthily, privily, underhandedly,
restless, saltatory corrosive: (adj) acid, erosive, acrid, undercoverly, mysteriously,
convulsively: (adv) spasmodically, biting, sarcastic, destructive, obscurely, quietly. ANTONYMS:
paroxysmally, spasticly, with vitriolic, acerbic, bitter, stringent, (adv) blatantly, overtly, publicly,
convulsions acrimonious. ANTONYMS: (adj) brazenly
coolness: (n) chill, cool, composure, supporting, fortifying, gentle covey: (adj, n) bevy, shoal, herd; (n)
assurance, cold, calmness, corrupted: (adj) tainted, rotten, cluster, school, assemblage, group,
alienation, frigidity, equanimity, spoiled, degraded, adulterated, party; (adj) drove, flock, flight
chilliness, poise. ANTONYMS: (n) depraved, distorted, decayed, cowardly: (adj, adv) dastardly,
friendliness, panic, approachability, impaired, debased; (n) corrupter. scared, shrinking; (adj) timid, afraid,
mustiness, turbulence, agitation ANTONYM: (adj) pure craven, gutless, sneaky,
coppersmith: (n) journeyman, corsage: (n) bouquet, bodice, corset, fainthearted, faint; (adv) recreantly.
artificer, artisan posy, waist, corselet, spray, ANTONYMS: (adj, adv) brave,
coquetry: (v) captation, buttonhole, brassiere, nosegay, slip daring, bold, courageous; (adj)
obsequiousness, sentimentalism, cortege: (adj, n) retinue; (n) suite, intrepid, fearless, strong,
sycophancy, mock modesty, escort, entourage, train, court, determined; (adv) dauntless, gutsy,
minauderie, toadeating, flunkeyism, gathering; (n, v) procession; (v) unafraid
prudery; (n) dalliance, invitation cavalcade, caravan; (adj) rank and cower: (v) crouch, cringe, wince,
coquettish: (adj) flirtatious, coy, file grovel, flinch, shrink, sneak, squat,
kittenish, charming, coquet, arch, cothurnus: (n) Melpomene and blench; (n, v) skulk; (n) funk.
fickle Thalia, histrionic art, sock, ANTONYMS: (v) swagger,
cordial: (adj) genial, warm, affable, theatricals, Thespis, dramaturgy intimidate
amiable, friendly, genuine, ardent, coughing: (n) coughs, breathing out cowering: (adv) cowardly; (adj)
unaffected, gracious, honest; (n) counterfeit: (adj, n, v) sham; (n, v) fawning, squat, subservient
liqueur. ANTONYMS: (adj) copy, duplicate; (adj, v) mock, cowl: (n) bonnet, cowling, kerchief,
unfriendly, stern, cold, cool, falsify; (adj) false, artificial, protection, helmet, cow, condition,
disagreeable, aloof, reserved, assumed; (adj, n) imitation; (v) chock, soe, tonsure
distant, rude, uncordial, unpleasant forge, ape. ANTONYMS: (adj) crabbed: (adj) abstruse, sour,
cordially: (adv) warmly, genially, genuine, real, authentic, true, actual; grumpy, morose, crusty, surly,
kindly, sincerely, heartfeltly, (n) original churlish, moody, irritable, huffy;
ardently, friendly, jovially, counterfeiter: (n) coiner, forger, (adj, n) austere
earnestly, affectionately, cheater, cheat, fabricator, deceiver, crabs: (n) pediculosis pubis, order
harmoniously. ANTONYMS: (adv) faker, falsifier, trickster, Decapoda, Decapoda, Crustacea,
disagreeably, frostily paperhanger, literary pirate sexually transmitted disease,
cordon: (n) zone, band, ribbon, counterpoint: (v) differ, oppose, be returns, barnacles, venereal disease
Littoral cordon, insignia, chain, different; (adj) corresponding, cracker: (n) banger, biscuit,
Victor Hugo 645
firecracker, firework, soda cracker, crescendo: (n) swell, intensity, crucifixion: (v) cruciation,
pyrotechnics, favor; (v) squib, volume, loudness, culmination, impalement; (n) executing, death,
popgun, gun, doughnut apogee; (adv) diminuendo, martyrdom, capital punishment,
crackers: (adj) nuts, mad, kooky, rallentando, staccato, legato; (adj) excruciation, execution
nutty, loony, bats, barmy, haywire, increasing cruelly: (adv) harshly, ferociously,
crazy, dotty, bonkers crevice: (n) cleft, break, chink, cranny, fiercely, viciously, inhumanly,
crackled: (adj) alligatored, crazed, chap, fissure, interstice, rift, gap, mercilessly, pitilessly, heartlessly,
barmy, damaged, crackers, chapped, hole, fracture roughly, unkindly; (adj, adv)
buggy, bonkers, batty, bats, balmy crimson: (adj, n) carmine, ruby, bitterly. ANTONYMS: (adv) kindly,
crackling: (adj, n) crisp; (adj) scarlet, maroon; (v) blush, flush, mercifully, sympathetically, tamely,
snapping, crepitant, cheerful, brittle, redden; (adj) bloody, ruddy, cherry; peacefully, humanely,
noisy; (n) crepitation, decrepitation, (n) deep red compassionately, sensitively,
crackleware, crackle China, cripple: (adj, v) maim, prostrate; (v) respectfully, innocently, genially
bohemian crackle mutilate, enfeeble, injure, crumble: (v) decay, shatter, perish,
crafty: (adj) cunning, adroit, sly, incapacitate, weaken, becripple; (n, crush, fragment, decompose, fall
astute, artful, wily, clever, tricky, v) damage; (n) invalid; (adj) apart, disintegrate, break down,
shifty, designing, scheming. paralyze. ANTONYMS: (v) support, collapse; (adj, v) crack.
ANTONYMS: (adj) naive, open, strengthen, invigorate, help, fortify, ANTONYMS: (v) build, resist
honest, guileless, artless, enable, aid crumbled: (adj) rotten, fragmented
straightforward, trustworthy, croaking: (adj) hollow, raucous, crumbling: (adj, v) moldering,
ingenuous, blatant, straight sepulchral, dry, cacophonic, harsh, ramshackle; (adj) rotten,
cramps: (n) spasm guttural, gruff, croaky, dilapidated, worn out; (n) ruin,
crape: (n, v) curl; (n) French pancake, cacophonous, husky decay, disintegration,
hotcake, flapcake, flapjack, crock: (n) jar, vat, suede crock, fragmentation; (v) waterlogged,
griddlecake, pancake, battercake; container, banger, urn, jalopy, bowl, tainted. ANTONYM: (adj) pristine
(adj, v) crimp; (adj) deep mourning, amphora; (v) begrime, smut crupper: (n) strap, poop, stern,
weeds crocodile: (n) alacran, octopus, crouper, heelpiece
craving: (n) appetite, addiction, mosquito, crocodilian, mugger crutch: (n, v) support; (n) staff, groin,
appetence, eagerness, hankering, cromlech: (n) dolmen, megalith, stick, prop, ankle, stilt, crutches,
yen, hunger; (n, v) desire, tumulus, barrow, cairn, quoit, tope zigzag, sickle, scythe
appetency; (adj, n) longing; (adj) crone: (n) beldam, beldame, hag, crystallization: (n) crystallisation,
eager. ANTONYMS: (n) disgust, grandmother, old woman, crony, crystal, crystallizing, condensation,
hatred, distaste, repulsion, aversion, witch chemical phenomenon, crystallurgy,
apathy, disinclination; (adj) crooked: (adj) bent, corrupt, efflorescence, formation; (adj)
unconcerned, disinterested dishonest, curved, unfair, deformed; precipitation; (v) crystallize
creak: (v) pipe, screech, twang, (adj, n, v) awry; (adj, v) irregular, cubit: (v) foot, hand, inch, line, nail,
skreigh, resound, jangle, gnash, askew, wry, indirect. ANTONYMS: palm; (n) coudee
confess; (n) creaking; (adv) (adj) straight, honest, principled, cudgel: (n) bludgeon, truncheon,
creakingly; (adj) ancient even, aboveboard, lawful, level, stick, staff, switch, mace, baton; (v)
creaking: (adj, v) creaky; (adj) moral, flat, aligned, honorable beat, bat, hit, drub
squeaking, harsh, screaky, noisy, cropping: (n) harvest, napping, cuffs: (n) handcuffs, manacles,
arthritic; (v) rickety; (n) screak masking manacle, handcuff, shackles, fetters,
credo: (n) faith, belief, gospel, crosier: (n) staff, fiddlehead bond, bonds, handlock, chains
doctrine, persuasion, ism, dogma, crossbow: (n) balister, bow, arbalest, cuirass: (v) breastplate, fender,
principle, thinking, testament, sling, arcubalist, catapult, latch armor, mask, thimble, shield,
statement of belief crouch: (v) bend, couch, cringe, squat, scutum, aegis; (n) coat of mail,
credulous: (adj) gullible, sneak, bow, huddle, stoop, lie down, hauberk, body armor
unsuspecting, simple, unsuspicious, crawl, hunch culprit: (adj, n) convict; (n)
unquestioning, green, trusting, crouching: (adj) sneaking, huddled, delinquent, accused, malefactor,
unwary, innocent, believing, obsequious, squat, hunkered, perpetrator, transgressor, prisoner,
illogical. ANTONYMS: (adj) cowering, hunkered down; (v) sinner, offender; (adj) guilty, felon
suspicious, wary, disbelieving, submissive, resigned curfew: (n) rescript, deadline, decree,
suspecting, skeptical, cynical, crowning: (adj) top, ultimate, dusk, edict, eleventh hour, fiat,
untrusting, shrewd, rational, smart, topmost, complementary, final; (adj, order, signaling, signal, twilight
mistrustful v) paramount, supreme; (n) curling: (adj) curled, curly, moving,
crenelated: (adj) crenellated, tapering, coronation, finishing piece; curled up; (adv) curlingly; (n)
battlemented, castled, crenelate, (v) preeminent. ANTONYMS: (adj) croquet, pallone, polo, tipcat, golf,
indented, fancy, embattled, bathetic, indecisive curling edge
crenellate, cleft, fancier crozier: (n) crosier, staff curses: (n) abuse
crenellated: (adj) crenelated, castled, crucible: (n) melting pot, retort, cursing: (adj) cursed, execrative; (n)
castellated, battlemented, crenelate, calabash, touchstone, still, vessel, blasphemy, anathema, swearing,
embattled, fancier, fancy, indented matrix, pix, reagent, ordeal, check swear word, malediction,
execration, denunciation, moistness, moisture, wet, wetness, conscious
cursedness; (v) beshrew vapor, dankness, drizzle, heat, dazzled: (adj) confused, dazzle,
curt: (adj) concise, brief, abrupt, short, mugginess. ANTONYMS: (n) bewildered, blind, blinder,
brusque, crisp, terse, laconic, rude, dryness, smoothness, freshness fascinated, unsighted
churlish, crusty. ANTONYMS: (adj) damsel: (n) demoiselle, damosel, dazzlement: (v) resplendence
polite, friendly, courteous, gracious, damozel, damoiselle, wench, deacon: (n) clergyman, Protestant
civil, lengthy, rambling, voluble, maiden, maid, girl, nymph, deacon, Catholic deacon, minister,
caring, loquacious, convoluted unmarried woman, virgin deaconess, church officer; (v) offer
custos: (n) guard, warder, gaoler, dappled: (adj) speckled, motley, sacrifice, deny oneself, fast, doctor,
jailer, ranger, turnkey, keeper, flecked, dapple, freckled, spotty, falsify
castellan spotted, dotted, multicolored, deafen: (adj) stun, render deaf; (v)
cutlass: (n) sword, cutlas, steel, knife, brindled, brindle. ANTONYMS: desensitize, soften, weaken, muffle,
saber, machete, dirk, dagger, (adj) sunny, spotless, monochrome, deave, dampen, blindfold
scimitar, poniard, stylet uniform deafened: (adj) dead, deaf corn,
cutpurse: (n) pickpocket, dip, Moll darkly: (adv) murkily, dimly, stunned, deadened
Cutpurse, thief, angle of dip obscurely, duskily, somberly, deafening: (adj) earsplitting,
cyclopean: (adj) huge, gigantic, giant, shadily, mistily, secretly, dismally, thunderous, shrill, piercing, noisy,
colossal, gargantuan, prodigious, heavily, overcastly. ANTONYM: massive, roaring, enormous,
Brobdingnagian, Cyclopic, jumbo, (adv) openly gigantic, tremendous; (v)
Atlantean dark-skinned: (adj) swarthy thundering. ANTONYM: (adj)
cyclops: (adj) Antaeus, atlas, dart: (n, v) dash, run, flit; (v) bound, tranquil
Brobdingnagian, Hercules, flash, shoot, rush, race, gallop; (adj, deafness: (n) deaf, surdity, acute
superman, Samson, mammoth; (adj, n) arrow, rocket. ANTONYMS: (v) suppurative otitis media, hearing
n) giant; (n) flat, Simple Simon, plod, trudge, slog, linger, dawdle, loss
water flea dally, delay, amble; (n) tonic deathblow: (v) finishing stroke; (n)
dagger: (n) bodkin, sword, blade, darting: (adj) arrowy, moving; (v) quietus, blow of mercy, sudden
obelisk, knife, stiletto, dirk, cutlass, Sally death
grapheme, saber, skean dashing: (adj) stylish, dapper, debarring: (n) debarment
dainties: (n) delicacies, food, cates gallant, showy, smart, snappy, debauch: (v) corrupt, debase,
daintiness: (adj, n) frailty, fragility, impetuous, rakish, raffish, brave; deprave, demoralize, vitiate, violate,
weakness, dainty; (n) fineness, (adj, n) spruce. ANTONYMS: (adj) whore, pollute; (n) Saturnalia, orgy;
loveliness, niceness, fastidiousness, boring, unstylish, dull, bumbling, (n, v) riot. ANTONYMS: (v)
finesse, refinement, nicety. bland, awkward, drab, graceless upgrade, praise, laud, elevate, honor
ANTONYMS: (n) inelegance, datum: (n) fact, data point, datum debauchery: (n) dissipation,
sturdiness, ugliness plane, material, given, information, depravity, revel, excess,
dainty: (adj, v) nice; (adj, n, v) datum horizon, datum level, dissoluteness, riot, revelry, orgy,
delicacy; (adj) fastidious, savory, statistics, note, reading vice, bacchanal, Bacchanalia.
tasteful, squeamish, particular, daub: (n, v) smear, splotch, smudge; ANTONYMS: (n) chastity,
mincing, refined; (adj, n) tidbit; (n) (v) spread, besmear, plaster, coat, uprightness, decency, restraint
luxury. ANTONYMS: (adj) coarse, bedaub, stain; (n) blot, spot debouch: (v) issue, disembogue,
vulgar, rough, inelegant, harsh, daubed: (adj) beplastered, covered, effuse, March out, process, emerge,
gross, awkward, accepting, heavy, greasy start, march, come out, discharge
careless, thick dauby: (adj) adhesive, glutinous, itself, extravasate
dais: (n) platform, podium, rostrum, smeary decadence: (n) degeneracy,
stage, chair, pedestal, pulpit, seat, dauphin: (n) crown prince deterioration, decadency, decay,
ambo, woolsack, estrade dauphiness: (n) dauphine decline, degradation, depravity,
damascened: (n) fancier dawning: (n) daybreak, sunrise, start, degeneration, become rotten,
damask: (n) fabric, napery, purple, beginning, aurora, cockcrow, become gangrenous, downfall.
magenta, red, fancier, cloth dayspring, morning, birth, first ANTONYMS: (n) restraint,
damnable: (adj) cursed, damned, light, break of day. ANTONYM: (n) righteousness, parsimony, decency
abominable, hateful, accursed, sunset decapitate: (v) decollate,
devilish, infernal, disgusting, sinful, daybreak: (adj, n) break of day; (n) decapitation, guillotine, kill, execute,
deplorable, offensive. ANTONYMS: sunrise, prime, morning, light, head, murder, top, unhead
(adj) commendable, laudable, dawning, cockcrow, dayspring, decayed: (adj) spoiled, corrupt,
praiseworthy aurora, sunup, daylight. dilapidated, rank, rusty, rotting,
damnation: (n) damn, condemnation, ANTONYMS: (n) sunset, sundown, decaying, rotted, putrid; (adj, v)
anathema, state, curse, execration, darkness, eventide, nightfall wasted; (v) stale. ANTONYMS: (adj)
judgment, oath, imprecation, dazed: (adj) bewildered, stunned, matured, restored, strengthened
denunciation, denouncement dumbfounded, muzzy, stupefied, decaying: (adj) rotten, decayed,
damoiselle: (n) damosel, maiden, dizzy, stupid, groggy, amazed, rotting, stale, decadent, stinking,
maid, demoiselle, damozel, damsel astounded, bleary. ANTONYMS: decomposed, smelly, shabby, seedy;
dampness: (n) clamminess, humidity, (adj) indifferent, unimpressed, (n) fading. ANTONYM: (adj)
Victor Hugo 647
pristine contorted, warped, shapeless, capitulate, desiccate, surrender,
deceive: (v) cheat, circumvent, twisted, deform. ANTONYMS: (adj) parch, dry, dehydrate
bamboozle, pretend, hoax, fool, beautiful, flawless, unflawed, demoiselle: (n) damosel, damozel,
cozen, trick, beguile; (n, v) dupe; (n) perfect, straight miss, damoiselle, damselfish,
fraud. ANTONYMS: (v) guide, deformity: (n) malformation, percoid, percoidean, girl, maid,
inform, undeceive, protect disfigurement, defect, blemish, maiden, wench
deceived: (adj) mistaken, misguided disfiguration, defacement, disability, demolish: (v) defeat, break,
decipher: (v) interpret, explain, solve, abnormality, distortion, clubfoot; annihilate, destroy, devastate, crush,
decode, translate, disentangle, (adj, n) irregularity batter, raze, blast, break down,
resolve, construe, read, decrypt, defunct: (adj) deceased, inanimate, smash. ANTONYMS: (v) build,
discover. ANTONYMS: (v) encode, late, extinct, departed, lifeless; (n) construct, fix, preserve, produce,
code, encipher, scramble, confuse reliquiae, dust, earth, mortal restore, create, inflate, assemble,
decked: (adj) bedecked, decked out, remains, relics. ANTONYMS: (adj) support
ornamented, decorated, festooned existing, thriving, surviving, demolishing: (n) devastation,
decorously: (adv) fitly, becomingly, operating, alive, current destruction, disposal, leveling,
properly, seemly, courteously, deign: (v) lower oneself, vouchsafe, razing, tearing down
fittingly, appropriately, modestly, stoop, descend, lower, grant, move, demoniac: (adj) diabolic, devilish,
sedately, correctly, politely. stoop to, allow, fall, come from possessed, demoniacal, amuck,
ANTONYMS: (adv) rudely, boldly dejection: (n) discouragement, amok, berserk, violent; (n) fiend,
decrepit: (adj) infirm, senile, feeble, depression, sadness, despair, monster, ogre
effete, seedy, worn, dilapidated, sorrow, woe, grief, melancholy, demonstrator: (n) protester,
shabby, old, rickety, frail. blues, desolation, despondency. instructor, salesperson, reformist,
ANTONYMS: (adj) fit, strong, ANTONYMS: (n) cheerfulness, teacher, dissenter, marcher,
sound, robust, powerful, healthy, ecstasy, encouragement, meliorist, reformer,
hearty, sturdy hopefulness, joy, cheer demonstrationist, sales
decretal: (v) decretory; (n) edict, ex delicacies: (n) food, delices, cates, demonstrator
cathedra pronouncement, regalia denounce: (v) censure, decry, accuse,
ordination, writ, bull delightfully: (adv) pleasantly, brand, criticize, damn, reproach,
deem: (v) believe, assume, consider, enchantingly, exquisitely, gladly, excoriate, betray, arraign, scold.
count, hold, think, feel, view, charmingly, finely, sweetly, ANTONYMS: (v) commend,
suppose, regard, imagine. deliciously, beautifully, merrily; compliment, honor, laud, approve,
ANTONYMS: (v) disregard, doubt (adv, v) happily. ANTONYMS: support
deepen: (v) intensify, amplify, (adv) unattractively, horribly, denouncing: (v) denounce; (adj)
develop, rise, redouble, heighten, disagreeably disparaging, critical, reproving,
strengthen, raise, magnify, increase, delirious: (adj) crazy, wild, frantic, censorious, disapproving
darken. ANTONYMS: (v) lower, wandering, demented, excited, denticulation: (n) denticle, jag, barb,
contract, shorten, reduce, lessen, insane, mad, frenetic, doting, drunk. cleft
decrease, lighten, diminish ANTONYMS: (adj) unexcited, denuded: (adj) naked, denudate,
deep-set: (adj) hollow rational, composed, relaxed, bald, exposed, stripped, bereft,
defacing: (n) defacement, violation reasonable, balanced, lucid, bereaved, devoid, bleak, barefaced;
defer: (v) adjourn, postpone, comply, collected, clearheaded, calm, (v) minus
procrastinate, bow, suspend, retard, dejected departing: (adj, v) parting; (adj, n)
accede, protract; (adj, v) put off; (n, delirium: (n) craze, insanity, mania, leaving, going away; (adj) outgoing,
v) delay. ANTONYMS: (v) advance, disturbance, fever, ecstasy, outbound, outward, passing,
rush, hurry, hasten, forge, disagree, derangement; (adj, n) fury; (adj) decedent, valedictory, retiring; (v)
expedite, continue, resist furor, rage, distraction. depart. ANTONYM: (n) arrival
defiled: (adj) impure, polluted, dirty, ANTONYMS: (n) indifference, depleted: (adj) low, wasted, spent,
maculate, debauched, contaminated, dejection drained, tired, consumed, poor,
corrupt, violated, tainted, abusive, deliverer: (n) saviour, deliveryman, infertile, impoverished, useless,
adulterate. ANTONYMS: (adj) redeemer, rescuer, bailor, Christ, empty. ANTONYMS: (adj) refilled,
hallowed, purified, sanctified, individual, human, somebody, renewed, replaced, replenished,
cleansed, untarnished person, helper restocked, increased
defiling: (adj) impious, infectious; (n) deluding: (adj) commanding, deplorable: (adj) sad, wretched,
inquination circumventive, beguiling, false, criminal, calamitous, abominable,
definiteness: (n) certainty, imposing, hypocritical, fallacious, pitiful, lamentable, miserable,
conclusiveness, accuracy, exactness, deceptive, delusive, misleading regrettable, sorry; (adj, v) woeful.
finality, decisiveness, definition, deluge: (adj, v) inundate; (n) ANTONYMS: (adj) acceptable,
predictability, intelligibility, cataclysm, downpour, cloudburst, pleasing, laudable, happy, cheerful,
resolution, expressness. torrent, debacle; (v) overrun, admirable, agreeable, excellent,
ANTONYM: (n) uncertainty overwhelm; (n, v) overflow, surge, fortunate, praiseworthy
deformed: (adj) distorted, misshapen, stream. ANTONYMS: (n) drought, depraved: (adj) bad, immoral, base,
bent, malformed, ugly, crippled, abatement, trickle, lack; (v) drain, abandoned, debauched, vicious,
wicked, degenerate, evil, perverse, bankrupt, broke, poor, helpless, voraginous, ravenous; (n) fire
perverted. ANTONYMS: (adj) good, impecunious, penniless, necessitous; devout: (adj) pious, devoted, saintly,
virtuous, just, chaste, noble, pure, (adj, v) forlorn, devoid. heartfelt, holy, dear, devotional,
righteous, upright, ethical, innocent ANTONYMS: (adj) wealthy, hearty, earnest; (adj, v) pure; (adj, n)
derision: (n) contempt, mockery, privileged, prosperous, solvent godly. ANTONYMS: (adj)
scorn, banter, jeering, disdain, scoff, detach: (v) disengage, part, break off, irreligious, agnostic, impious,
insult, irony, sport, gibe. unhook, remove, disentangle, cut irreverent, unbelieving, undevout,
ANTONYMS: (n) applause, esteem, off, disconnect, separate, dissociate; unholy, atheistic, secular,
admiration, praise, approval (n, v) detail. ANTONYMS: (v) uncommitted
derisive: (adj) ironic, sarcastic, fasten, add, associate, connect, unite, devoutly: (adv) sincerely, godly,
derisory, contemptuous, cynical, couple, link religiously, reverently, earnestly,
mordant, sardonic, jeering, scornful, detaching: (adj) peeling, disengaging, solemnly, heartily, holy, purely,
quizzical, satirical. ANTONYMS: shedding; (n) division heartfeltly, at heart
(adj) complimentary, approving, detestable: (adj) hateful, abhorrent, devoutness: (n) holiness, piety,
flattering, praising, sympathetic damnable, odious, offensive, religiousness, godliness, piousness,
desertion: (n) abandonment, despicable, execrable, horrible, consecration, religion, attachment,
defection, apostasy, dereliction, infamous; (adj, v) cursed; (adj, adv) fervor, earnestness, reverence
withdrawal, secession, rejection, atrocious. ANTONYMS: (adj) dexterity: (n) agility, cleverness,
decampment, exposure, leaving, admirable, adorable, sweet, ability, aptitude, skill, deftness,
disappearance. ANTONYMS: (n) loveable, lovable, likable, delightful, expertise; (adj, n) art, cunning; (n, v)
appearance, attention, preservation cherished, honorable, desirable, nice adroitness, address. ANTONYMS:
deserts: (n) desert, just deserts, due, detesting: (adj) abhorring, detestable, (n) clumsiness, awkwardness,
compensation, comeupance abhorrent; (n) execration, loathing ineptitude, inability, uselessness,
designate: (n, v) denominate, dethrone: (v) remove, uncrown, inexperience, ineptness, inaccuracy
appoint, note, name; (v) allocate, disenthrone, unthrone, oust, diabolical: (adj) diabolic, demoniac,
assign, delegate, define, allot, mark; overthrow, divest, displace, unseat, demonic, infernal, hellish, unholy,
(adj, n, v) denote. ANTONYMS: (v) deposit, disthronize. ANTONYMS: fiendish, wicked, satanic, atrocious,
disapprove, generalize, guess, (v) enthrone, throne, install evil
oppose, elect detonation: (adj, n, v) explosion, diabolically: (adv) fiendishly,
desirous: (adj) wistful, avid, burst; (n) bang, report, roar, infernally, satanically, wickedly,
ambitious, greedy, longing, eager, blowback; (adj, v) discharge; (adj) hellishly, demonically, deucedly,
hungry, covetous, envious, agog; blow up, bounce, rush; (v) salvo unholy, atrociously, devilish,
(adj, v) willing. ANTONYMS: (adj) detract: (v) depreciate, defame, brutally
undesirous, reluctant, undesiring, derogate, deprecate, traduce, diadem: (n) crown, coronet, tiara,
unconcerned disparage, lose, cut, slander, circlet, sovereignty, headdress, crest,
desolate: (adj, v) desert, forlorn; (adj) subtract, damage. ANTONYMS: (v) power, capitulum, cap of
bare, barren, alone, bleak, deserted, increase, heighten, enhance maintenance, crown jewels
cheerless, disconsolate; (v) deuce: (n) devil, couple, two, dyad, dialogues: (n) dialog
devastate, destroy. ANTONYMS: demon, duo, duet, Twain, Dickens, diametrically: (adv) utterly, totally,
(adj) cheerful, inhabited, happy, brace, craps oppositely, polarly, diametrally,
sheltered, mobbed, overcrowded, devastate: (adj, v) consume, destroy, exactly, altogether, entirely, wholly,
ecstatic, hopeful; (v) create, waste; (v) demolish, spoil, havoc, fairly, quite
construct, build ruin, annihilate, sack, wreck, ravage. diaphanous: (adj) sheer, filmy,
despairing: (adj) hopeless, desperate, ANTONYMS: (v) construct, help, gauzy, thin, translucent, lucid, clear,
despondent, forlorn, desolate, aid, improve, preserve, save, hyaline, gossamer, dainty, hyaloid.
dejected, pessimistic, sad, comfort, capitulate ANTONYMS: (adj) thick, opaque,
brokenhearted, miserable, devilish: (adj, v) diabolic, satanic, heavy, robust
inconsolable. ANTONYMS: (adj) infernal, mephistophelian, dictation: (n) command, bidding, bid,
hopeful, optimistic, rosy, happy, demoniacal; (adj) demonic, wicked, dictate, control, behest, charge,
confident, cheerful diabolical, terrific; (v) Stygian; (adv) commission, order, direction,
despise: (v) disdain, loathe, devilishly. ANTONYMS: (adj) commandment
depreciate, abhor, dislike, detest, cherubic, godlike, good, saintly, diffused: (adj) spread, dispersed,
slight, hate; (n, v) contemn; (n) virtuous dim, distributed, softened
contempt, deride. ANTONYMS: (v) devils: (n) unclean spirits digested: (adj) mature, digestible
respect, love, adore, appreciate, devour: (v) eat, bolt, gulp, demolish, dike: (n) channel, ditch, trench,
cherish, like, praise, accept guzzle, swallow, gorge, ingurgitate, embankment, jetty, bank, trough,
despoiled: (adj) plundered, looted, gobble, use up, absorb. weir, levee; (n, v) dyke; (v) bar
desecrated, sacked, assaulted, ANTONYMS: (v) avoid, abstain, dilapidated: (adj, v) bedraggled,
besmirched, corrupted, desolate, regurgitate, nibble, fast, sip frayed; (adj) decayed, decrepit,
desolated, destroyed, dishonored. devoured: (adj) eaten up derelict, shabby, worn out, rickety,
ANTONYM: (adj) untarnished devouring: (adv) devouringly; (adj) broken, ragged, damaged.
destitute: (adj) impoverished, needy, esurient, edacious, avid, greedy, ANTONYMS: (adj) pristine, elegant,
Victor Hugo 649
trim, tidy, thriving, sound, solid, comprehension, discretion, taste, haughty, scornful, arrogant, proud,
intact, sturdy, habitable understanding, insight, cavalier, derogatory, lordly,
dilapidation: (n) disrepair, discrimination, perception, condescending, derisive, sneering.
devastation, desolation, recognition. ANTONYMS: (n) ANTONYMS: (adj) respectful,
deterioration, ruin, collapse, neglect, ignorance, tastelessness, admiring, humble, approving,
decrepitude, waste, destruction, uncouthness, clumsiness warm, reverential, praising,
impairment discharging: (n) unloading, deferential
dilated: (adj) wide, inflated, discharge, fulfillment, acquittal; (v) disdainfully: (adv) contemptuously,
ampulliform unload superciliously, haughtily, proudly,
diligent: (adj) busy, active, assiduous, disciple: (n) adherent, follower, cavalierly, derogatorily,
painstaking, careful, earnest, devotee, scholar, pupil, believer, contumeliously, sneeringly,
studious, attentive, laborious, proselyte, cohort, learner, partisan, arrogantly, insultingly,
industrious, zealous. ANTONYMS: votary. ANTONYMS: (n) leader, condescendingly. ANTONYMS:
(adj) careless, negligent, dilatory, teacher, God, instructor (adv) humbly, hopefully
idle, inactive, languid, slack, discomfited: (adj) uncomfortable, ill disembark: (v) debark, land,
sluggish, lethargic, weary, indolent at ease, disappointed, embarrassed, dismount, go ashore, alight, come
dingy: (adj) dark, black, drab, dull, frustrated, thwarted, self-conscious, in, arrive, set down, descend,
muddy, impure, dim, seedy, dowdy, mortified, humiliated, unsuccessful; discharge, light. ANTONYMS: (v)
unclean, grimy. ANTONYMS: (adj) (adj, n) defeated board, depart
immaculate, spotless, sparkling, discomfiture: (n) embarrassment, disenchant: (v) disappoint,
bright, neat, brilliant, interesting, confusion, perturbation, discomfort, disillusion, disgust, shock,
smart discomfit, disconcertion, dishearten, repel, offend, unspell,
dint: (v) indent; (n) indentation, discomposure, humiliation, disencharm, discourage, decharm.
blow, strength, percussion, agency, consternation; (adj) rebuff, rout. ANTONYMS: (v) enchant, inspire
hollow, depression, might, ANTONYMS: (n) contentment, disenchanted: (adj) cynical,
impression; (adj) delve honor disappointed, worldly,
diogenes: (adj) troglodyte, solitaire, disconcerted: (adj) confused, sophisticated, blas, let down,
ruralist, santon, Timon of Athens; confounded, bewildered, blank, dissatisfied. ANTONYMS: (adj)
(n) cynic, Timon, misanthropist, embarrassed, disturbed, troubled, naive, satisfied, spellbound,
misanthrope, man hater, egotist worried, ashamed, entranced, idealistic
dipper: (n) shovel, spoon, Big Dipper, discombobulated, bemused. disengage: (v) discharge, detach,
scoop, butterball, bufflehead, Little ANTONYMS: (adj) composed, extricate, release, disconnect,
Dipper, plough, duck, oscine, soothed, unabashed, relaxed enfranchise; (adj, v) disentangle,
thimble discontinue: (v) stop, break, clear, disembarrass, free; (adj)
disagreeable: (adj) nasty, offensive, abandon, desist, break off, disencumber. ANTONYMS: (v)
uncomfortable, distasteful, terminate, cut off, quit, give up, fasten, engage, attach, connect,
cantankerous, cross, ungrateful, interrupt; (n, v) drop. ANTONYMS: tighten, obstruct, unite, couple, join,
abhorrent, horrible, bad, painful. (v) continue, restart, resume, start, activate, lock
ANTONYMS: (adj) pleasant, open, maintain, begin disengaged: (adj) vacant,
friendly, amiable, inoffensive, discord: (n, v) conflict, clash; (n) unemployed, disentangled, free,
acceptable, desirable, easygoing, disagreement, variance, division, freed, untrammelled, devoid,
happy, pleasing, sweet, nice difference, dissension, dissonance, unreserved, detached, liberated,
disarmed: (adj) harmless, prostrate strife, split, contention. loosened
disarrange: (v) derange, clutter, ANTONYMS: (n) agreement, disentangled: (adj) freed, free,
disorganize, muss, muddle, harmony, unity, accord, extricated, freer, loosened,
disorder, ruffle, perturb, shuffle, concordance, consent, silence, unsnarled
rumple, disturb. ANTONYMS: (v) concord; (v) match disfigure: (adj, v) mutilate, mangle,
arrange, order, tidy discouragement: (n) dismay, maim; (v) deform, blemish, mar,
disarranged: (adj) disheveled, disappointment, despair, determent, damage, contort, blot, ruin, injure.
disorderly, untidy, deranged, depression, deterrent, despondency, ANTONYMS: (v) beautify,
disturbed, delirious, disordered, check, dejection, dissuasion, alarm. embellish, adorn, heal, decorate,
unkempt, tousled, topsy-turvy, ANTONYMS: (n) incentive, boost, enhance, straighten
mussy. ANTONYM: (adj) neat hopefulness disfigured: (adj) crooked, ugly, spoil,
disarray: (n) confusion, chaos, mess, disdain: (n, v) despise, contemn, damage, deform, shabby, hurt,
clutter, disorderliness; (n, v) slight, ridicule; (n) contempt, shapeless, dishonest, stained,
disorder, jumble, litter; (v) derange, derision, arrogance, haughtiness, blemished
tumble, disarrange. ANTONYMS: pride; (v) scoff, disparage. disheartened: (adj) dejected,
(n, v) order; (n) neatness, ANTONYMS: (n) humility, depressed, despondent, dispirited,
orderliness, arrangement, admiration, reverence, worship, demoralized, disappointed, sad,
agreement, harmony approval, regard; (v) approve, downcast, down, low, daunted.
discernment: (n, v) appreciation, admire, praise, accept, participate ANTONYMS: (adj) cheerful,
sense, apprehension; (n) disdainful: (adj) supercilious, enthusiastic, happy, positive,
hopeful dislocation disputations: (adj) polemic
dishevelled: (adj) untidy, tousled, disordered: (adj) chaotic, upset, sick, disputing: (adj) opposed; (v)
messy, blowzy, rough, frowsy, disorganized, broken, incoherent, disputant
frowzy, unkempt, sloppy, slovenly; deranged, messy, disjointed, disquiet: (v) discompose, perturb; (n,
(v) bedraggled disconnected, ill. ANTONYMS: (adj) v) worry, alarm, trouble, disorder,
dishonorable: (adj) disgraceful, base, neat, ordered, organized, arranged, dismay, discomfort, concern; (n)
mean, ignoble, shameful, infamous, quiet, regulated, systematic, anxiety, apprehension.
unfair, disreputable, degrading, systematized, straightforward, tidy ANTONYMS: (n) reassurance, quiet,
wrong, unethical. ANTONYMS: disorderly: (adj) wild, disordered, tranquility, serenity, calmness,
(adj) honorable, noble, ethical, chaotic, boisterous, jumbled, optimism; (v) soothe, settle, relax,
glorious, respectable, admirable, disorganized, unruly, rowdy, compose, tranquilize
trustworthy, incorrupt, sporting, untidy, irregular; (adj, v) lawless. disrespect: (n) contempt, cheek,
reputable, professional ANTONYMS: (adj) orderly, neat, impertinence, neglect, blasphemy,
dishonored: (adj) shamed, arranged, peaceful, organized, impudence, disdain, insolence; (n, v)
discredited, shameful, corrupt, systematized, conforming, ordered, insult, slight; (v) disesteem.
damaged, disfigured, broken, restrained, behaved, coherent ANTONYMS: (n, v) respect; (n)
mortified, dishonest; (n) degraded, disorganized: (adj) chaotic, confused, admiration, regard, value,
derogate. ANTONYMS: (adj) messy, disorganised, disorderly, reverence, politeness, civility,
untarnished, pure jumbled, muddled, untidy, approval, decency, seriousness
disinclined: (adj) reluctant, loath, haphazard, pell-mell, random. dissembling: (adj) dissimulating,
averse, indisposed, loth, backward, ANTONYMS: (adj) methodical, insincere; (n) pretense, deception,
not content, opposed, dubious, neat, tidy, systematic, prepared, pretence, deceit, chicanery, feigning,
afraid, not in the vein. ANTONYMS: ordered, coherent, efficient, orderly hypocrisy, misrepresentation,
(adj) tending, willing, leaning, eager, dispensation: (n) allotment, release, pretending
bent, keen, disposed disposal, assignment, division, disseminated: (adj) dispersed,
dislocated: (adj) disordered, freedom, distribution, exemption, spread, scattered
dislocate, disorderly, disconnected, license, allocation, apportionment. dissimulate: (v) disguise,
separated, topsy-turvy, confused, ANTONYM: (n) prohibition masquerade, mask, pretend, fake,
detached displease: (v) annoy, disgust, bother, feign, conceal, cloak, secrete,
dislocation: (n) transposition, anger, vex, affront, offend, rile, simulate, make believe.
interruption, confusion, disturbance, irritate, nark, nettle. ANTONYMS: ANTONYMS: (v) disclose, expose,
disruption, derangement, luxation, (v) please, satisfy, pacify, delight reveal, display
abarticulation, diastasis, contortion, displeased: (adj) disgruntled, dissipate: (adj, v) waste; (v) disperse,
break dissatisfied, angry, annoyed, squander, disappear, diffuse,
dislodge: (v) bump, shift, throw, unhappy, peeved, irritated, consume, scatter, disseminate,
extrude, banish, discharge, dislocate, disgusted, indignant; (v) pained, break, evaporate, spend.
expel, eject, free, move. afflicted. ANTONYMS: (adj) ANTONYMS: (v) save, conserve,
ANTONYMS: (v) wedge, root, seat, contented, satisfied, calm appear, collect, hoard, absorb,
replace, plant, embed, stick, restore displeasing: (adj) distasteful, gather
disloyalty: (n) treason, betrayal, offensive, disagreeable, obnoxious, dissipated: (adj, v) fast; (adj)
treachery, dishonesty, objectionable, unacceptable, dissolute, immoral, abandoned,
unfaithfulness, sedition, annoying, unwelcome, contrary; profligate, prodigal, gay, rakish,
faithlessness, perfidy, infidelity, (adv) displeasingly; (v) unpleasing. degenerate, squandered, licentious.
deceitfulness, duplicity. ANTONYMS: (adj) pleasing, ANTONYMS: (adj) upright, moral
ANTONYMS: (n) loyalty, agreeable dissipating: (n) distribution
faithfulness, honesty, allegiance, displeasure: (n) resentment, distaff: (adj) female, rack; (v) dizen;
commitment, dedication, reliability discomfort, dissatisfaction, dislike, (n) sphere, domain, area, arena
dismantle: (v) strip, destroy, deprive, discontent, exasperation, disfavor, distinctness: (n) clearness, sharpness,
disassemble, break up, disintegrate, annoyance, offense, pique, definition, otherness, perspicuity,
level, undress, tear down, take disapproval. ANTONYMS: (n) discreteness, articulate sound,
down, take apart. ANTONYMS: (v) satisfaction, pleasure, enjoyment, separation, uncloudedness,
raise, erect, build, construct, support happiness, delight, contentment, dissimilarity; (adj) conspicuousness.
dismayed: (adj) aghast, shocked, equanimity, approval ANTONYM: (n) indistinctness
horrified, startled, discouraged, disproportionate: (adj) distort: (adv, v) falsify, pervert; (v)
disheartened, upset, downhearted, incommensurate, unequal, uneven, contort, wring, bend, disfigure,
afraid, downcast, dejected. undue, unsymmetrical, excessive, twist, buckle, misrepresent, mangle,
ANTONYMS: (adj) composed, lopsided, insufficient, inordinate, mutilate. ANTONYMS: (v) untwist,
enthusiastic, happy, unabashed, unfair; (v) disproportionated. straighten, correct, interpret, right,
cheerful ANTONYMS: (adj) equal, clarify, smooth
dismembered: (adj) broken proportionate, commensurate, even, distractedly: (adj, adv) madly; (adv)
dismemberment: (n) division, balanced, fair, moderate, distraughtly, frantically, frenziedly,
separation, mutilation, taking apart, corresponding wildly, forgetfully, absentmindedly,
Victor Hugo 651
inattentively, vaguely, confusedly, opinion gammer, goody, dame, widow,
preoccupiedly. ANTONYM: (adv) dogmatic: (adj) arbitrary, wife, matriarch, lady, female
calmly overbearing, authoritative, downcast: (adj) depressed, dejected,
distrusted: (adj) suspect authoritarian, narrow, peremptory, dispirited, blue, desolate,
distrustful: (adj) suspicious, doctrinal, doctrinaire; (adj, v) disconsolate, gloomy, low, sad,
doubtful, diffident, distrust, jealous, absolute, confident, formal. downhearted, discouraged.
leery, shy, apprehensive, skeptical, ANTONYMS: (adj) flexible, ANTONYMS: (adj) cheerful,
scrupulous, disbelieving. doubtful, uncertain, amenable, vivacious, cheery, elated, joyous, up,
ANTONYMS: (adj) trusting, equivocal, indecisive, questioning, positive
trustful, aggressive, assured, tolerant, ambiguous, polite, liberal dowry: (n) dot, inheritance, gift,
believing, faithful, unwary, certain, doleful: (adj) mournful, sorrowful, alimony, dowery, portion, jointure,
optimistic sad, disconsolate, melancholy, grant, share, endowment, heritage
ditty: (n) ballad, canzonet, canticle, miserable, piteous, dolorous, dozing: (adj) drowsy, dozy, nodding,
bravura, cantata, carol, tune, somber, woeful; (adj, v) dolesome. napping, asleep, sleepy, tired
pastoral, recitative, recitativo, ANTONYMS: (adj) gleeful, happy, drapery: (n) drape, clothing, dress,
solfeggio glad, cheery, elated, euphoric blind, raiment, costume, toilette,
divergent: (adj) dissimilar, differing, dolmen: (n) megalith, tolmen furnishings, trim, guise, toilet
distinct, diverging, unlike, dolorous: (adj) tearful, dismal, draughts: (n) solitaire, go bang,
conflicting, disparate, diverse, doleful, lachrymose, melancholy, backgammon, misere chess, chess,
abnormal, separate; (v) diverge. piteous, miserable, lamentable, dark, dominos, board game
ANTONYMS: (adj) similar, cheerless; (v) dolorific. drawbridge: (n) fire escape, draw-
convergent, alike, parallel, agreeing, ANTONYMS: (adj) hopeful, cheery, bridge, bridge, drawbridge sign, lift
central, indistinct cheerful, upbeat bridge
diverting: (adj, v) entertaining; (adj) dolt: (n) ass, fool, dummy, dunce, drawl: (adv) creep, loiter, linger,
comical, fun, amusive, droll, comic, clod, dumbbell, dullard, stupid, saunter; (adj) dawdle, slouch, hang
laughable, funny, humorous, pudding head, oaf, numskull. back, droil; (v) mouth, pronounce,
recreative, intriguing ANTONYMS: (n) intellect, whiz enounce. ANTONYMS: (v) contract,
divinely: (adv) holy, wonderfully, domine: (n) dominie, dominus, shorten, abridge
exquisitely, priestly, beautifully, clergyman, a clergyman, dominee dreamer: (n) romancer, visionary,
religiously, spiritually, almightily, dominus: (n) dominie, dominee, daydreamer, woolgatherer, seer,
magnificently, sacredly, godly reverend, a clergyman, clergyman sleeper, slumberer, illusionist,
divinity: (n) God, theology, donjon: (n) castle, dungeon, fastness, logician, philosopher, escapist
divineness, immortal, godship, hold, oubliette, citadel, capitol, dreamily: (adv) languorously,
godhead, spirit, demiurge, bread and butter, stronghold, moonily, pensively, sleepily,
apologetics, demigod; (adj, n) the fortress dreamfully, vaguely, visionarily,
Deity. ANTONYM: (n) devil don't: (adv) not; (n) taboo, slowly, shadowily, idealistically,
dizziness: (n) giddiness, swimming, prohibition lethargically. ANTONYMS: (adv)
faint, symptom, nausea, perkiness, dormer: (n) window, lantern, dormer vigorously, alertly, calmly, carefully
playfulness, flightiness, window dreamy: (adj) faraway, romantic,
lightheartedness, laughing and dormitory: (n) dorm, bedroom, hall, impractical, somnolent, visionary,
joking; (v) scotomy bedchamber, chamber, dorm room, sleepy, pensive, moony, idealistic,
docile: (adj) dutiful, compliant, meek, hostel, quarters, residence, hall of drowsy; (v) balmy. ANTONYMS:
submissive, tame, teachable, residence, living quarters (adj) cynical, vigorous, pragmatic,
humble, obedient, acquiescent, dotage: (adj, n) fatuity; (n) senility, practical, awake, alert, ordinary,
conformable; (adj, v) tractable. second childhood, old age, age, prosaic
ANTONYMS: (adj) stubborn, decrepitude, imbecility, feebleness, dregs: (n) residue, grounds, refuse,
assertive, unruly, willful, defiant, insanity, years; (adj) second sediment, dreg, remains, settlings,
vicious, determined, uncooperative, childishness. ANTONYM: (n) feces, trash, waste, dross
obstinate, disobedient, intractable adolescence drenched: (adj) saturated, soaked,
docility: (n) obedience, tractability, doublet: (n) pair, couple, waistcoat, soaking, damp, soppy, wet through,
meekness, flexibility, docibleness, CHUDDER, barbe, gabardine, sodden, sopping, wringing wet,
submission, deference, humility, double, jacket, jubbah, oilskins, soaked to the skin, dripping wet
gentleness, willingness, camisole drinker: (n) tippler, drunkard,
tractableness doublets: (n) span, dyad imbiber, toper, guzzler, bacchanal,
doeskin: (n) material, fabric, leather, doubting: (adj) doubtful, distrustful, bacchant, carouser, alcoholic,
buckskin, cloth disbelieving, incredulous, doubt, boozer, potator
doge: (n) archduke, elector, judge, skeptical, suspicious, sceptical, drip: (n, v) drop, trickle, leak, escape;
jurist, justice, magistrate, chicanery, wary, doubts, distrusting. (n) leakage; (v) distill, weep, seep,
prime minister ANTONYM: (adj) credulous trill, fall, percolate. ANTONYMS: (v)
dogma: (n) tenet, creed, belief, doves: (n) Columbiformes, order flow, pour, surge, flood
doctrine, principle, faith, gospel, Columbiformes droll: (adj) comical, humorous,
theory, canon, way of thinking, dowager: (n) matron, Donna Belle, funny, laughable, burlesque,
ludicrous, ridiculous; (adj, n) comic, ANTONYMS: (adj) light, bright, rise; (v) fail, brighten, clear, disclose
witty; (n) buffoon, clown. sunny, radiant, clear ecstatic: (adj) delighted, excited,
ANTONYMS: (adj) dramatic, dull, dwelt: (v) dwell, inhabit rhapsodic, rapt, exultant, blissful,
grave, tragic, solemn eagerness: (n, v) desire, aspiration; joyful, elated, happy, transported;
drone: (n, v) hum, murmur; (v) (n) enthusiasm, avidity, cupidity, (n, v) thrilling. ANTONYMS: (adj)
whine, idler, purr; (n) dawdler, readiness, passion, keenness, depressed, down, unhappy,
droning, laggard, sluggard, roll; ambition, fervor, avidness. dejected, desolate, despairing,
(adv, n) bourdon ANTONYMS: (n) indifference, miserable, troubled, sad, calm
droop: (adj, v) decline; (v) dangle, unwillingness, aloofness, disinterest, eddies: (n) turbulence
wilt, hang, flag, sink, slump, loll, lethargy, listlessness, patience, edict: (n) act, command, writ,
collapse; (n, v) sag, pine. gloom, reluctance declaration, ruling, rule, regulation,
ANTONYMS: (v) rise, bloom earnestly: (adj, adv) seriously; (adv) directive, order, dictate, law
drooping: (adj) flabby, pendulous, eagerly, intently, zealously, edification: (n) enlightenment,
limp, flaccid, cernuous, flagging, solemnly, ardently, fervently, education, illumination, building,
languid, floppy, lax, tired; (n) droop. heartily, gravely, warmly, disenchantment, architecture,
ANTONYMS: (adj) taut, firm passionately. ANTONYMS: (adv) disillusionment, civilization,
dropsy: (n) oedema, hydrops, edema, indifferently, insincerely, schooling, teaching, learning
chemosis, tumefaction, puffiness, unconcernedly, jokingly edifice: (n) building, structure, house,
intumescence, tumor, lump, earthenware: (v) China, porcelain, hall, fabric, aviary, bagnio,
swelling, circulatory failure pottery, ceramic ware; (adj) ceramic; bathhouse, abattoir, bawdyhouse,
dryly: (adv) coldly, sternly, sourly, (n) ceramics, delft, clay, stoneware, clubhouse
sarcastically, laconically, huskily. faience, majolica efface: (v) cancel, erase, obliterate,
ANTONYMS: (adv) interestingly, earthworm: (n) crawler, dew worm, destroy, expunge, wipe out,
warmly oligochaete, worm, night crawler, suppress, sponge, blot out, blur,
dryness: (n) drought, aridity, red worm, fishing worm, dewworm, raze
dehydration, aridness, thirst, nightcrawler, wiggler, fishworm effaced: (adj) obliterated
desiccation, barrenness, monotony, earthy: (adj) coarse, mundane, effecting: (n) accomplishment,
status, drying, insensibility. earthly, realistic, vulgar, worldly, implementation, completing,
ANTONYMS: (n) damp, humidity, gross, terrestrial, natural, terrene, finishing, fulfillment, carrying out;
wetness, moisture, succulence, rude. ANTONYMS: (adj) (adj) effectual
exaggeration, juiciness sophisticated, cultured, clean effectual: (adj, n) efficient,
dues: (n) tax, obligation, tallage, eastward: (adj) eastbound, eastern; efficacious, able; (adj) forceful,
assessment, sess, cost, contribution, (adv) eastwards telling, authoritative, operative,
impost, toll, union dues, deficit eaves: (n) arch, balcony, cupola, potent, adequate, impressive,
duet: (n) twosome, deuce, brace, pair, dome, penthouse, eave, overhang, powerful. ANTONYMS: (adj)
duo, duetto, dyad, two, Twain, attic, loft, projection, roof space ineffectual, incapable, weak,
Gemini, twins ebbing: (n) wane, ebb, diminution, impotent, ineffective, unproductive,
dulled: (adj) dull, blunted, disappearance; (adj) dying, refluent unsuccessful, useless
benumbed, duller, blunt, ebony: (adj, n) sable; (adj) black, effectually: (adv) efficaciously,
uninterested, rounded, jaded, dark, jet, soot, raven, smut, sloe; (n) effectively, validly, adequately,
grayed, colorless, deadened jet black, coal black, wood potently, tellingly, strongly,
dumbfounded: (adj) astounded, ebullition: (n) boiling, ferment, decisively; (adj) nicely, fully, head
amazed, staggered, stupefied, choler, bile, dander; (adj, n) and shoulders. ANTONYM: (adv)
speechless, stunned, bewildered, effervescence; (v) seethe, coction; ineffectually
dazed, taken aback, flabbergasted, (adj) seething, stir, splutter effervescing: (adj) effervescent,
surprised. ANTONYMS: (adj) eccentrically: (adv) queerly, bubbly, curl, ebullient, foaming,
aware, unsurprised unusually, oddly, outlandishly, foamy, frothy, crisp, crackling,
dung: (adj, n) ordure, excrement; (n) irregularly, bizarrely, whimsically, cheerful, brisk
compost, filth, muck, soil, dejection; wackily, quirkily, strangely, effigy: (n) likeness, figure, copy, idol,
(v) defecate, fertilise; (adj) feces, originally. ANTONYM: (adv) simulacrum, picture, effigies,
faeces sensibly dummy, appearance, semblance,
dungeon: (n, v) keep; (n) prison, cell, eclectic: (n) philosopher, eclecticist; graven image
jail, penitentiary, fastness, oubliette, (adj) selective, broad, assorted, efflorescent: (adj) abloom,
Bastille, bridewell, detention, house miscellaneous, widespread, select, impalpable, gritty, floral,
of correction free, extensive, electic. exanthematous, mature, emergent,
dunghill: (adj) base, craven, jakes, ANTONYMS: (adj) maturer
sink, recreant, privy; (n) incomprehensive, specialized, effrontery: (n) audacity, brass,
unsanitariness, laystall, mixen, particular, narrow, limited presumption, face, boldness,
muckheap, muckhill eclipse: (v) darken, overshadow, insolence, nerve, impertinence,
dusky: (adj) dark, cloudy, gloomy, cloud, shade, outdo, surpass, dim, impudence, rudeness, assurance.
black, swarthy, dull, murky, transcend, outshine, outweigh; (n) ANTONYMS: (n) timidity,
obscure, dingy, sooty, somber. disappearance. ANTONYMS: (n) deference, courtesy
Victor Hugo 653
egg-shaped: (adj) oval, round, disentangled, disengaged, emit: (adj, v) discharge; (v) shoot,
elliptical boundless belch, reek, give off, evolve, eject,
egotistical: (adj) conceited, selfish, embarrass: (v) baffle, bother, shed, radiate, emanate; (n, v) give.
egocentric, proud, arrogant, confound, hinder, disconcert, block, ANTONYMS: (v) absorb, contain,
narcissistic, pompous, haughty, complicate, impede, discomfit; (adj, repress, retain, suppress, block,
boastful, vain, brassy. ANTONYMS: v) bewilder, encumber. trickle, withhold
(adj) humble, modest, selfless ANTONYMS: (v) comfort, please, emitting: (n) emission; (adj) flowing,
egress: (n) exit, egression, outlet, soothe, relieve mittent, emissive
door, emergence, departure, embattled: (adj) crenelated, enacting: (adj) legislative; (n) acting
emersion, emission, way out, crenellate, crenellated, under fire, encased: (adj) incased, sheathed
dissilience; (v) emerge. under attack, prepared, indented, enchained: (adj) in chains, bound
ANTONYMS: (n) entry, ingress militant; (v) in battle array, battled; enchanted: (adj) bewitched,
eiderdown: (n) duvet, quilt, (n) fancier delighted, charmed, fascinated, rapt,
continental quilt, antimacassar, embellish: (v) dress, adorn, decorate, spellbound, blissful, happy,
pillowslip, numdah, pillowcase, deck, beautify, ornament, enamored, possessed; (v) entranced.
comforter, down embroider, trim, bedeck, gild, ANTONYMS: (adj) disenchanted,
elaborated: (adj) elaborate, careful, garnish. ANTONYMS: (v) deface, unhappy
finished, wrought understate, disfigure, mar, spoil, enchanting: (adj) captivating,
elapsed: (adj) gone, forgotten, lapsed, uglify delightful, fascinating, bewitching,
back, beyond, onwards, over and embellished: (adj) ornamented, lovely, alluring, magical, glamorous,
done rhetorical, decorated, fancy, florid, adorable; (adj, v) charming,
elector: (n) voter, constituent, tall, rich, embroidered, elaborate, engaging. ANTONYMS: (adj)
archduke, doge, floater, electant, baroque; (prep) beautied unhappy, revolting, repulsive,
citizen embellishments: (n) trimmings, repellent, foul, everyday, dull,
elevating: (adj) inspiring, arrangements, added extras, fixing, disenchanting, annoying,
exhilarating trappings uninteresting, despicable
elliptical: (adj) oval, oblong, ellipse, ember: (n) coal, embers, clinker, enchantment: (n) attraction,
oviform, ovoid, epigrammatic, fragment, glow, ashes, flash, flicker, captivation, charm, conjuration,
quaint, curved, crisp, ovate, round glimmer sorcery, spell, bewitchment,
eloquence: (n) style, fluency, oratory, emblem: (n) flag, type, device, incantation, delight, bewitchery;
rhetoric, articulateness, expression, allegory, character, crest, sign, (adj, n) rapture. ANTONYMS: (n)
volubility, persuasiveness, badge, figure, ensign, symbol displeasure, discomfort
articulacy, facundity, way with emboldened: (adj) bold enchantress: (n) siren, Delilah, fairy,
words. ANTONYM: (n) embossed: (adj) raised, brocaded, witch, occultist, woman, lamia,
inarticulateness stamped, decorated, prominent, sibyl, vamp, hag, sorceress
elucidate: (v) clear up, clarify, bossy; (n) relief encircled: (adj) enclosed, bounded,
enlighten, explain, illuminate, embrasure: (n) porthole, crenel, circinate, circular, decorated,
expound, decipher, brighten, machicolation, recess, window, delimited, ringed, wreathed,
resolve, solve, clear. ANTONYMS: opening, crenelle, battlement, dent, bordered, annulated, annular
(v) obfuscate, muddy, obscure casement encroach: (adj, v) infringe; (v)
emaciated: (adj) bony, lean, thin, embroider: (v) embellish, adorn, intrude, violate, entrench, impinge,
gaunt, skinny, meager, wasted, decorate, broider, trim, hyperbolize, trench, contravene, infiltrate,
haggard, slender, slim, lanky. stitch, ornament, glorify, lard; (adv, invade, overstep, penetrate
ANTONYMS: (adj) fat, obese, v) color. ANTONYMS: (v) encumbered: (adj) burdened,
heavy, bloated, beefy, overweight understate, unpick, deemphasize, burdensome, weighed down, heavy,
emaciation: (n) gauntness, minimize deep, clayey, cloggy. ANTONYM:
maceration, thinness, leanness, embroidered: (adj) ornate, inflated, (adj) unencumbered
consumption; (v) tabes, collapse, exaggerated, bewrought, decorated encyclopedia: (n) encyclopaedia,
tabefaction, marasmus; (adj) embroidering: (n) embellishment, cyclopaedia, encyclopedy, book,
macilency, marcor hyperbole calendar, list, instruction manual,
emanation: (n) emission, effluvium, emerald: (adj) green, verdigris, verd instruction book, information bank,
effusion, effluence, efflux, radiation, antique, malachite, verdant, index, handbook
excretion, exhalation, flow, egress, brilliant; (n) beryl, gem, viridity, endeavor: (n, v) struggle, try, strain;
ectoplasm greenness, chalcedony (n) effort, trial, essay, shot,
emancipate: (v) discharge, liberate, emery: (adj) steel; (n) emeril enterprise, work; (v) strive, aim.
deliver, save, enfranchise, eminence: (n) distinction, elevation, ANTONYMS: (n, v) neglect
disengage, release, rescue, free, altitude, celebrity, superiority, rank, endeavoring: (n) effort; (adj) aspiring
absolve, relieve. ANTONYMS: (v) excellence, fame, glory, prominence, endowed: (adj) gifted, clever, cute,
imprison, incarcerate status. ANTONYMS: (n) felicitous, competent, blessed,
emancipated: (adj) free, freed, insignificance, cavity, depression, artistic, brilliant, ingenious, talented,
uncontrolled, released, unbound, unimportance, dip, commonness, qualitied
open, uninhibited, freer, inferiority enduring: (adj) durable, abiding,
lasting, permanent, continuing, (adj, v) brighten. ANTONYMS: (v) intermezzo
constant, hardy, immortal, eternal, bore, subdue, tire, spoil, dull, entrails: (n) bowels, gut, bowel,
stable; (adv) enduringly. deflate, dampen, deaden, exhaust, viscera, innards, internal organs,
ANTONYMS: (adj) impatient, depress insides, intestines, guts, tripe, inside
transient, fleeting, mortal, modern, enlivened: (adj) bouncy, active, entreat: (v) beg, beseech, ask,
insubstantial, inconstant, fickle, spirited, alive, bouncing implore, pray, adjure, appeal,
erratic, unstable enormity: (n) magnitude, size, request, conjure, crave, bid.
energetically: (adv) vigorously, greatness, vileness, immensity, ANTONYMS: (v) demand, reject
strongly, actively, briskly, lustily, outrage, vastness, seriousness, entreating: (adj) beseeching,
forcefully, lively, forcibly, crime, evil, indecency. imploring, suppliant, begging,
powerfully, spiritedly, strenuously. ANTONYMS: (n) minuteness, supplicant, imploratory, asking
ANTONYMS: (adv) idly, quietly, veniality, unimportance, tininess, submissively, pleading, piteous
lifelessly, resignedly, indifferently, virtue, goodness, diminutiveness, enumeration: (n) count, counting,
feebly, wearily, languorously, lazily, remissibility, smallness, mildness, computation, list, calculation,
sluggishly, passively insignificance catalogue, recital, account, tally,
enervated: (adj) debilitated, limp, enraged: (adj) angered, furious, reckoning, listing
tired, lethargic, weak, languid, faint, infuriated, irate, mad, livid, enunciate: (v) articulate, declare,
colorless, adynamic, asthenic, incensed, exasperated, raging, vocalize, voice, pronounce, utter,
enfeebled. ANTONYMS: (adj) irritated, boiling say, enounce, speak, express; (n, v)
activated, invigorated, strengthened, enraptured: (adj) rapt, rapturous, allege. ANTONYMS: (v) mumble,
energized, strong captive, bewitched, rhapsodic, mispronounce, muffle, mutter
engraved: (adj) carved, inscribed, ecstasy, confined, absorbed, jubilant, enveloped: (adj) convoluted,
etched, sculptured, chased, cut in, joyous, enamored enclosed, cover, bounded,
graphic, graven; (prep) enriched: (adj) educated Byzantine, clothed, involved, misty,
insculptured; (v) fixed, imprinted enroll: (v) enlist, enter, draft, enrol, swallowed, vestured, emotionally
engraving: (n) print, sculpture, plate, record, join, matriculate, recruit, list, involved
picture, carving, copperplate, insert, inscribe. ANTONYMS: (v) enveloping: (n) envelopment,
aquatint, printmaking, omit, withdraw, pass, neglect, enclosure, boxing, enclosing,
engravement, cutting, chasing disregard, discard, reject, leave encasement; (prep) about; (adj)
engrossed: (adj) rapt, engaged, intent, ensconced: (v) imbedded, situate, comprehensive, roundabout,
occupied, preoccupied, busy, posited circuitous. ANTONYM: (adj)
fascinated, obsessed, thoughtful, enshrined: (adj) hallowed contained
hooked; (adj, v) immersed. entablature: (n) cornice, architrave, envenomed: (adj) caustic, venomous,
ANTONYMS: (adj) disinterested, capital, coping stone, structure, virulent, mordacious, acrimonious
bored, distracted, indifferent, epistyle, entablement, construction, envoys: (n) embassy
unconcerned, uninterested, zoophorus, sconce, pediment epidermis: (n) scarfskin, outer skin,
inattentive, carefree entangle: (n, v) tangle; (v) embrangle, skin, epithelium, epiderm, stratum,
engulfed: (adj) overcome, weak, complicate, involve, snarl, entwine, coat, mantle, periostracum, pelt,
overwhelmed, conquered, mat; (adj, v) enmesh, embarrass, carapace
overpowered, swamped, powerless, confuse, bewilder. ANTONYMS: (v) epilepsy: (v) bustle, fits, subsultus,
flooded, enclosed, beaten, disentangle, disengage, extricate, staggers, rout, racket, megrims, fuss;
enveloped free, unravel, untangle, explain, (n) convulsion, cortical epilepsy,
enigma: (adj, n) mystery, riddle; (n) undo akinetic epilepsy
puzzle, secret, perplexity, poser, entangled: (adj) complicated, epiphany: (n) advent, Christmas,
question, problem, closed book, nut intricate, embroiled, complex, foul, manifestation, Twelfth Day, Three
to crack, logogriph. ANTONYMS: confused, matted, tangled, Kings' Day, Epiphany of our Lord,
(n) clearness, explanation inextricable, knotty; (v) entangle Twelfthtide
enigmatical: (adj) mysterious, entangling: (v) entangle; (adj) snary, episcopal: (adj) pontifical, bishoplike,
obscure, indeterminate, oracular, intricable clerical, episcoparian
perplexing, unintelligible, enterprising: (adj) bold, energetic, epistle: (n) letter, note,
ambiguous, cabalistic, confusing, active, aggressive, courageous, communication, message,
dark, difficult vigorous, ambitious, go-ahead, correspondence, post card, favor,
enjoined: (adj) lawful brave, pushing; (adj, n) daring. missive, writing, memo, dispatch
enlighten: (v) advise, edify, educate, ANTONYMS: (adj) lethargic, epitaph: (n) memorial, lettering,
inform, clarify, apprise, instruct, unenterprising, passive, inactive, inscription, commemoration,
illuminate, clear, notify; (adj, v) indolent, lazy, cautious, cowardly epitaphic, legend
lighten. ANTONYMS: (v) puzzle, entirety: (n) completeness, entire, epithalamium: (n) epithalamy
obfuscate, mystify, confound, cloud, entireness, ensemble, sum, whole, epoch: (n) era, date, period, day,
brutalize, bewilder, muddle aggregate, gross, amount, fullness, season, time, term, cycle, crisis, date
enliven: (v) animate, inspire, refresh, total. ANTONYMS: (n) element, of reference, times
encourage, exhilarate, elate, liven component, particular equerry: (n) functionary, groom,
up, stimulate, invigorate, energize; entr'acte: (n) intermission, Querry, attendant
Victor Hugo 655
equestrian: (n) rider, trooper, trainer, exalted: (adj) elevated, eminent, executor: (n) doer, fiduciary, agent,
buster, roughrider, horsewoman, noble, high, August, elated, executioner, trustee, executrix,
horseback rider, breaker, postilion; dignified, great, sublime, grand, big. perpetrator, trustee in bankruptcy
(adj) mounted ANTONYMS: (adj) belittled, exemplary: (adj) model, typical,
equinoctial: (n) equinoctial line, condemned, criticized, debased, representative, classic, admonitory,
equinoctial circle humble, humiliated, low, lowly, ideal, warning, commendable,
equivocal: (adj) ambiguous, minor, ridiculed, base worthy, excellent, virtuous.
indefinite, doubtful, dubious, exasperated: (adj) incensed, annoyed, ANTONYMS: (adj) awful, lousy,
questionable, elusive, cryptic, enraged, angered, indignant, mad, poor, unconventional,
precarious, problematic, apocryphal, irate, irritated, cheesed off, testy; reprehensible, wrong, substandard,
double. ANTONYMS: (adj) clear, (adj, prep) provoked. ANTONYM: blameworthy
unequivocal, definite, obvious, (adj) pleased exerting: (n) push
plain, unquestionable, certain, direct excavated: (adj) concave, hollow exhibiting: (n) advertising; (adj)
erases: (v) erase excavating: (v) excavate exhibitory, ostensive
erecting: (n) construction, building, excellently: (adv) splendidly, exhilaratingly: (adv) invigoratingly,
erection beautifully, exquisitely, excitingly, thrillingly, stirringly,
ermine: (n) purple, pelt, fur, weasel, magnificently, finely, marvelously, rousingly, bracingly, cheeringly,
pall, shorttail weasel, mantle, toga, goodly, worthily, grandly, primely, movingly, inspiritingly; (adv, v)
millinery, robes of state superbly. ANTONYMS: (adv) happily
erudition: (n) education, scholarship, poorly, badly, terribly exorbitant: (adj) unreasonable,
letters, edification, reading, excepted: (v) except; (adj) let off, immoderate, steep, unconscionable,
learnedness, culture, lore, excused inordinate, extravagant, outrageous,
eruditeness; (n, v) knowledge; (adj, excite: (v) arouse, enliven, disturb, enormous, extortionate, extreme,
n) wisdom. ANTONYM: (n) agitate, awaken, incite, inspire, high. ANTONYMS: (adj) reasonable,
simplicity rouse, electrify; (n, v) energize; (adj, inexpensive, moderate, modest,
esteemed: (adj) dear, reputable, v) quicken. ANTONYMS: (v) calm, sensible, fair
respected, honorable, noble, pacify, bore, soothe, stifle, exordium: (n) overture, prelude,
honored, prestigious, important, tranquilize, placate, quiet, dampen outset, preface, opening, symphony,
distinguished, August, respect. exclaim: (v) call out, call, shout, cry foreword, prologue, proem,
ANTONYM: (adj) disreputable out, ejaculate, clamor, outcry, beginning, preliminary
estrade: (adj) parterre, rostrum, scream, shout out, speak, vociferate expedient: (adj) fit, advisable,
platform, dais, terrace, esplanade exclaiming: (n) deuce, Dickens, becoming, desirable, adequate, apt,
etching: (n) print, corrosion, ejaculation, exclaim, devil, convenient, suitable; (n) contrivance,
impression, printmaking, etching interjection, ecphonesis resource, artifice. ANTONYMS:
process, copper etching, aquatinta, exclamation: (n) clamor, ejaculation, (adj) inappropriate, inexpedient,
drawing; (v) etch, engrave, water exclaiming, utterance, whoop, impractical, futile, detrimental,
color drawing interjection, shout, expletive, deuce, inconvenient, foolish
eternally: (adv) always, permanently, Dickens, ecphonesis expeditious: (adj) agile, brisk, swift,
incessantly, perpetually, constantly, excrescence: (n) outgrowth, bump, prompt, quick, hasty, fast, rapid,
ceaselessly, endlessly, unendingly, protuberance, growth, jut, wart, speedy, efficient, ready.
unceasingly, lastingly; (adj, adv) nub, protrusion, hump, caput, ANTONYMS: (adj) ineffectual,
forever. ANTONYMS: (adv) briefly, process sluggish, slothful, inefficient,
sporadically excused: (adj) privileged, immune leisurely
eulogy: (n, v) encomium, praise; (n) execrable: (adj, adv) abominable, expended: (adj) spent, finished, dead,
compliment, eulogium, paean, nefarious; (adj, v) cursed, hateful, departed, unpursed, bypast, bygone,
panegyric, speech, tribute; (v) odious; (adj) deplorable, damnable, deceased, gone, completely
applause, acclaim, eulogize. abhorrent, atrocious, accursed, exhausted; (v) expending
ANTONYMS: (n) damning, dreadful. ANTONYMS: (adj) expending: (n) outlay, spending,
vilification, condemnation savory, laudable, outstanding, disbursement, consumption,
evangelists: (n) revelations, acts, dandy, swell, great, fabulous, disbursal, expenditure; (v) spend
apocalypse, gospels superb, praiseworthy expiation: (n) amends, penance,
evaporating: (n) contraction executing: (n) performing, execution, compensation, recompense,
evils: (n) mala decapitation, capital punishment, satisfaction, propitiation, reparation,
evolutions: (n) evolution electrocution, death penalty, conciliation, expiate, restitution,
exaltation: (n) elation, ecstasy, crucifixion, implementation, salvation
apotheosis, worship, praise, rapture, corporal punishment; (v) perform, expiration: (n) ending, end,
deification, grandeur, adoration; (n, execute conclusion, finish, close, exhalation,
v) sublimation; (v) laud. executioner: (n) killer, murderer, termination, exit, death, lapse,
ANTONYMS: (n) abasement, hangman, headsman, expiry. ANTONYM: (n) beginning
belittlement, debasement, electrocutioner, executor, tormentor, expire: (v) end, conclude, decease,
degradation, humiliation, sorrow, executer, public executioner, elapse, pass away, depart, run out,
derogation, disparagement slaughterer, slayer succumb, perish, exhale, exit.
ANTONYMS: (v) inhale, start, interior, substance, rear, genuine shrift, sackcloth and ashes,
commence, begin, thrive, inspire, facile: (adj, v) easy, comfortable; (adj) maceration, lustration, flagellation,
appear, survive effortless, cushy, dexterous, fluent, watching one's weight, hunger
expired: (adj) lapsed, deceased, expert, indulgent, light, deft, glib. strike, penance; (v) calorie counting
invalid, dead, overdue, extinct, ANTONYMS: (adj) laborious, fatality: (n) disaster, calamity, death,
elapsed, out complicated, hard, difficult, original mishap, demise, misadventure,
explosively: (adv) hazardously, fagot: (n) bundle, fag, poof, fairy, lethality, adversity, loss, decease,
volatilely pansy, queer, poove, pouf, fascicle, dead
extant: (adj) actual, current, present, tuft, sheaf fatigued: (adj) tired, weary, beat,
existent, surviving, alive, living, faience: (v) enamel, satsuma; (n) worn, tired out, jaded, spent, worn
available, instant, in existence, that glazed earthenware, earthenware, out, done in, fagged, run-down.
is. ANTONYMS: (adj) lost, dead, Laocoon ANTONYMS: (adj) refreshed, alert,
departed, destroyed, gone fainting: (n) swoon, syncope, lively, energized, energetic
exterminate: (v) annihilate, eliminate, deliquium, lipothymy, prostration, fatten: (adj, n) enrich; (adj, v) fat,
destroy, obliterate, extirpate, stupor; (adj) lipothymic elaborate; (v) fatten up, feed, fill out;
liquidate, slay, slaughter, massacre, fairylike: (adj) magic, magical, (adj) fructify, bloom, bear fruit,
uproot, wipe out. ANTONYMS: (v) sprightly blossom, blow. ANTONYMS: (v)
generate, revive, protect falsely: (adv) incorrectly, undernourish, starve
extermination: (n) destruction, fraudulently, deceptively, fatuity: (n) absurdity, silliness,
devastation, death, obliteration, dishonestly, wrongly, erroneously, fatuousness, folly, idiocy, nonsense,
demolition, liquidation, eradication, misleadingly, deceitfully, asininity, crassitude, inanity; (adj, n)
annihilation, expiry, expiration; (v) unfaithfully, spuriously, fictitiously. dotage; (adj) anility
extirpation. ANTONYMS: (n) ANTONYMS: (adv) honestly, faubourg: (n) suburbia, suburb
preservation, survival truthfully, faithfully, authentically, faubourgs: (n) banlieue, entourage,
extinguish: (v) destroy, exterminate, correctly, naturally, rightly environs, outskirts, precincts,
eradicate, douse, annihilate, falsetto: (adj) alto, penny trumpet, purlieus
consume, wipe out, end, suppress, voce di testa, soprano, tenor faun: (n) Faunus; (adj) sylvan
quash; (adj, v) allay. ANTONYMS: familiarly: (adv) intimately, usually, faust: (n) Faustus
(v) ignite, build, create, encourage, ordinarily, nearly, frequently, favor: (n, v) countenance, aid, grace,
inflame, sustain, protect commonly, regularly, informally, support, benefit, boon; (adj, n)
extinguished: (adj) extinct, out, dead, closely, acquaintedly, kindness; (n) advantage; (v)
quenched, allayed, destroyed; (n) conventionally. ANTONYM: (adv) befriend, encourage, patronize.
defunctness, complete annihilation, distantly ANTONYMS: (v) hinder, contradict,
experimental extinction, famished: (adj) ravenous, starving, dislike, hurt, differ, thwart, reject,
extermination, extinction starved, empty, voracious, greedy, demean; (n) derogation,
extinguisher: (n) device, asphyxiator malnourished, thin; (adj, v) esurient; disapproval, unkindness
extirpate: (v) eradicate, uproot, (v) peckish, lickerish. ANTONYMS: favorable: (adj) lucky, fortunate,
annihilate, deracinate, extinguish, (adj) full, satisfied, satiated, gorged, propitious, prosperous, convenient,
destroy, root, excise, root out, raze; healthy advantageous, encouraging, happy,
(adj, v) obliterate. ANTONYMS: (v) fancies: (n) stock helpful; (adj, v) friendly; (adj, n)
breed, propagate, generate, foster fanciful: (adj) mythical, fantastic, kindly. ANTONYMS: (adj) adverse,
extremity: (n) end, member, capricious, unreal, arbitrary, negative, ominous, disapproving,
boundary, bound, close, appendage, romantic, ideal, chimerical, notional, inauspicious, detrimental,
limit, limb, ending, fringe, visionary; (adj, v) fancy. unfriendly, disagreeable, hindering,
conclusion. ANTONYMS: (n) trunk, ANTONYMS: (adj) prosaic, real, harmful, untimely
average, minimum, head, leniency realistic, plausible, normal favored: (adj) advantaged, preferred,
extricate: (v) clear, evolve, disengage, fantastical: (adj, v) fanciful; (adj) lucky, advantageous, pet, favorite,
rid, untangle, disembarrass, absolve, antic, chimerical, unusual, beautiful, blessed, privileged, favorable; (adj,
enfranchise, free, deliver, dislodge. unreal, strange, grotesque, odd, n) happy, prosperous. ANTONYMS:
ANTONYMS: (v) entangle, embroil, extraordinary; (v) fancy (adj) disliked, unpopular, Standard
hamper, hinder, involve, fasten, fantastically: (adv) wonderfully, favorite: (adj, n) darling, favourite,
wedge fabulously, tremendously, dear, number one; (adj) favored,
exultation: (n) jubilation, joy, delight, marvelously, extraordinarily, beloved, popular; (n) pet, choice,
ecstasy, elation, rejoicing, revelling, strangely, queerly, magnificently, pick, preference. ANTONYMS: (n)
transport, joyousness, bliss, glee. grotesquely, whimsically, indifference, superior, underdog;
ANTONYMS: (n) depression, peculiarly. ANTONYMS: (adv) (adj) unwanted, despised, disliked,
desolation, misery, sorrow plausibly, abysmally hated, unusual
eyelashes: (n) cilia farrier: (n) horseshoer; (v) cowboy, fawn: (v) crawl, creep, grovel, cringe,
facade: (n) appearance, outside, face, bull whacker, cow puncher cower, crouch, bootlick, kowtow,
front, veneer, pretense, disguise, fashioned: (adj) formed, featured, blandish, flatter; (n) deer.
surface, guise, semblance, fictitious, intentional, bent, wrought ANTONYMS: (v) insult, despise,
frontispiece. ANTONYMS: (n) fasting: (n) abstinence, white sheet, ignore, domineer
Victor Hugo 657
feasting: (n) carnival, eating fetters: (n) chains, captivity, bond, filtering: (n) filtration, straining,
feathered: (adj) plumy, plumelike, restraint, irons, handcuffs, iron, refinement; (v) to filter
featherlike, plumose, plumed, enduring; (v) confine, fee, embellish. filth: (n) grime, garbage, foulness,
plumaged, fledged, plumigerous, ANTONYM: (n) liberation impurity, soil, blot, stain, nastiness,
flighted, decorated; (v) fledge feudalism: (n) feodality, structure, squalor, uncleanliness; (adj) impure.
fecund: (adj) productive, prolific, feudality, slavery ANTONYMS: (n) cleanliness,
fruitful, rich, luxuriant, fat, fiat: (n) decree, edict, dictum, act, luxury, loveliness
pregnant, fructuous, reproductive, order, call, behest, bidding, rescript, fineness: (n) refinement, elegance,
exuberant, plenteous. ANTONYMS: enactment, mandate daintiness, thinness, choiceness,
(adj) infertile, sterile, impotent, fibrous: (adj) tough, ropy, fibrose, beauty, superiority, subtlety,
unproductive filamentous, muscular, rubbery, slimness, slenderness, narrowness.
feebleness: (n) weakness, frailty, nemaline, gossamer, sinewy, raw, ANTONYMS: (n) stoutness,
decrepitude, faintness, imbecility, brawny. ANTONYM: (adj) tender thickness, vulgarity, inaccuracy,
fragility, tenuity, languor, frailness; fickle: (adj, v) erratic, skittish; (adj) coarseness, width
(adj, n) infirmity; (adj) feeble. volatile, capricious, mercurial, fingering: (n) location, placement,
ANTONYMS: (n) perseverance, mobile, variable, inconsistent, feeling, emplacement
success, effectiveness, competence shifting, giddy, inconstant. firebrand: (n) instigator, brand,
feebly: (adv) faintly, ANTONYMS: (adj) untiring, stable, troublemaker, inciter, incendiary,
unenthusiastically, dimly, unchanging, consistent, constant, firewood, pyromaniac, scalawag,
hopelessly, unproductively, dependable, predictable, placid, blade, radical, instigant
unpersuasively, unconvincingly, loyal, faithful firewood: (n) backlog, brand,
uncertainly, reluctantly, fictitious: (adj) bogus, assumed, firebrand, fuelwood, lumber,
powerlessly, insipidly. fictional, counterfeit, artificial, fake, brushwood, wood, kindling, fuel,
ANTONYMS: (adv) robustly, fabulous, sham, fabricated, fanciful, cordwood, bobbing
confidently, domineeringly, apocryphal. ANTONYMS: (adj) firework: (n) pyrotechny, squib,
vehemently, stubbornly, strongly, true, honest, historical, factual pyrotechnics, cracker, firecracker,
effectively, convincingly, fiddler: (n) Fiddler's money, sparkler, pyrotechnic, skyrocket,
competently, admirably, trumpeter, fifer, instrumentalist, banger, crackers, explosive device
wholeheartedly musician, player, piper, violin firmness: (adj, n) constancy; (n)
feigned: (adj) false, affected, player, twiddler, tinkerer, drummer determination, resolution,
assumed, dummy, unnatural, fidelity: (n) constancy, devotion, assurance, consistency, obstinacy,
fictitious; (adj, v) sham, counterfeit, faithfulness, adherence, allegiance, steadfastness, resolve, confidence,
spurious, mock, pretended. loyalty, faith, dedication, exactness; courage, backbone. ANTONYMS:
ANTONYMS: (adj) sincere, genuine, (adj, n) honesty, truth. (n) softness, instability, vacillation,
natural, wholehearted, heartfelt, real ANTONYMS: (n) infidelity, unsteadiness, yielding,
felicity: (n) happiness, bliss, unfaithfulness, disloyalty, irresoluteness, droopiness,
blessedness, beatitude, luck, inaccuracy, faithlessness, indefiniteness, indecisiveness,
felicitousness, joy, fortune, ecstasy, dishonesty, unreliability indecision, leniency
enjoyment, appropriateness. fief: (n) feoff, demesne, feud, fee, fishes: (n) amphibians, Craniata,
ANTONYM: (n) infelicity benefice, land, possession, tenement, Subphylum Vertebrata, Vertebrata,
fenced: (adj) hedged in, provisional, estate, deadly hatred, acres birds
guarded, bounded figuratively: (adv) allegorically, fishwife: (n) fishmonger,
ferment: (n) agitation, excitement, symbolically, tropically, typically, merchandiser, merchant, shrew
barm, tumult, unrest, disturbance; representatively, parabolically, fixedly: (adv) steadily, steadfastly,
(adj, v) stew, pother; (v) effervesce, parabolicly, flowerily, symbolicly, regularly, intently, stably, setly,
turn, brew. ANTONYMS: (v) quiet, floridly, figurally. ANTONYM: permanently, rigidly, unwaveringly,
defuse, soothe (adv) factually surely, resolutely
ferryman: (n) waterman, figuring: (n) calculation, reckoning, flabbily: (adv) flaccidly, slackly,
longshoreman, lighterman, boater, estimation, computing, figure, limply, softly, laxly, weakly,
shipman, bargeman, Charon, Ferrier approximation, conversion, baggily, droopingly, frailly,
fervent: (adj) ardent, eager, earnest, derivative, differential, estimate, tenderly, heavily
enthusiastic, intense, cordial, derived function flagellate: (v) lash, flog, whip, thrash,
passionate, hot, emotional, torrid, filial: (adj) dutiful lick, cane, beat, trounce, cob; (n)
strong. ANTONYMS: (adj) fille: (n) maiden, miss, lassie, lass, dinoflagellate, protozoon
apathetic, unenthusiastic, cool, wench, girl, belle, chick, doll, dame, flagging: (adj) tired, fading, lazy,
weak, unexcited, dispirited, maid slack, failing, remiss, pendulous; (v)
dispassionate, flippant, impassive, fillip: (n) incentive, incitement, spur, lame, halting, enervate; (n)
lukewarm, mild bonus, rowel, whip, provocation, pavement. ANTONYM: (adj)
fetter: (n, v) shackle, bond, gyve, encouragement; (v) quicken, irritate, prompt
hamper, hobble, tether; (v) bind, whet flagon: (n) jar, flask, bottle, pitcher,
chain, confine, handcuff, band. filtered: (n) clean, drinkable; (adj) ewer, cruse, vessel, decanter, carboy,
ANTONYMS: (v) free, facilitate refined mug, carafe
flagstone: (n) slab, paving stone, effervescing, bubbly, bubbling, organized, clear, distinct
ensign; (adj) asphalt, wood sparkling, spumy; (adj, n) frothing; fornication: (n) adultery, criminal
pavement (n) surging, effervescence, scum conversation, intercourse,
flakes: (n) dust foin: (n) prod whoredom, bawdry, incest, carnal
flaming: (adj, n) burning, ardent, folio: (n) leaf, sheet, number, page knowledge, extramarital sex,
glowing, passionate; (adj) blazing, number, flyleaf, quarto, octavo, infidelity, intimacy; (adj, n)
ablaze, aflame, hot; (n) enthusiastic, blade, foliage, number the folios, debauchery
flame, fire. ANTONYMS: (adj) book fortification: (n) castle, fort, bastion,
extinguished, placid, gentle, quiet follower: (n) backer, devotee, fan, consolidation, defense, bulwark,
flaring: (adj) flared, flaming, burning, admirer, adherent, cohort, apostle, stronghold, barrier, entrenchment,
blazing, tawdry, ablaze, garish, partisan, believer, attendant; (adj) fortress, safeguard
fiery; (v) glaring; (n) flare; (adv) lover. ANTONYMS: (n) detractor, fortifications: (n) rampart,
flaringly rebel, superior, disbeliever, cynic, battlements, ramparts
flattered: (adj) pleased leader foundling: (adj, n) wastrel; (n)
flattering: (adj) ingratiating, fondling: (n) caressing, pet, caress, abandoned infant, infant, waifs and
complimentary, courtly, obsequious, cuddling, dalliance, foreplay, estrays, vagrant, refugee, babe,
adulatory, fulsome, bland, candied, stimulation, indulgence, darling, scatterling; (v) find, trouvaille; (adj)
smooth, encouraging; (n) flattery. kissing, necking wilding
ANTONYMS: (adj) assertive, font: (n) type, fountain, baptistery, fowl: (n) poultry, bird, domestic fowl,
critical, unflattering, unattractive, typeface, spring, print, well, chick, cochin, birds, partlet, poult,
wounding, uncomplimentary, boldface, black letter, baptistry, hen, fowls, rooster
negative; (adv) partially baptismal font franchises: (n) facility, freedom
flax: (n) hemp, lint, line, feature, foothold: (n) bridgehead, beachhead, franciscan: (n) Gray Friar, Cordelier
clothesline, flex, figure, boundary; hold, support, handhold, basis, frankness: (n) honesty, truth,
(v) hit, trounce, flog footholds, ground, step, toehold, forthrightness, candidness, freedom,
flay: (v) excoriate, peel, skin, position sincerity, candour, plainness,
decorticate, pare, lash, flog, footpad: (n) Dick Turpin, padder, bluffness, outspokenness,
castigate, scalp, shell, batter Macheath, bandit, sturdy beggar, ingenuousness. ANTONYMS: (n)
fleas: (n) order Siphonaptera, vermin, pad, road agent, Claude Duval cunning, tact, delicacy, deceit,
Siphonaptera footstep: (n) pace, footfall, track, conformity, reticence, indirectness,
fleece: (v) extort, bilk, pluck, deceive, footmark, vestige, tread, trail, stride, evasiveness
rip off, swindle, strip, pigeon, shear; degree; (n, v) step, action fraternal: (adj) brotherly, brotherlike,
(adj, v) bleed; (n) wool forbade: (v) prohibit, to prohibit biovular, sympathetic, kind, hearty,
fleecy: (adj) fluffy, hairy, brushed, fore: (adv) ahead, before; (adj, adv) amicable, unhostile, affectionate,
soft, woolly, silky, napped forward; (n) bow, head, forefront, thick, related. ANTONYM: (adj)
flemish: (n) Flemish dialect stem; (adj, n) front; (adj) anterior, identical
fleshless: (adj) scraggy, weedy, lean, foremost, frontal. ANTONYMS: fraternally: (adv) brotherly, heartily,
chapless (adv) aft, behind, rear; (adj) back kindly, sympathetically,
fling: (n, v) toss, throw, pitch, slam, forefinger: (n) index finger, index, harmoniously
hurl; (v) chuck, shoot, dash, rush, forefingers, paw, thumb, hand, fraternity: (adj, n) brotherhood; (n)
discard; (n) crack. ANTONYM: (v) exponent, antenna, feeler association, company, club,
collect foreseeing: (n) foresight, anticipation, fellowship, society, companionship,
flinging: (n) casting, cast prospicience, prevision, forecast; (v) clan, circle, community,
flit: (n, v) dart; (v) flicker, fly, fleet, foresee; (adj) prevoyant, conscious organization
flutter, zip, flash, speed, flitter, run; beforehand freak: (n, v) crotchet, caprice; (adj, n)
(adj) stir foretold: (adj) foreseen; (v) eccentric; (n) oddity, crank, fanatic,
flog: (v) lash, whip, chastise, lick, annunciate nut, monster, fit, whim, fad
trounce, flagellate, birch, castigate, forgetfulness: (n) neglect, amnesia, freewill: (n) autonomy, freedom,
cane, strap, wallop obliviousness, inattention, memory independence; (adj) unpaid
florin: (n) guilder, Dutch florin loss, omission, unknowingness, freshness: (adj) coolness; (n)
flounce: (v) fling, flounder, bob, unawareness, Lethe, carelessness, impertinence, gall, greenness,
bounce, dance; (n) ruffle, frill, fringe, loss of memory. ANTONYMS: (n) impudence, insolence, newness,
trimming, furbelow, frame awareness, concentration, viridity, originality, crust, crispness.
flowered: (adj) flowering, flowery remembering, attention ANTONYMS: (n) oldness, clutter,
fluted: (adj) corrugated, grooved, forked: (adj) bifurcate, divided, humidity, mustiness
gadrooned, canaliculated; (v) branching, bifurcated, furcated, fretted: (adj) latticed, haggard,
ribbed, sulcated biramous, double, forked road, magged, latticelike, reticulated,
fluttering: (adj) flying, palpitating, furcate, tined, forky reticular, interlaced. ANTONYM:
flittering, flaring, aflare, waving; (n) formless: (adj) shapeless, unformed, (adj) unfretted
flutter, flapping, flicker, flitting; indistinct, unstructured, unbodied, frieze: (n) architrave, textile, sconce,
(adv) flutteringly nebulous, vague, indistinguishable, pediment, material, zoophorus,
foaming: (adj) foamy, effervescent, soft, fuzzy, rude. ANTONYMS: (adj) freeze, architectural ornament,
Victor Hugo 659
capital, coping stone, entablature accommodate, supply, outfit, yield, Gallican
frightful: (adj, v) fearful; (adj) decorate; (n, v) give. ANTONYM: gallop: (v) speed, dart, dash, race,
formidable, awful, fearsome, (v) divest spring, tear, hasten, sprint; (adj, v)
appalling, gruesome, horrible, furred: (adj) hairy, hirsute, fur lined, fly; (n, v) trot; (n) gait
terrible, dread, frightening, grim. wooly, fuzzy galloping: (v) flying
ANTONYMS: (adj) wonderful, furrier: (n) cloakmaker, gallows: (n) gibbet, gallous, gallows-
calming, soothing, pleasant, lovely, garmentmaker, garmentworker bitts, hanging, noose, scaffold,
fair furrow: (n, v) fold, crinkle, crease, halter, tree, rope, gallowstree, bough
frightfully: (adv) awfully, ghastly, groove, line, chamfer, rut; (n) gambler: (n) gamester, adventurer,
dreadfully, fearfully, hideously, channel, cut, ditch, trough. punter, plunger, croupier, bettor,
terribly, gruesomely, terrifically, ANTONYMS: (n) ridge; (v) smooth bookmaker, speculator, gamblers,
atrociously, horrendously, awful furrowed: (adj) wrinkled, lined, high roller, shooter
frisking: (n) search, hunt, hunting, wrinkly, crumpled, corrugated, gambling: (adj, n) gaming; (n) play,
searching corrugate, furrowy, porcate, rugged, speculation, recreation, vice,
frisky: (adj) playful, brisk, lively, uneven. ANTONYM: (adj) hazardry, bid; (adj) betting,
coltish, perky, blithe, breezy, unfurrowed dissipated, sporting, clean
kittenish, tricksy, buoyant, mirthful. furtive: (adj) covert, stealthy, gambols: (n) behave, play, frolic,
ANTONYMS: (adj) lethargic, surreptitious, secretive, concealed, employment, disport, act, action,
demure, sedate, solemn latent, cryptic, sneaky, backstairs, amusement
frock: (n) dress, gown, clothing, secret, underhanded. ANTONYMS: gamester: (n) sportsman, player,
attire, robe, kirtle, habit, clothes, (adj) blatant, aboveboard, obvious, reveler, dicer, hazarder
coat, chemise, caftan overt, honest gaming: (n) play, game, diversion,
frolicsome: (adj) frisky, frolic, furtively: (adv) stealthily, covertly, speculation, wager, frolic, bet,
waggish, coltish, gay, rollicking, surreptitiously, sneakily, gamble, recreation, vice, betting
frolicky, jocose, airy, lively, jocular. clandestinely, secretively, sly, gamut: (n) scale, reach, compass,
ANTONYMS: (adj) serious, lethargic sneakingly, underhandedly, ambit, ut, orbit, series, variety,
frontispiece: (n) front, heading, undercoverly, craftily. sweep, spectrum, stretch
frontage, facia, face, groundwork, ANTONYMS: (adv) deliberately, gaping: (adj, n) agape; (adj) vast,
endpapers, pediment, proscenium brazenly yawning, cavernous, discontinuous,
frothing: (adj) foamy, bubbling, fustian: (adj, n) rant, jargon; (adj) wide, ajar, drowsy, hollow, wide
effervescent, bubbly, spumous, bombastic, inflated, pompous, open; (adj, v) oscitant. ANTONYMS:
spumy, effervescing, sudsy, grandiloquent, highfalutin, prose (adj) cramped, narrow
agitated; (n) effervescence, scum run mad; (n) claptrap, blah, garb: (n, v) dress, apparel, array,
fruitless: (adj, v) abortive; (adj) grandiosity garment; (n) attire, clothing,
barren, useless, empty, futile, gable: (n) pediment, gable end, wall, costume, frock, outfit, clothes; (v)
ineffective, idle, pointless, sterile, gable wall, William Clark gable, bell clothe
bootless, unproductive. gable, corbie gable, gavel, Clark gargantua: (adj) Brobdingnagian,
ANTONYMS: (adj) fertile, useful, gable mammoth, monster, Gog and
effective, satisfying, fruitful, gadfly: (n) botfly, horsefly, pest, cuss, Magog, giant, Goliath; (n) Cyclops
worthwhile, profitable, successful, blighter, tormentor, persecutor, gargle: (v) rinse, utter, lave, drink,
productive, hopeful, meaningful nuisance, chap, pesterer, clegg gargarize, gargalize; (n) solution,
fumble: (n, v) muff; (v) botch, grope, galiot: (n) flatboat, dugout, galliot gargarism, bath; (adj) syringe, inject
feel, flounder, finger, paw, bobble, gallant: (adj) fearless, brave, daring, garnished: (adj) fancier, elaborate
touch; (adj, v) blunder; (adj) boggle courageous, chivalrous, bold, garret: (n) cockloft, loft, attic, house
fumbling: (adj) clumsy, fumble, manly, heroic, dashing, courteous, top, storey, level, upper story, story,
butterfingered, awkward, bumbling, fine. ANTONYMS: (adj) boorish, dome, noggin, classical Greek
bunglesome, clunky, cumbersome, rude, selfish garrulous: (adj) talkative, chatty,
incompetent, left-handed, unskilled gallantly: (adv) courageously, gabby, verbose, wordy,
funereal: (adj) doleful, dismal, intrepidly, chivalrously, splendidly, conversational, glib, talky, windy,
dreary, somber, gloomy, valiantly, heroically, fearlessly, voluble, effusive. ANTONYMS:
melancholy, dolorous, dark, finely, doughtily, pluckily, (adj) taciturn, concise, reticent
depressing, lugubrious; (v) burial. courteously. ANTONYMS: (adv) gauze: (n) film, curtain, blind,
ANTONYMS: (adj) cheery, lively, unchivalrously, poorly, timidly bandage, mask, mantle, muslin,
cheerful gallantry: (adj, n) prowess, daring, screen, gauze bandage, shutter, daze
fungi: (n) bacteria, fungus, kingdom spirit, fearlessness; (n) heroism, gayety: (n) hilarity, glee, cheer,
fungi, Thallophyta, fungus kingdom bravery, valor, courage, chivalry, jocundity, joviality, happiness,
furnace: (n) forge, heater, blast courtesy, courageousness. pleasure; (adj) good humor,
furnace, fireplace, hearth, stove, ANTONYMS: (n) cowardice, L'Allegro, spirits; (adj, n) mirth
oven, kiln, electric furnace, cupola, cowardliness, rudeness gayly: (adv) cheerfully, merrily,
crematorium galleys: (n) crank, treadmill, mirthfully, gaily, jovially, airily,
furnish: (v) afford, provide, punishment lightly, sportively, easily, finely,
contribute, render, offer, gallic: (adj) French, Gaulish, Gallian, courageously
gazelle: (adj) antelope, race horse, zone, ring; (n) cincture, godfather: (n) godchild, supporter,
eagle, courser; (n) springbuck, gazel cummerbund, sash patron, godparent, godmother,
gazette: (n) magazine, journal, gist: (n) content, substance, core, gangster, executive; (v) christen
newspaper, gazetteer, organ, public essence, heart, crux, marrow, matter, godmother: (n) sponsor, godchild,
press, list, the press, tract, catalogue; meaning, kernel; (adj, n) godparent
(v) publish quintessence golconda: (n) Potosi, king's ransom,
gehenna: (n) Tartarus, perdition, hell, glace: (adj) sleek, crystalized, glossy, Pacatolus, mint of money, mine of
inferno, limbo, purgatory lustrous, shiny, slippery, wealth, gold mine, El Dorado,
gendarme: (n) mace bearer, huissier, crystallized bonanza
kavass, lictor, policeman, officer, glacial: (adj) arctic, frigid, freezing, goodly: (adv) benignly, kindly,
bedel, beefeater, National Guard, frosty, frozen, gelid, polar, chilly, strongly, rightly, graciously,
posse comitatus, reserves wintry, chilling; (adj, v) icy. virtuously, soundly, uprightly; (adj)
genesis: (n) beginning, birth, origin, ANTONYMS: (adj) warm, friendly, sizable, handsome, respectable
ancestry, descent, cause, tropical, torrid goody: (n) dainty, tidbit, gammer,
commencement, generation, glassy: (adj, v) glossy; (adj) clear, titbit, kickshaw, gelatin, dowager,
derivation, creation, dawn. glazed, smooth, flat, crystalline, ambrosia, Donna Belle, treat,
ANTONYM: (n) end dead, dull, hyaline, transparent; (v) confectionery
gentleness: (adj, n) kindness, glabrous. ANTONYMS: (adj) alert, gorged: (adj) sated, full, stuffed,
courtesy, benignity, compassion; (n) bumpy, dull, expressive, murky, congested, replete, satisfied,
kindliness, lenity, mildness, rough bursting, surfeited; (v) ready to
sweetness, softness, benevolence, glazier: (n) glasscutter, glazer, burst
mercy. ANTONYMS: (n) severity, journeyman, puttier, artificer, gorget: (n) armor plate, armour plate
harshness, fierceness, cruelty, artisan, craftsman, glass cutter gorgon: (adj) mormo, ogre,
ferocity, brusqueness, abruptness, glide: (adj, n, v) slide; (n, v) coast, Hurlothrumbo, enfant terrible, bete
rage, callousness, sharpness, slip; (v) float, run, fly, flow, drift, noire, Euryale, nightmare
roughness lapse, slink, skid. ANTONYMS: (v) gossiping: (adj) gabby, garrulous,
geometrical: (adj) lurch, hurtle, flounder, sink scandalous; (n) gossipmongering
nonrepresentational, mathematical gliding: (adj) sliding, flying, slipping, goujon: (n) catfish, flathead catfish,
germ: (n) beginning, bacterium, bud, labent, elusory; (n) sailing, soaring, shovelnose catfish, spoonbill catfish,
sprout, kernel, microbe, embryo, flight, glissando; (v) slither; (adv) mudcat
egg, bacillus, root, seed glidingly gourd: (n) bottle gourd, pumpkin,
gesticulating: (adj) communicative glorification: (n) adoration, praise, melon, Lagenaria, gord, vine,
gewgaws: (n) gay ornaments, fallals, admiration, worship, eulogy, noddle, exploding cucumber, fruit,
frippery apotheosis, glory, appreciation, flask, calabash tree
ghent: (n) gent, Gand, fellow, feller, idealization; (adj, n) celebration, gout: (n) taste, relish, arthritis, go-out;
fella, cuss, chap, blighter dedication. ANTONYM: (n) (v) cephalalgia, earache, otalgia,
gibbet: (n) gallows, gallowstree, disparagement odontalgia, neuralgia, lumbago,
gallous, scaffold; (v) hang, expose, glossa: (n) clapper, applauder, lingua sciatica
pillory, brand, stigmatize, disgrace, glued: (adj) watchful, affixed, goya: (n) Francisco Jose de Goya,
string up attentive Francisco de Goya, Francisco Goya
giddy: (adj, v) flighty; (adj) dizzy, gnash: (v) grate, frown, gnarl, clench, gracefully: (adv) prettily, graciously,
faint, silly, changeable, vertiginous, snap, rasp, scrape, scowl, pout, neatly, delicately, smoothly,
featherbrained, light, fickle, lower, knit the brow charmingly, refinedly, lithely, easily,
capricious; (adv) careless. gnat: (adj) midge, animalcule, emmet, daintily, nicely. ANTONYMS: (adv)
ANTONYMS: (adj) serious, dull shrimp, maggot, minnow, worm; (n) awkwardly, ungraciously, clumsily,
gild: (v) embellish, ornament, blackfly, mosquito, sandfly, black fly gracelessly, vigorously,
beautify, decorate, begild, engild, gnawed: (v) gnow, eroded unpleasantly, unkindly, heavily
paint, whitewash, varnish; (n) club, gnawing: (v) corroding, biting; (n) graciously: (adv) gracefully, mildly,
fraternity. ANTONYM: (v) strip arrosion politely, courteously, benevolently,
gilded: (adj, v) gilt; (adj) rich, gold, gnome: (n) dwarf, goblin, imp, benignantly, civilly,
golden, deluxe, gilden, fortunate, axiom, sprite, lamia, jinn, elf, sympathetically, mercifully,
garish, advantageous, aurated, brownie, byword, pixie leniently, suavely. ANTONYMS:
luxurious goad: (n, v) spur, drive, urge, (adv) bitterly, coarsely, poorly,
gilding: (n) embellishment, ormolu, stimulus, prick; (n) fillip, gad, ungraciously, harshly
plating, beautification, cosmetics, incentive; (v) foment, incite, gradation: (n) degree, scale, ablaut,
decoration, enamel, adornment, encourage. ANTONYMS: (n) curb, progression, graduation, tier, step,
prettification, coat, gold plating deterrent, disincentive; (v) deter, level, shade, form, extent
gimlet: (n) auger, borer, wimble, inhibit, restrain, prevent, soothe, graft: (n, v) transplant, toil; (n)
drill, bore, probe, trepan, awl, calm, discourage corruption, bribery, bud, grafting,
corkscrew, cocktail, gimblet goblet: (n) bowl, chalice, cup, mug, bribe, implant; (v) engraft, ingraft,
girdle: (v) encircle, circle, compass, grail, beaker, basin, tumbler, boodle
gird, enclose, encompass; (n, v) rummer, flask; (v) glass grafting: (n) tongue-grafting,
Victor Hugo 661
transplantation, transplant, grimy: (adj) dirty, filthy, grubby, discharge, stream, rush, surge; (n)
attachment, bribery dingy, unclean, impure, nasty, burst, effusion; (v) course
grammarian: (n) philologist, begrimed, squalid, messy, muddy. gushing: (adj) pouring, enthusiastic,
syntactician ANTONYMS: (adj) pure, pleasant burbly, alive to, burbling, emotional,
granary: (n) garner, warehouse, groaning: (adj) moaning, groaningly, effusive, garrulous, torrential; (n)
storage, grange, store, storehouse, inarticulate sincere, passionate. ANTONYM:
cornloft, depot, farm, lathe, entrepot grooved: (adj) fluted, ribbed, (adj) taciturn
grandiose: (adj) majestic, pretentious, channeled, established, flutelike, gust: (n) eruption, flurry, blow, blast,
bombastic, imposing, ostentatious, accustomed, methodical, ridged, puff, flare, explosion, gale, storm,
pompous, stately, royal, ambitious, fine breeze; (adj, n) whiff
flamboyant, highfalutin. groping: (adj) fumbling, gropingly, gustavus: (n) Gustavus Adolphus,
ANTONYMS: (adj) unimpressive, investigative, incertain, blind, Gustavus II
modest probing, tentative, uncertain, gutenberg: (n) Laurens Janszoon
grasshopper: (n) goat, frog, chamois, unsure, hesitant, exploratory Coster, Laurens Janszoon Koster,
orthopteron, orthopteran, cricket, grotesquely: (adv) monstrously, Johannes Gutenberg, Johann
locust, cocktail, acridid, flea ludicrously, unnaturally, anticly, Gutenberg
gratified: (adj) glad, satisfied, funnily, hideously, ridiculously, guttural: (adj) hoarse, throaty, gruff,
pleased, delighted, happy, thankful, bizarrely, fantasticly, fantastically, croaking, husky, harsh, velar,
grateful, content, complacent, drolly raucous, grum; (n) dental; (v) nasal.
comfortable, cheerful grotto: (n) cavern, cave, alcove, ANTONYMS: (adj) soft, smooth,
gratifying: (adj) agreeable, pleasant, conservatory, arbor, greenhouse, high
enjoyable, delightful, pleasurable, bower, hermitage, Grote, habitation: (adj, n) abode; (n)
rewarding, welcome, satisfying, summerhouse, crypt domicile, residence, house, home,
nice; (adj, v) grateful; (v) gratify. groundwork: (n) bottom, basis, base, habitat, lodging, place, occupancy,
ANTONYMS: (adj) disappointing, foundation, bed, ground, footing, inhabitation, inhabitancy.
unwelcome, unrewarding, bedrock, fundament, background, ANTONYM: (n) vacancy
frustrating, disagreeable, substructure habitually: (adv) usually, ordinarily,
heartbreaking, annoying, unpleasant growl: (adj, n, v) snarl; (n, v) roar, normally, generally, regularly,
grating: (adj) hoarse, strident, harsh, bark, howl, yap, moan, thunder; (v) frequently, commonly, routinely,
discordant, gravelly, raspy, gruff, gnarl, mutter, complain, croak wontedly, conventionally,
raucous; (n, v) lattice; (n) grate, grid. growling: (adj) grunting, doggish, commonplacely. ANTONYMS:
ANTONYMS: (adj) pleasing, churlish, brutal, guttural, hoarse, (adv) unusually, seldom, erratically,
soothing, smooth, harmonious husky, peevish; (n) scowling, exceptionally, occasionally
graven: (adj) carved, engraved, glowering habituated: (v) given to, addicted to,
etched, sculptured, sculptile, grudge: (v) begrudge, covet; (n, v) attuned to; (adj, v) used to; (adj)
sculpted, inscribed, carven spite; (n) malice, anger, umbrage, addicted, wont, trained, inured,
gray-haired: (adj) old, long in the resentment, rancor, gall, pique, feud used, inveterate, hardened.
tooth gruff: (adj) bluff, abrupt, curt, crusty, ANTONYM: (adj) untrained
grazed: (adj) hurt brusque, brutal, husky; (adj, v) hackbut: (n) arquebus, hack ,
greenish: (adj) green, virescent, coarse, rough, hoarse, harsh. shooting iron, shooter, shotgun,
viridescent, fleeceable, envious, ANTONYMS: (adj) courteous, hagbut
covetous, chromatic, porraceous friendly, high, velvety, smooth, haggard: (adj) emaciated, gaunt,
greenly: (adv) youngly, verdantly, mellow, gentle, civil, polite cadaverous, careworn, tired, worn,
immaturely, rawly, freshly, naively, grumble: (n, v) mutter, gripe, growl, lean, thin, wasted, pinched, squalid.
unripely, recently, youthfully, moan, rumble, mumble, groan, roar; ANTONYMS: (adj) relaxed, carefree,
unsophisticatedly, lushly (v) complain, grouch; (n) complaint. healthy
greensward: (n) sward, turf, sod, ANTONYMS: (n, v) praise; (v) hail: (v) address, cry, acclaim,
green, lawn, ground, land, soil, compliment, rejoice applaud, summon, accost, fall,
meadow, bugger, field grumbling: (n) grumble, growling, cheer, salute; (n, v) call; (n) greeting.
grenadiers: (n) Macrouridae murmur, murmuring, mutter, ANTONYMS: (v) ignore, criticize
gridiron: (v) grill, grating, trellis, muttering; (adj, n) rumbling; (adv) hailstones: (n) sleet, frozen rain
grille, tracery, reticle; (n, v) lattice; grumblingly; (adj) grouchy, haired: (adj) hirsute, herd
(n) football field, field, andiron, web grumpy, irritable hallowed: (adj) holy, blessed,
grief-stricken: (adj) brokenhearted, guardianship: (n) custody, care, consecrated, sacred, sanctified,
woebegone, plaintive, disconsolate, charge, keeping, safekeeping, divine, heavenly, saintly, inviolable,
despairing tutelage, conservation, protection, revered, sacrosanct. ANTONYM:
grieved: (adj) sore, sad, sorry, wardship; (adj, n) ward; (adj) guard (adj) secular
sorrowful, upset, woeful, pained, guillotine: (n) trimmer, block, ax, hallucination: (n) illusion, dream,
affected, brokenhearted closure by compartment, cutter, gag apparition, vision, fantasy,
grimace: (n, v) scowl, glower, sneer, rule; (v) decapitate, cut, execute, kill, phantom, delirium, aberration,
smile, roar; (n) face, mop, mouth, murder optical illusion, mirage, nightmare
expression; (v) pull a face, wince gush: (n, v) flood, flow, spurt, jet, halter: (n) gibbet, rein, bridle,
gallows, rope, noose, cestus, collar, hastening: (n) quickening, speed, languorously
drop; (v) confine, cramp hurrying, speeding up, faster, fast, heartrending: (adj) grievous,
halting: (adj) halt, hesitant, broken, stepping up deplorable, pitiful, distressing,
crude, grotesque, barbarous; (adj, v) hateful: (adj) disgusting, execrable, catastrophic, woeful, tragic, pathetic,
lame, crippled; (adv) haltingly; (v) nasty, abominable, hideous, moving, miserable, affecting.
drooping, flagging. ANTONYMS: despicable, repulsive, distasteful, ANTONYMS: (adj) cheerful,
(adj) easy, firm foul; (adj, v) odious, obnoxious. unemotional, joyous, happy
handcuffs: (n) fetters, cuffs, cuff, ANTONYMS: (adj) delightful, kind, hearty: (adj) heartfelt, healthy, genial,
chains, handcuff, manacles, nice, benign, desirable sturdy, cheering, fervent,
manacle, bonds, bond, darbies, iron haughty: (adj) supercilious, arrogant, wholehearted, lusty, enthusiastic,
hangings: (n) long curtains assuming, contemptuous, proud, convivial; (adj, n) well.
hangman: (n) executioner, headsman, lordly, cavalier, vain, contumelious, ANTONYMS: (adj) unhealthy, frail,
hanger, tormentor, tiger, boggle, grand; (n) boastful. ANTONYMS: old, weak, sluggish, unwholesome,
crossword puzzle, scrabble, wild (adj) modest, meek, subservient, meager
beast, hyena unassuming, considerate, heathen: (adj, n) gentile, ethnic; (n)
haphazard: (adj, n) chance; (adj) deferential infidel, idolater, paynim, heretic;
careless, fortuitous, contingent, haunches: (n) buttocks (adj) heathenish, irreligious, giaour,
random, casual, indiscriminate, hauteur: (n) arrogance, pride, godless, barbaric
occasional, slipshod, adventitious; disdain, conceit, assumption, heavenward: (adj) skyward; (adj,
(adv) casually. ANTONYMS: (adj) conceitedness, insolence, loftiness, adv) toward heaven; (adv)
methodical, discerning, planned, lordliness, airs, elegance. heavenwardly
organized, meticulous, regular, ANTONYM: (n) modesty heaving: (v) tremor, twitter; (adj)
careful, deliberate hawklike: (n) accipitral; (adj) swelling, full, full up, jammed; (n)
harangue: (v) declaim; (n) rant, accipitrine, beaked, hawky murmur, forcing out, groan,
screed, address, tirade, oration, hayloft: (n) loft, garret, attic grumble, mutter. ANTONYM: (adj)
diatribe, sermon; (n, v) lecture, headdress: (n) headgear, hood, deserted
discourse, stump turban, apparel, crown, clothes, hebrew: (n) Israelite, Rabbist,
haranguing: (n) declamation chapeau, cap, hairstyle, coiffure, rabbinist, kike, Pharisee, redeemer,
harden: (adj, v) habituate, inure; (n, vesture savior; (adj) Hebraic, Greek, Jewish,
v) strengthen; (v) season, headgear: (n) halter, bridle, hood, dominical
consolidate, freeze, congeal, hackamore, hoist, hat, cap, chapeau, heed: (n, v) consideration, concern,
coagulate, calcify, petrify; (n) brace. helmet, lid, miter regard, mind, attention, notice; (n)
ANTONYMS: (v) soften, liquefy, headlong: (adj, adv) headfirst; (adv) caution, advertence, advertency; (v)
dissolve, weaken, melt directly, hastily, precipitately; (adj) attend, hear. ANTONYMS: (n, v)
hardily: (adv) robustly, vigorously, rash, hurried, desperate, disregard; (n) inattentiveness
stoutly, courageously, hardly, precipitous, impetuous, sudden, heedless: (adj) careless, reckless,
intrepidly, strongly, powerfully, precipitate. ANTONYMS: (adj) inattentive, neglectful, negligent,
ruggedly, sturdily, toughly cautiously, considered; (adv) thoughtless, rash, regardless,
hares: (n) Lagomorpha carefully unwary, indifferent; (adj, v) wanton.
hark: (v) harken, hear, hearken, heed, headsman: (n) headman, executioner, ANTONYMS: (adj) heedful,
listen in; (n) look here, look you, hangman, chieftain attentive, mindful, conscientious,
look healed: (adj) recovered, heal, recover, prudent, careful, cautious
harshness: (n) austerity, asperity, whole, corned, well, aged heedlessness: (n) neglect, rashness,
severity, acrimony, brutality, heaped: (adj) dense, cumulative, carelessness, inattention,
hardness, roughness, rigor, concentrated, collective, coacervate, inadvertence, recklessness,
inclemency, hoarseness; (adj, n) thick indifference, inattentiveness,
strictness. ANTONYMS: (n) heaps: (adj, n) lots, much; (n) masses, foolhardiness, disregard, temerity.
softness, leniency, quietness, oodles, piles, stacks, many, tons, ANTONYMS: (n) mindfulness,
flexibility, kindness, mercy, plenty, lot, accumulation. caution
sweetness, melodiousness, ANTONYM: (adj) inadequate hellish: (adj, v) diabolic, satanic; (adj)
brightness, smoothness, lenience heartbreaking: (adj) poignant, tragic, infernal, diabolical, fiendish,
harvester: (n) combine, binder, depressing, distressing, grievous, demonic, beastly, wicked, unholy,
harvestman, cutter, fieldhand, pathetic, deplorable, moving, pitiful, detestable; (v) mephistophelian
header, Grim Reaper, picking unfortunate, catastrophic. helplessness: (n) powerlessness,
machine, farmer, farm worker, farm ANTONYMS: (adj) comforting, defenselessness, dependence,
machine unemotional, happy, cheerful, impotency, impotence, inability,
hasten: (adj, n, v) speed, quicken; (v) heartwarming, joyous impuissance, incapability,
expedite, advance, hurry, hie, dash, heartily: (adv) cordially, sincerely, incapacity, defencelessness, failing.
rush; (n, v) further, forward, enthusiastically, warmly, strongly, ANTONYMS: (n) resistance,
dispatch. ANTONYMS: (v) linger, earnestly, vigorously, ardently, capacity, strength
retard, amble soundly, devoutly, eagerly. hemp: (n) cannabis, dope, ganja,
hastened: (adj) careless ANTONYMS: (adv) feebly, grass, flax, halter, rope, abaca, gage;
Victor Hugo 663
(adj) marijuana, pot bandit, robber, outlaw, hijacker, kor, basking shark, base hit, triumph
hempen: (adj) Hempen collar, tough, road agent, highjacker, padder, homo: (n) gay, fellow, lesbian,
cannabine freebooter, sturdy beggar homosexual, human being, human,
heraldic: (adj) communicative, hillock: (n) hill, mound, rise, barrow, man, ad hominem, guy, one,
communicatory kopje, hammock, elevation, heap; somebody
herculean: (adj) cyclopean, (adj, n) knoll, hummock; (adj) mole honeyed: (adj) honied, dulcet,
prodigious, formidable, powerful, hilly: (adj) steep, rugged, luscious, syrupy, mellifluous,
brawny, laborious, difficult, hard, mountainous, cragged, rough, melodic, melodious, sugary,
giant, gigantic; (v) palestric rocky, lofty, irregular, tumulous, saccharine, complimentary, candied
herein: (adv) here, therein knobby, unsmooth. ANTONYM: honor: (n, v) respect, reputation,
heresy: (n) paganism, heathenism, (adj) flat glory, fame, reward; (n) award,
false doctrine, nonconformity, hilt: (n) knob, grip, handgrip, haft, accolade, reverence; (v) celebrate;
revisionism, unbelief, orientation, helm, gripe, tiller, treadle, key, (adj, n, v) worship, grace.
apostasy, fallacy, schism, dissent trigger, butt ANTONYMS: (n, v) dishonor,
heretic: (n) schismatic, pagan, hindoo: (n) Brahman, Vaishnava, disgrace; (n) shame, humiliation,
misbeliever, nonconformist, Kshatriya, Hindustani, gentoo, wickedness, contempt, insult; (v)
dissident, sectarian, heathen, pariah, Brahmin, chela; (adj) Hindi break, ignore, disrespect, discredit
outcast, dissenter, renegade hindrance: (n, v) difficulty, obstacle, honorable: (adj) good, estimable,
heretofore: (adv) formerly, as yet, block, check, delay; (n) deterrent, exalted, respectable, fair, decent,
before, so far, yet, already, until barrier, obstruction, impediment, reputable, ethical, honor; (adj, v)
now, previously, once, hereunto; inconvenience, disturbance. great, noble. ANTONYMS: (adj)
(adv, n) hitherto ANTONYMS: (n) advantage, shameful, disgraceful, corrupt,
hermetic: (adj) tight, airtight, contribution, assistance, success, degenerate, immoral, humiliating,
hermetical, impenetrable, boost, incentive, strength dishonest, unethical, decadent, bad,
impervious, sealed, airproof, air- hinge: (n, v) joint; (n) axis, axle, deceitful
tight, watertight, recondite, articulation, spindle, crux, fulcrum, honored: (adj) esteemed, reputable,
reclusive arbor, flexible joint; (v) depend, respected, honoured, privileged,
hermetically: (adv) chemically, juncture glorious, distinguished, honorable,
tightly, impenetrably, sealedly, hippocras: (n) ypocras, ipocras worshipful, exalted, revered.
imperviously hippocrates: (n) Galen ANTONYMS: (adj) disadvantaged,
hermit: (n) anchorite, ascetic, solitary, hiss: (v) fizz, spit, whiz, whisper, disreputable
anchoret, eremite, monk, troglodyte, whoosh; (n) buzz, jeer, hissing, hooded: (v) cucullate, encuirassed,
solitaire, loner, caveman, cave man ridicule; (n, v) hoot, taunt dermatoid, squamiferous, tectiform;
heroically: (adj, adv) courageously, hissing: (adj) sibilant, sibilous, (adj) covered, capistrate, cucullated,
daringly; (adv) intrepidly, fearlessly, sibilatory; (n) whistling, heckling, draped, enclosed, kerchieft
gallantly, boldly, grandly, nobly, scoffing, sibilance, taunts, sibilation, hoof: (n) toe, sole, hooves, bottom,
resolutely, splendidly, chivalrously. white noise; (v) fizzle. ANTONYM: keel, root, leg, ungula, unguis,
ANTONYMS: (adv) halfheartedly, (n) applause animal foot; (v) step
fearfully, execrably hither: (adv) here, whither, hoops: (n) basketball game, earrings,
heron: (n) egret, broadbill, boatbill, hitherward, thither studs, jewelry, basketball
bittern, hern, wader, bomber, Cuban hive: (adj) swarm, herd; (v) store, SE hoot: (n, v) hiss, boo, cry, jeer, mock,
sandwich, fighter, great blue heron, nicher; (n) concourse, hiding place, beep; (n) gibe, honk, catcall; (v) call,
champion cave, cell, den, aerie, eyry howl
hesitating: (adj) indecisive, irresolute, hives: (n) urticaria, rash, hopping: (n) jump, jumping, leaping;
undecided, doubtful, hesitate, efflorescence, eruption, urtication, (adv) leapingly
reluctant, faltering, unwilling, skin complaint horde: (n) gang, crowd, crush,
hesitancy, backward, hesitatingly hoarding: (n) billboard, hoard, swarm, mob, drove, crew, cloud,
hewn: (adj) downed garner, signboard, cumulation, shoal, throng, herd. ANTONYM: (n)
hexagonal: (adj) sexangular, board, save, hoards, store, notice, few
hexangular poster horizontally: (adv) evenly, flatly,
hexameter: (n) verse, pentameter hoarse: (adj) gruff, husky, raucous, planely, straightly, frigidly, dully,
hierarchic: (adj) hierarchal, grating, strident, guttural, rough, barwise, smoothly, recumbently,
hierarchical, stratified, graded. throaty; (v) coarse; (adj, v) hollow, prostrately; (adj) crosswise
ANTONYM: (adj) nonhierarchical sepulchral. ANTONYMS: (adj) horned: (adj) cornuted, somm, horny,
hieroglyph: (n) hieratic, orthography, smooth, mellow, velvety, high sharp, cuckolded, cornigerous,
writing, character, hieratic script hogshead: (n) cask, barrel, vat bearing horns, having horns.
hieroglyphic: (adj) hieroglyphical, hollowed: (adj) concave ANTONYM: (adj) hornless
illegible; (v) arrowhead, ogham, hombre: (n) guy, bloke, Dick, chap, horny: (adj) corneous, hornlike, hard,
runes, cuneiform character, uncial bozo, cuss, gink, creature, bugger, hot, excited, ruttish, randy,
writing; (n) writing, orthography, man, sod lecherous, lascivious, aroused,
ideograph, hieratic script homer: (n) homing pigeon, poet, cornuted
highwayman: (n) footpad, brigand, Winslow homer, bingle, referee, cor, horseback: (n) hogback, body part
horseman: (n) cavalier, rider, jockey, mild hypocritical. ANTONYMS: (n)
horse fancier, horseback rider, humming: (adj) droning, zippy, sincerity, honesty
trooper, trainer, knight, cavalryman, reeking, bustling, grunting, stinking; hypocrite: (n) impostor, pretender,
animal fancier, postilion (n) buzzing, vocalizing, sound, trickster, fraud, deceiver, fake, cheat,
horseshoe: (n) bow, arc, arch, carve, murmur, growling charmer, bigot, whited sepulcher,
crescent, arcade, loop, curve, brake humor: (n, v) caprice, freak, humour; smoothie
shoe, lunule, vault (n) temper, mood, disposition, wit; idem: (n) the same
hose: (n) stocking, pipe, tights, (v) indulge, gratify; (adj, n) spirit, idiotic: (adj) absurd, foolish, fatuous,
hosepipe, hosiery, fire hose, airline, frame of mind. ANTONYMS: (n) imbecile, crazy, stupid, ridiculous,
trunk hose; (v) water, cheat; (n, v) seriousness, gravity, solemnity; (v) mindless, silly, unwise, daft.
wash displease ANTONYMS: (adj) wise, genius,
hosier: (n) cordwainer, storekeeper, hump: (n) bulge, swelling, knob, clever
tradesman, shopkeeper, hatter gibbosity, protuberance, bunch, idleness: (n) lethargy, laziness,
hospitable: (adj) affable, receptive, lump; (n, v) hunch; (v) jazz, fuck, torpor, inactivity, idling,
gracious, cordial, generous, amiable, bed. ANTONYM: (n) crater unemployment, sloth, inaction,
convivial, genial, pleasant, warm, to humped: (adj) gibbous, inertia, faineance, idlesse.
enjoy having guests. ANTONYMS: hunchbacked, gibbose, crookback, ANTONYMS: (n) energy, activity,
(adj) unwelcoming, inhospitable, crookbacked, humpy, bent, curved, bustle, liveliness, responsibility
sinister, hostile hunchback, kyphotic, unfit idolater: (n) heathen, pagan,
hostelry: (n) inn, lodge, tavern, hotel, hunch: (n, v) hump; (n) intuition, idolatress, idolizer, idol worshiper,
khan, caravansary, pub, public suspicion, foreboding, feeling, devotee, adorer, infidel, Baalite,
house, saloon, imaret, club premonition, presentiment, bunch, bigot, fanatic
hotly: (adv) heatedly, passionately, inkling; (v) bend, crouch idolized: (adj) adored, beloved,
fervidly, fervently, pepperily, hunchback: (n) humpback, hump, loved, precious, worshipped
sultrily, intensely, sharply, torridly; kyphosis, humpback whale; (adj) ignited: (adj) kindled, enkindled,
(adj, adv) violently, vehemently. humpbacked, hunchbacked, flaming, ablaze, fiery; (adj, v)
ANTONYMS: (adv) impassively, humped, crookbacked, kyphotic, burning; (v) having life, flowing,
mildly gibbose, gibbous active, being alive, laving
hound: (v) bloodhound, chase, hunt, hunchbacked: (adj) hunchback, ignoble: (adj) contemptible, abject,
follow, badger, course, bait, pursue; crookback, humpbacked, gibbous, base, dishonorable, disgraceful,
(n) greyhound, blackguard, cad. crookbacked, gibbose, kyphotic, beggarly, mean, humble, degraded,
ANTONYM: (v) soothe unfit despicable, caddish. ANTONYMS:
housings: (n) horsecloth, caparison, huntsman: (n) fowler, trapper, (adj) honorable, glorious
saddlery, tack, furnishings, bard, hawker, huntress, falconer, ignominious: (adj) dishonorable,
trapping, trappings pothunter, jaeger, seeker, tracker, shameful, disreputable, infamous,
hovel: (n) hut, cot, booth, hole, stalker; (v) sportsman base, discreditable, dishonourable,
cottage, hutch, shanty, bothy, shed, hurl: (v) chuck, dash, pitch, throw, inglorious, black, despicable,
shack, croft. ANTONYM: (n) dart, pelt, toss, heave, send; (n, v) degrading. ANTONYMS: (adj)
mansion fling; (n) casting. ANTONYM: (v) honorable, glorious
howl: (n, v) cry, roar, scream, bark, hold ignominy: (n) disgrace, dishonor,
shout, yell, bay, yelp; (v) bawl, hurling: (adj) moving; (n) field game shame, reproach, contempt,
growl, yawl. ANTONYM: (v) laugh hurly-burly: (n) hubbub, tumult, disrepute, degradation, discredit,
howling: (n) howl, cry; (adj) fierce, uproar, to-do, commotion, haste, scandal; (adj, n) odium; (adj)
fantastic, gross, glaring, marvelous, bustle, clamor, hassle, storm opprobrium. ANTONYMS: (n)
wonderful, wondrous; (adj, n) hurrah: (int, n) hooray; (n) huzza, cry, success, glorification, pride
weeping, sniveling controversy, fervor, passion, praise; ignoramus: (n) fool, dolt, idiot,
humid: (adj) wet, moist, dank, damp, (int) congratulations, bravo; (v) blockhead, simpleton, numskull,
sultry, steamy, watery, wettish, come; (adv) cheerfully bungler, dullard, dumbbell,
clammy, sticky, soggy. hussar: (n) dragoon, cavalry, artillery, dummy, booby
ANTONYMS: (adj) fresh, cool, arid, horse artillery, cavalryman, ill-bred: (adj) boorish, discourteous,
temperate mounted rifles, uhlan, voltigeur, impertinent, graceless, gruff,
humiliated: (adj) humbled, mortified, light horse uncouth, uncivil, ill-mannered,
embarrassed, humble, broken, hyaena: (n) canine, canid, aardwolf, crude, inurbane, indelicate
abashed, crushed, miserable, brown hyena ill-favored: (adj) ugly, objectionable,
shamefaced, abject, feeling guilty hydra: (adj) chimera, Minotaur, seed ill-favoured, unwelcome,
humiliating: (adj) humbling, plot, sphinx, warren, rabbit, unacceptable, inadmissible
embarrassing, mortifying, phoenix, milch cow; (n) snake, ill-humor: (n) chagrin
demeaning, shameful, disgraceful, plague, cancer illuminations: (n) flourish of
ignominious, abject, dishonorable; hypocrisy: (n, v) insincerity; (n) cant, trumpets, fanfare, feu de joie,
(v) humiliate; (n) infra dignitatem. dissimulation, falsity, deception, illumination
ANTONYMS: (adj) dignified, falseness, sanctimony, deceit, lip illustrious: (adj, n) glorious,
honorable, glorious, reassuring, service; (v) double dealing; (adj) celebrated, excellent, grand; (adj)
Victor Hugo 665
famous, bright, eminent, famed, inflexibly ANTONYMS: (adj) penetrable,
distinguished, brilliant, well-known. immure: (v) confine, incarcerate, jail, readable, straightforward, apparent,
ANTONYMS: (adj) unknown, gaol, detain, jug, lag, enclose, simple, sparse, vulnerable,
obscure, ordinary, undistinguished, constrain, cage; (n) Mure accessible, transparent,
lowly immutability: (n) changelessness, understandable, open
ill-will: (n) enmity invariability, majesty, infinity, imperceptible: (adj) invisible,
imbecile: (adj) foolish, idiotic, unchangeableness, sovereignty, intangible, insensible, faint,
fatuous, dumb, imbecilic, simple; (n) unchangeability, unchangingness, evanescent, inaudible, negligible,
idiot, moron, cretin, ass, oaf. fixedness, fixity, permanency. indiscernible, unseen, unnoticeable,
ANTONYM: (adj) genius ANTONYM: (n) mutability gentle. ANTONYMS: (adj) obvious,
imbecility: (n) folly, foolishness, impalpable: (adj) imperceptible, overwhelming, clear, visible,
idiocy, fatuity, weakness, stupidity, shadowy, invisible, efflorescent, perceptible, heavy, noticeable,
feeblemindedness, lunacy; (adj, n) gritty, insubstantial, incorporeal, definite, considerable, conspicuous,
debility, feebleness; (adj) infirmity inscrutable, ethereal, strong
imbedded: (v) embosomed, rooted, inapprehensible, elusive. imperceptibly: (adv) unnoticeably,
mewed up, in the bosom of, posited, ANTONYMS: (adj) tangible, definite gradually, slightly, invisibly, gently,
situate; (adj) encysted impartiality: (adj, n) justice, honesty; quietly, softly, observably,
imbued: (adj) addicted, alive, (n) fairness, disinterestedness, indistinctly, scarcely, hardly.
instinct, full candor, equality, indifference, ANTONYMS: (adv) obviously,
imitating: (adj) imitative; (n) detachment, evenhandedness; (adj) visibly, audibly, conspicuously,
emulation, mimicry, forgery, acting impartial, fair play. ANTONYMS: perceptibly, heavily, clearly,
immeasurable: (adj) endless, (n) injustice, bias, inequality, strongly
immense, infinite, huge, enormous, partiality, prejudice, subjectivity imperfectly: (adv) faultily,
illimitable, unmeasurable, imparting: (n) giving, conveyance, defectively, badly, deficiently,
incalculable, inestimable, conveyance of title, conveyancing, incompletely, partially, poorly,
innumerable, interminable. conveying inadequately, sketchily, incorrectly,
ANTONYMS: (adj) limited, minute, impassable: (adj) impervious, halfway. ANTONYMS: (adv)
finite, shallow, slight, negligible, impenetrable, impracticable, perfectly, flawlessly, correctly, well
tiny, few, minor, small invincible, insuperable, inaccessible, imperious: (adj) haughty,
immemorial: (adj) ancient, unpassable, innavigable, domineering, authoritative,
prescriptive, pristine, primaeval, inextricable, closed, impossible. arbitrary, imperative, masterful,
primeval, traditional, old, eternal, ANTONYMS: (adj) passable, open dictatorial, commanding, lordly,
customary impassible: (adj) impassive, dull, magisterial, despotic. ANTONYM:
immensity: (n) greatness, apathetic, rocky, bloodless, (adj) subservient
enormousness, immenseness, unmoved, impatible imperiously: (adv) overbearingly,
infinity, bulk, largeness, infiniteness, impassioned: (adj) fervent, fanatical, arrogantly, commandingly,
infinitude, vastness, grandeur, fiery, burning, passionate, hot, magisterially, dictatorially,
grandness. ANTONYM: (n) torrid, vehement, keen, zealous; masterfully, haughtily, imperatively,
lightness (adj, v) enthusiastic. ANTONYMS: authoritatively, domineeringly,
immobility: (adj, n) fixity; (n) (adj) impassive, indifferent, calm insolently. ANTONYMS: (adv)
fixedness, stillness, stationariness, impassive: (adj) expressionless, calm, meekly, feebly
motionlessness, immovability, cool, stolid, stoic, callous, imperishable: (adj) immortal, eternal,
immovableness; (adj) vitality, impervious, quiet, peaceful, abiding, deathless, enduring,
stiffness, stabiliment, solidity. emotionless, dull. ANTONYMS: permanent, perpetual, perennial,
ANTONYMS: (n) bustle, movement (adj) expressive, mobile, involved, incorruptible; (adj, v) undying,
immortality: (n) sempiternity, demonstrative, affected, passionate, indestructible. ANTONYMS: (adj)
perpetuity, athanasia, glory, aye, sympathetic, spirited, knowing, temporary, fragile
fame, everness, immortal, enthusiastic impertinence: (n) audacity, gall,
permanency, deathlessness, impassiveness: (n) indifference, impudence, insolence, disrespect,
undying. ANTONYM: (n) mortality emotionlessness, impassivity, effrontery, brass, boldness,
immovable: (adj, v) firm, fixed; (adj) unemotionality, insensibility, impertinency, sauciness, freshness.
adamant, steadfast, motionless, phlegm, stolidity, unconcern, ANTONYMS: (n) politeness,
unyielding, unmovable, set, coldness, nonchalance, torpor. seriousness, reticence
imperturbable, inflexible; (v) fast. ANTONYM: (n) involvement impertinent: (adj) fresh, pert, saucy,
ANTONYMS: (adj) loose, moving, impelled: (adj) prompted, provoked, forward, audacious, brash, brazen,
mobile, flexible, movable, determined, compulsive, extraneous, discourteous,
acquiescent, temporary, irresolute encouraged, goaded, motivated, disrespectful, flippant.
immovably: (adj) firmly, bound ANTONYMS: (adj) respectful,
extravagantly; (adv) unyieldingly, impenetrable: (adj) impassable, thick, polite, courteous
stubbornly, unwaveringly, incomprehensible, hard, mysterious, imperturbability: (n) composure,
unmovably, unbendingly, unfathomable, unintelligible, coolness, self-possession, serenity,
unalterably, obstinately, obdurately, impervious, opaque, heavy, obscure. calmness, imperturbableness,
tranquility, aplomb, imperturbation, slack, ineffective, incapable, unable. extinct, unconscious, spiritless.
composedness, inirritability ANTONYMS: (adj) able, powerful ANTONYMS: (adj) living, animate,
imperturbable: (adj) dispassionate, imprecation: (n) curse, anathema, spirited
impassive, composed, placid, execration, cuss, blasphemy, bane, inarticulate: (adj) unintelligible,
unflappable, cool, quiet, peaceful, ban, oath, prayer, malison, silent, vague, muffled, incoherent,
still, equable, steady. ANTONYMS: denunciation mute, incomprehensible,
(adj) edgy, concerned, agitated, imprint: (n, v) mark, stamp, brand, unarticulate, speechless, guttural,
excited, nervous print; (n) impression, effect, feeling; fuzzy. ANTONYMS: (adj) articulate,
imperturbably: (adv) (v) engrave, inscribe, emboss, dent eloquent, fluent, distinct, talkative
dispassionately, unflappably, imprinted: (adj) printed, marked, incalculable: (adj) countless,
serenely, indifferently, impassively, embossed innumerable, numberless,
emotionlessly, coolly, casually improvised: (adj, adv) off the cuff, boundless, inestimable, immense,
impetuosity: (n) eagerness, haste, informal, unplanned; (adj) infinite, myriad, numerous,
heat, violence, vehemence, extemporaneous, improvisatory, invaluable, unpredictable.
impulsiveness, impetuousness, offhand, makeshift, spontaneous, ANTONYMS: (adj) calculable,
excitability, temerity, precipitation, unrehearsed, temporary, negligible, limited, worthless, tiny,
fervency. ANTONYMS: (n) extemporized. ANTONYMS: (adj) slight, finite, few, definite, small,
deliberation, patience, prepared, permanent minor
consideration, carefulness imprudent: (adj) foolish, foolhardy, incessant: (adj) endless, continual,
impetuous: (adj) boisterous, hasty, indiscreet, hasty, improvident, everlasting, eternal, constant,
fiery, headlong, heady, hot, brash, impolitic, heedless, unadvised, continuous, perpetual, unremitting,
foolhardy, dashing, fierce; (adj, v) injudicious, unwary, unwise. interminable, persistent; (adj, v)
impulsive. ANTONYMS: (adj) ANTONYMS: (adj) sensible, frequent. ANTONYMS: (adj)
considered, careful, slow, sensible, prudent, cautious, wise, deliberate, intermittent, occasional, sporadic,
patient discreet, guarded, judicious, broken, finite
impetuously: (adv) rashly, advisable incessantly: (adv) constantly,
impulsively, vehemently, impudence: (adj, n) boldness, brass; endlessly, continually, perpetually,
precipitately, fiercely, headily, (n) cheek, gall, audacity, continuously, unceasingly, eternally,
passionately, intensely, fierily, impertinence, insolence, face, persistently, unremittingly,
spontaneously, thoughtlessly. cheekiness, effrontery, assurance. unendingly, steadily. ANTONYMS:
ANTONYMS: (adv) deliberately, ANTONYMS: (n) cowardice, (adv) sporadically, briefly
sensibly, patiently reticence inclining: (adj) oblique, shelving; (n)
impiety: (n) disrespect, irreligion, impudent: (adj, n) bold, daring; (adj) leaning, tendency, disposition,
blasphemy, unrighteousness, disrespectful, audacious, movement, proclivity, sentiment,
impiousness, sacrilege, profanity, impertinent, brassy, barefaced, propensity, predilection, partiality
godlessness, irreverence, sin, evil. brazen, insolent, brash, cheeky. inclusive: (adj) included, broad,
ANTONYMS: (n) restraint, ANTONYMS: (adj) polite, cowardly comprehensive, sweeping, overall,
goodness impugn: (v) censure, dispute, charge, total, general, whole, extensive,
impious: (adj) godless, ungodly, assail, challenge, question, gainsay, complete; (v) include. ANTONYMS:
disrespectful, profane, unholy, doubt, contradict, contest, impeach. (adj) local, narrow, sketchy, elite,
sinful, unhallowed, wicked, ANTONYMS: (v) support, accept partial, restricted
iniquitous, irreligious, irreverent. impunity: (n) impune, come off, incoherent: (adj) disjointed,
ANTONYMS: (adj) reverent, freedom, immunity, permission, disconnected, delirious, rambling,
devout, restrained, good forgiveness. ANTONYM: (n) confused, disordered, incompatible,
implacable: (adj) cruel, remorseless, liability wandering, muddled, inconsistent,
irreconcilable, pitiless, merciless, impure: (adj) defiled, dirty, unclean, contradictory. ANTONYMS: (adj)
grim, unappeasable, deadly, mortal, squalid, sordid, filthy, bastard, foul, clear, articulate, eloquent,
relentless, unforgiving. immoral, profane, contaminated. intelligible, lucid, sound, concise,
ANTONYMS: (adj) placable, ANTONYMS: (adj) unmixed, clean consistent
unrelenting impurity: (n) impureness, pollution, incommensurable: (adj)
implements: (n) equipment, filth, dirtiness, admixture, incommensurate, divisible,
apparatus, gear, tackle, rigging, defilement, dirt, dross, adulteration, fractional, figurate, decimal,
outfit, hardware, trappings foulness, corruption. ANTONYM: complementary, aliquot,
implore: (v) beg, beseech, supplicate, (n) cleanliness incomparable, infinite, innumerable,
ask, conjure, crave, pray, importune, inalterable: (adj) unchangeable, unfathomable
appeal, plead, solicit. ANTONYMS: invariable, changeless, fixed, incomparably: (adv) superlatively,
(v) demand, grant, reject irrevocable, incommutable, matchlessly, uniquely,
impost: (n) custom, tax, customs, incurable, last, laster, final. exceptionally, outstandingly,
customs duty, toll, dues, cess, excise, ANTONYM: (adj) alterable unbeatably, uncomparably,
Scot, sess, stone inanimate: (adj) defunct, dull, excellently, very, greatly, beyond
impotent: (adj) helpless, feeble, frail, breathless, inorganic, inactive, compare. ANTONYM: (adv)
fragile, inadequate, weak, barren, lifeless, exanimate, deceased, comparably
Victor Hugo 667
inconceivable: (adj, v) unbelievable, equivocal. ANTONYMS: (adj) indeterminate, hazy, neutral; (adj, n)
hard to believe; (adj) impossible, concrete, precise confused, cloudy, dark.
implausible, incomprehensible, indelible: (adj) ineffaceable, ANTONYMS: (adj) clear, slight,
unimaginable, unthinkable, memorable, fixed, ineradicable, separate, certain, precise, audible,
improbable, unintelligible, lasting, irrevocable, ingrained; (adj, strong, definite
inscrutable, fabulous. ANTONYMS: v) indestructible; (n) impressive, indolence: (n) laziness, inaction,
(adj) conceivable, believable, likely, deep; (v) incorruptible. lethargy, inertia, inactivity,
understandable, credible ANTONYMS: (adj) erasable, fleeting listlessness, slowness, torpor,
incongruous: (adj) inappropriate, indentation: (n) pit, depression, sluggishness, apathy; (adj, n) sloth.
improper, absurd, inapt, hollow, impression, indent, dip, ANTONYMS: (n) energy,
incompatible, conflicting, notch, impress, concavity; (n, v) nimbleness, activity, bustle,
inconsistent, incoherent, nick; (adj) concave. ANTONYMS: liveliness, vigor
inexpedient; (adj, n) contradictory, (n) lump, bump indolently: (adv) lazily, sluggishly,
dissonant. ANTONYMS: (adj) indescribable: (adj) indefinable, slackly, slowly, languidly, torpidly,
appropriate, befitting, consistent, ineffable, unutterable, vague, listlessly, lethargically, carelessly,
reasonable beyond expression, nameless, inertly, shiftlessly. ANTONYMS:
inconsiderately: (adv) unthinkingly, inexpressible, nondescript, terrible, (adv) nimbly, vigorously,
indiscreetly, carelessly, unadvisedly, intangible, termless. ANTONYMS: dynamically
tactlessly, rashly, unkindly, rudely, (adj) explainable, conceivable, indubitably: (adv) certainly, surely,
headlongly, inattentively, selfishly. concrete positively, incontrovertibly,
ANTONYMS: (adv) considerately, indescribably: (adv) unspeakably, unquestionably, clearly,
politely incredibly, inconceivably, beyond undoubtedly, of course, absolutely,
incontinently: (adv) directly, at once, words, unbelievably, unutterably, indisputably, decidedly.
immediately, helter-skelter, pell- unthinkably ANTONYMS: (adv) possibly,
mell, incontinent, rakishly, indestructible: (adj) immortal, arguably, doubtfully
meretriciously eternal, everlasting, undestroyable, indulged: (adj) pet, privileged,
incredulous: (adj) dubious, doubtful, undying, durable, perdurable, cherished, admired
suspicious, unbelieving, faithless, permanent, indelible, incorruptible, indulgence: (adj, n) gratification,
skeptical, doubting, lacking faith, lasting. ANTONYMS: (adj) fragile, delight; (n) allowance, extravagance,
questioning, cynical, mistrustful. destructible, vulnerable, ephemeral, debauchery, hobby, tolerance,
ANTONYM: (adj) convinced soft, perishable, temporary luxury, enjoyment, leniency,
incrusted: (adj) crusted indeterminate: (adj) inconclusive, pardon. ANTONYMS: (n) denial,
incurable: (adj) incorrigible, indefinite, equivocal, vague, neutral, virtue, intolerance, uprightness,
immedicable, cureless, inveterate, indistinct, obscure, undetermined, necessity, indifference, dismay,
irretrievable, irrecoverable, terminal, indecisive, inexact, adventitious. severity
irremediable, irreparable, ANTONYMS: (adj) quantifiable, industrious: (adj) diligent, assiduous,
remediless, chronic. ANTONYM: definite, determinate, specific, exact, indefatigable, busy, energetic,
(adj) mild certain, strong hardworking, laborious, tireless,
indebted: (adj) grateful, appreciative, indifferently: (adv) carelessly, coldly, earnest, keen, enterprising.
thankful, obliged, liable, insolvent, nonchalantly, listlessly, ANTONYMS: (adj) indolent, idle,
broke; (prep) beholden, debted; (n) unconcernedly, uninterestedly, destructive, weary, careless
debtor; (v) owe. ANTONYM: (adj) neutrally, middlingly, casually, ineffable: (adj) indescribable,
ungrateful unbiasedly, disinterestedly. unspeakable, unutterable,
indecision: (n) hesitation, ANTONYMS: (adv) passionately, indefinable, inexpressible, beyond
irresolution, uncertainty, obsessively, carefully, eagerly, expression, unimaginable, beyond
indecisiveness, hesitance, qualm, energetically, warmly, anxiously, words, unpronounceable, dreadful,
vacillation, hesitancy, dubiety, enthusiastically, sympathetically untellable
infirmity of purpose; (adj, n) indignant: (adj) angry, incensed, inexhaustible: (adj) indefatigable,
suspense. ANTONYMS: (n) furious, enraged, wrathful, hurt, immeasurable, unfailing, infinite,
determination, resolve, resolution, rage, provoked, hot, anger, irate. boundless, illimitable, unlimited,
confidence ANTONYMS: (adj) cool, content, incalculable, unexhaustible,
indefatigable: (adj) tireless, unaffected unapproachable, unfathomable.
assiduous, unflagging, untiring, indignantly: (adv) irately, angrily, ANTONYMS: (adj) limited,
inexhaustible, energetic, wrathfully, enragedly, sorely, unproductive
unremitting, indomitable, laborious, acrimoniously, cynically, sulkily, inexorable: (adj) adamant,
unwearying, unwearied. hotly, exasperatedly, furiously unrelenting, stern, cruel, relentless,
ANTONYMS: (adj) idle, feeble, indigo: (adj, n) blue; (n) anil, austere, adamantine, inflexible,
unrelenting, weary Indigofera tinctoria, shrub, dyestuff, remorseless, stiff; (adj, v) inevitable.
indefinable: (adj) ineffable, indigo plant, indigotin; (adj) bice, ANTONYM: (adj) gentle
unspeakable, vague, indeterminate, azure, cerulean, mauve inexplicable: (adj) incomprehensible,
undefinable, inexpressible, elusive, indistinct: (adj) indefinite, mysterious, unaccountable,
indefinite, undefined, nondescript, inarticulate, faint, dull, fuzzy, inscrutable, unfathomable,
enigmatic, baffling, indecipherable, inflexible: (adj) rigid, fixed, abuse. ANTONYMS: (v) heal,
unexplained, incognizable, uncompromising, immovable, enable, repair, protect, help
preternatural. ANTONYMS: (adj) rigorous, unbending, inexorable, innkeeper: (n) victualer, landlord,
understandable, explicable, dogged; (adj, n) hard, firm, harsh. Boniface, hostess, hotel keeper,
mundane, apparent, explainable, ANTONYMS: (adj) compliant, victualler, padrone, emcee, horde
straightforward, natural, legible irresolute, adaptable, innocently: (adv) innocuously,
inexpressible: (adj, v) indescribable; accommodating, stretchy, ingenuously, inoffensively, naively,
(adj) ineffable, unspeakable, compromising, bendy, weak, lithe, purely, simplely, artlessly,
unutterable, indefinable, pliable, soft unsophisticatedly, blamelessly,
incommunicable, nameless, untold, infrequent: (adj) few, rare, scarce, spotlessly, cleanly. ANTONYMS:
beyond description, unexpressible, seldom, exceptional, occasional, (adv) artfully, meaningfully,
undefinable. ANTONYM: (adj) unwonted, sparse, sporadic, indecently, immorally, illicitly,
definite unusual, deficient. ANTONYMS: intentionally, knowingly, unkindly,
inextinguishable: (adj) indomitable, (adj) common, regular, usual suspiciously, offensively,
impregnable, dominating, infrequently: (adv) uncommonly, deliberately
quenchless, indestructible, occasionally, sparsely, scarcely, inoffensive: (adj, n) harmless,
unquenchable; (v) incommutable, sporadically, unfrequently, innocent; (adj) innocuous,
indefeasible, volcanic, irreducible, unusually, from time to time, innoxious, safe, unoffending,
simmering hardly, not often, intermittently. euphemistic, hurtless, pleasant,
inextricable: (adj) insoluble, intricate, ANTONYMS: (adv) often, regularly, gentle, tame. ANTONYMS: (adj)
involved, perplexed, inaccessible, commonly rude, unsavory, unpleasant,
entangled, impervious, impassable, infringe: (v) violate, break, impinge, harmful, dysphemistic, malicious,
knotty; (v) inseparable, infrangible contravene, disobey, intrude, exciting
infamy: (n) dishonor, disrepute, entrench, trespass, invade, infract, inopportunely: (adv) unfortunately,
ignominy, notoriety, shame, pirate. ANTONYMS: (v) uphold, inappropriately, awkwardly,
opprobrium, reproach, stain, comply, honor unfittingly, inadequately, untimely,
discredit, baseness; (adj, n) infused: (adj) mixed inexpediently, improperly,
pollution. ANTONYMS: (n) fame, ingenuous: (adj, n) frank; (adj) naive, incorrectly, prematurely, wrongly.
virtue, honor, obscurity, pride guileless, honest, forthright, ANTONYMS: (adv) opportunely,
infatuated: (adj, n) fanatical; (adj, v) innocent, straight, artless, conveniently, suitably
besotted; (adj) gaga, crazy, mad, downright, green, hearty. inquire: (v) demand, ask, explore,
dotty, in love, obsessed, smitten, ANTONYMS: (adj) disingenuous, enquire, inspect, research, consult,
taken with; (v) illiberal dishonest, cunning, sophisticated, pry, request, wonder; (n, v)
infatuation: (adj) devotion, scheming, worldly, jaded, hesitant, question. ANTONYM: (v) answer
fascination, enchantment, gross experienced inquiring: (adj) inquisitive, quizzical,
credulity; (adj, n) passion, fervor, ingenuously: (adv) artlessly, interested, analytical, probing,
fanaticism; (n) crush, idolatry, love, sincerely, innocently, candidly, intrusive; (adj, n) questioning; (v)
hobby. ANTONYM: (n) indifference naively, frankly, outspokenly, inquire; (n) enquiry, question,
infernal: (adj) devilish, fiendish, plainly, naturally, unsophisticatedly, examination. ANTONYM: (adj)
diabolical, demonic, damned, straightforwardly. ANTONYMS: uninquiring
cursed, blasted, unholy, wicked; (adv) artfully, dishonestly, inquisitive: (adj) inquiring,
(adj, v) diabolic, satanic pretentiously speculative, nosy, prying,
infirm: (adj, n, v) feeble; (adj, v) faint, inhabitant: (n) denizen, resident, questioning, nosey, meddling,
weak, sickly, debilitated; (adj) occupant, citizen, tenant, occupier, investigative, meddlesome,
impotent, fragile, decrepit, ill, population, native, liver, indweller; quizzical, overcurious.
delicate, shaky. ANTONYMS: (adj) (v) habitant. ANTONYM: (n) ANTONYMS: (adj) apathetic,
whole, well, hearty stranger uninterested
infirmity: (adj, n) frailty, foible, inhumanly: (adv) brutally, inquisitor: (n) interrogator, examiner;
imbecility; (n) feebleness, inhumanely, ruthlessly, pitilessly, (v) investigator, inspector, querist;
impotence, disability, decrepitude, ferociously, atrociously, (adj) disciplinarian, bashaw, hard
illness, sickness, disease, weakness. barbarously, callously, savagely, master, despot, Draco, vulture
ANTONYMS: (n) health, wellness, mercilessly, coldly. ANTONYMS: inquisitorial: (adj) extortionate,
strength (adv) kindly, sympathetically inquisitional, nosy, inquisitive,
inflamed: (adj) impassioned, excited, inimical: (adj) harmful, adverse, inquisitorious, inquisiturient,
angry, hot, flaming, ablaze, irritated, detrimental, malign, contrary, oppressive, withering, causidical,
passionate, painful, burning; (n) red antagonistic, injurious, noxious, analytic; (v) catechetical.
inflated: (adj) grandiloquent, pernicious, repugnant, unfriendly. ANTONYM: (adj) accusatorial
exaggerated, puffy, conceited, ANTONYMS: (adj) helpful, friendly, insatiable: (adj) ravenous, voracious,
hyperbolic, vain, bloated, swollen, favorable insatiate, gluttonous, avaricious,
extravagant, flatulent; (adj, v) injure: (n, v) damage, harm, impair; quenchless, avid, unquenchable,
distended. ANTONYMS: (adj) (v) contuse, disfigure, maim, bruise, unsatiable, grasping, sateless.
deflated, humble, cheap, reasonable blemish, wound, insult; (adj, v) ANTONYM: (adj) moderate
Victor Hugo 669
inscribed: (adj) etched, incised, interposition, interlineation, see
graven, written, carved, carven interruption, interspersion, intersected: (adj) decussated
insensible: (adj) imperceptible, expletive, insertion, cry, outcry intersecting: (adj) decussate,
numb, unconscious, callous, dull, interlaced: (adj) interfretted, intersectant, crossing, intersecant,
unaware, apathetic, impassive, reticulated, reticulate, reticular, interchanged, decisive, cruciform,
indiscernible, comatose, impassible. latticed, having frets, complicated, crucial, contrary, angular, across
ANTONYMS: (adj) sensible, latticelike intersection: (n) crossroads, cross,
conscious, sensitive, awake, alive, interlocked: (prep) interfolded crossroad, crossing, intersect,
compassionate, concerned, aware interlocutor: (n) conversational junction, crossway, interchange,
insensibly: (adv) imperceptibly, partner, middleman, contact; (v) point of intersection, cross-roads,
apathetically, numbly, motionlessly, prolocutor cutting
inertly interlude: (n) intermission, interval, intone: (v) intonate, cantillate, sing,
insignia: (n) badge, sign, medal, intermezzo, entr'acte, pause, give benediction, recite, mouth,
device, symbol, decoration, episode, interact, adjournment, speak, label, judge, talk, verbalize
hashmark, cordon, caduceus, seal, interim, recess, rest intoned: (adj) rhythmical, singsong,
regalia intermediary: (n) broker, arbiter, go- rhythmic
insipid: (adj) tasteless, bland, dull, between, medium, arbitrator, agent, intoxicated: (adj) drunken, drunk,
watery, flavorless, uninteresting, mediator, negotiator, conciliator, inebriate, tipsy, elated, stimulated,
vapid, savorless, boring, tame, diplomat; (adj, v) intermediate. intoxicate, infatuated, fuddled,
humdrum. ANTONYMS: (adj) ANTONYMS: (adj) extreme; (n) loaded, plastered. ANTONYM: (adj)
exciting, tasty, interesting, flavorful, fighter sober
spicy, lively, colorful, dark, bright, interminable: (adj) endless, eternal, intoxicating: (adj) intoxicant, strong,
inspired, imaginative incessant, infinite, illimitable, alcoholic, effective, exciting,
insolence: (n) impertinence, immeasurable, unending, ceaseless, impetuous, inebriant, inebrious,
arrogance, audacity, impudence, timeless, continual, unlimited. powerful, provocative, forcible.
effrontery, cheek, assumption, gall, ANTONYMS: (adj) temporary, ANTONYMS: (adj) soft, weak
disrespect, haughtiness, crust. finite, intermittent, sporadic, concise intoxication: (n) inebriation,
ANTONYMS: (n) respect, intermingled: (adj) amalgamated, inebriety, poisoning, tipsiness,
politeness, meekness, shyness integrated, coalesced, blended, fascination, grogginess, ecstasy,
instituting: (adj) elemental, incorporated, assorted, daze, excitement, euphoria, wine
constitutive, determining consolidated, incorporate, intrepid: (adj) daring, fearless, bold,
instructing: (adj) directory, amalgamate, fused brave, dauntless, gallant, audacious,
directorial, enjoining, containing intermission: (n) rest, pause, lull, hardy, adventurous, heroic,
directions, improving cessation, suspension, interruption, confident. ANTONYMS: (adj)
insulting: (adj) contemptuous, abeyance, disruption, gap, fearful, timid, cautious, feeble
insolent, injurious, offensive, discontinuance, respite. intrepidly: (adv) valiantly,
scurrilous, defamatory, ANTONYM: (n) continuation courageously, boldly, dauntlessly,
opprobrious, rude, disgraceful, interposed: (adj) interjacent, bravely, daringly, audaciously,
disdainful, impolite. ANTONYMS: intercedent, intervenient, undauntedly, gallantly, heroically,
(adj) courteous, conciliatory, polite, parenthetical, intermediate colors, hardily. ANTONYMS: (adv)
generous, cordial mediate cautiously, nervously
insults: (adj) insulting; (n) abuse, interred: (adj) buried, inhumed, inundated: (adj) swamped, awash,
swearing hidden. ANTONYM: (adj) unburied overwhelmed, afloat, engulfed,
insupportable: (adj, v) insufferable, interrogate: (n, v) question, pump; (v) submerged, fuller, weak, suffused,
intolerable; (adj) indefensible, ask, demand, examine, enquire, submersed, soaked. ANTONYM:
unbearable, excruciating, catechize, query, quiz, probe, (adj) dry
unjustifiable, unendurable, investigate. ANTONYMS: (v) reply, inviolable: (adj) sacrosanct,
impossible, unsupportable, heavy, answer infrangible, hallowed, invulnerable,
obnoxious. ANTONYM: (adj) interrogating: (n) interrogation inviolate, inalienable, impenetrable,
bearable interrogatory: (n, v) interrogation; absolute, impregnable; (v)
intentionally: (adv) deliberately, (adj, n) interrogative; (n) imprescriptible, unimpeachable.
advisedly, consciously, purposely, examination, question, inquiry, ANTONYMS: (adj) acceptable,
on purpose, knowingly, willfully, query, hearing, problem, doubt, breakable
studiedly, expressly, purposefully, questionnaire; (adj) asking. invisibility: (n) darkness,
intendedly. ANTONYMS: (adv) ANTONYM: (adj) declarative nonappearance, inconspicuousness,
accidentally, innocently interrupting: (adj) cross, imperceptibility. ANTONYM: (n)
inter: (v) inhume, entomb, lay to rest, interchanged, interpelling, visibility
sepulchre, tomb, inurn, repose, lay, meddlesome, adverse, defensive, involuntarily: (adv) unconsciously,
intomb, among, embed deeply. contrary, interpellant, interruptive unintentionally, inadvertently,
ANTONYM: (adj) intra intersect: (v) cut, divide, meet, bisect, automatically, forcedly,
interjection: (n) ejaculation, intersection, traverse, interlace, mechanically, unthinkingly,
intercalation, interpolation, intertwist, intertwine, interweave, reluctantly, accidentally,
automaticly, unwillingly. doorjamb, coaming, currant jam, jawbone; (v) joul
ANTONYMS: (adv) voluntarily, door jamb, beam joyful: (adj) gay, glad, elated,
consciously, willingly, purposely janitor: (n) caretaker, concierge, cheerful, gleeful, cheery, delighted,
irksome: (adj, v) wearisome, gatekeeper, porter, warden, joyous, jolly, blissful, blithe.
tiresome; (adj) boring, dull, custodian, doorman, ANTONYMS: (adj) miserable,
annoying, tedious, trying, commissionaire, guardian, beadle, sorrowful, unhappy, despairing,
burdensome, bothersome, irritating, janitress unpleasant, staid, sorry,
prosaic. ANTONYMS: (adj) jeer: (n, v) gibe, flout, deride, mock, disappointed, depressed, heavy
delightful, pleasant, refreshing, ridicule, hiss, taunt, scoff, laugh at, joyfully: (adv) joyously, merrily,
soothing barrack; (n) mockery. ANTONYMS: gaily, gleefully, buoyantly, cheerily,
ironical: (adj) sarcastic, satirical, dry, (v) cheer, applaud jubilantly, pleasantly, mirthfully;
burlesque, wry, sardonic, satiric, jeering: (adj, n) mocking; (n) jeer, (adv, v) happily; (adj, adv)
derisive, caustic, quizzical; (n) scoffing, mockery, derision, scoff, cheerfully. ANTONYMS: (adv)
humorous scorn, banter; (adj) taunting, joylessly, miserably, despondently
ironmongery: (n) hardware, shop, gibelike; (v) deride. ANTONYM: (n) joyous: (adj) happy, gleeful, elated,
store clapping jolly, glad, gay, jovial, merry, festive,
irons: (n) fetters, iron, chain, shackles, jerk: (n, v) jump, yank, shake, twitch, cheerful, jocund. ANTONYMS: (adj)
fetter, manacles, gyve, bond, bonds, jar, tug, bump, heave, pull; (v) fling, despairing, joyless, miserable
pinion, handcuffs flip. ANTONYM: (v) ease joyously: (adv, v) happily; (adv)
irresistibly: (adv) charmingly, jerkin: (n) jacket, doublet, barbe, gaily, gleefully, mirthfully,
necessarily, overwhelmingly, CHUDDER, waistcoat, jubbah, cheerfully, gladly, merrily, festively,
charismatically, fiercely, temptingly, talma jacket, pilot jacket, pajamas, brightly, buoyantly, pleasantly.
overpoweringly, appealingly, oilskins, gabardine ANTONYM: (adv) joylessly
beguilingly jerky: (adj) uneven, abrupt, rough, judas: (n) betrayer, spyhole, Judah,
irretrievably: (adv) permanently, for unsteady, jerking, arrhythmic, peephole, St Jude, snake in the grass,
all time, irremediably, forever, spasmodic, shaky; (n) biltong, jerked serpent, saint Jude, Judas Iscariot,
irrecoverably, once and for all, meat, meat. ANTONYMS: (adj) conspirator, cockatrice
irrevocably, irreversibly smooth, graceful judea: (n) Jewry
irreverent: (adj, v) profane; (adj) jest: (n) gag, gibe, quip, game; (n, v) judiciary: (adj, n) judicatory; (adj)
blasphemous, disrespectful, jape; (v) banter, jeer, deride, gird, judicial, legal; (n) judicature, bench,
irreligious, impertinent, impudent, sneer, clown judicial system, judge, organization,
pert, saucy, aweless, godless, jingle: (n, v) ring, chime, ding, clank; organisation, system, court
irreverend. ANTONYMS: (adj) (v) clang, clink, tinkle, rattle, sound, judicious: (adj, v) discreet; (adj)
pious, reverent, deferential, mature, peal; (n) chink. ANTONYM: (n) careful, discerning, sensible,
devout, approving, respectful silence prudent, rational, sagacious, sound,
islet: (n) island, ait, reef, holm, atoll, jingling: (adj) reverberant, clinking, cautious, reasonable, advisable.
eyot, breaker, coral reef, coral jingly ANTONYMS: (adj) stupid, tactless,
Island, wight johannes: (n) Joe indiscriminate, reckless, illogical,
itinerant: (n) traveler, wanderer, joiner: (n) cabinetmaker, extreme, untimely
nomad, vagrant; (adj, n) migrant, woodworker, member, associate, judiciously: (adv) prudently,
vagabond; (adj) errant, traveling, cabinet maker, convoy joiner sagaciously, shrewdly, discreetly,
journeying, migratory; (adj, v) joist: (n) girder, rafter, scaffold, gist, discerningly, politically, cautiously,
ambulatory. ANTONYMS: (adj, n) Travis, trave, summer, baulk, logically, rationally, sensibly,
resident; (adj) sedentary, settled, crossbeam, stanchion, crossbar soundly. ANTONYMS: (adv)
fixed jolt: (n, v) jerk, shake, jog, jar, bump, foolishly, injudiciously, unwisely,
jabbering: (adj) babbling, blithering, push, knock, thrust, shock; (n) illogically, imprudently
blathering, loquacious, voluble, hustle; (v) agitate juggler: (n) performer, magician,
gabby; (n) jabber, gabble, babble, jostling: (v) jarring; (adj) bustling; (n) cheat, conjurer, prestidigitator,
gibberish elbowing deceiver, trickster, jockey,
jackal: (v) pelican; (n) canid, puppet, jovial: (adj, n) gay; (adj) jolly, genial, prestigiator, conveyer
tool glad, festive, joyful, gleeful, merry, justiciary: (n) justiciar, judge,
jagged: (adj) rough, angular, jocund, cheerful, blithe. jurisdiction, jurist, magistrate
irregular, crooked, craggy, toothed, ANTONYMS: (adj) miserable, justly: (adv) accurately, fairly,
scraggy, rugged, bumpy, jaggy; (adj, gloomy, frosty, serious, hostile correctly, honestly, lawfully,
n) ragged. ANTONYMS: (adj) joviality: (n) glee, cheerfulness, properly, exactly, uprightly,
smooth, even, straight, blunt, level happiness, mirth, merriment, gaiety, legitimately, impartially, purely.
jailer: (n) prison guard, guard, festivity, conviviality, hilarity, ANTONYMS: (adv) wrongly,
keeper, screw, turnkey, warder, geniality; (adj) jocundity. unfairly, unjustifiably, unjustly,
jailor, custos, custodian, goaler, ANTONYMS: (n) misery, sadness unlawfully, sinfully, falsely,
lawman jowl: (n) cheek, jaw, lower jaw, immorally
jamb: (n) doorpost, abutment, mandible, chin, os, wing, juxtaposition: (n) apposition,
mullion, vertical, cheek, upright, mandibula, submaxilla, lower proximity, contact, contiguity,
Victor Hugo 671
abuttal, location, locating, labyrinth: (n) inner ear, tangle, feebleness; (n) lethargy, fatigue,
placement, position, positioning, confusion, complication, internal infirmity, lassitude, weakness,
comparison ear, web, unit, system; (adj, n) indifference, ennui; (adj) atony.
kaleidoscope: (n) plaything, toy, network; (v) eel, labyrinthian ANTONYM: (n) energy
stereoscope, pseudoscope, labyrinthine: (adj) involved, lantern: (n) beacon, light, dormer,
polyscope convoluted, intricate, knotty, tube, lighting fitting, bedside light,
kennel: (n) doghouse, ditch, gully, complex, Byzantine, complicated, street light, street lamp, oil lamp,
fosse, dike, drain, culvert, sewer, mazy, circuitous; (adj, v) lime light, lanthorn
gutter, hutch, trough labyrinthian; (v) labyrinthic. lard: (n) grease, suet, tallow, oil; (v)
keyhole: (n) hole, mousehole, ANTONYM: (adj) direct embellish, embroider, glorify,
pigeonhole, porthole, loophole, free laced: (adj) even, fastened, spiked, magnify, amplify, aggrandize, blow
throw line, peephole, knothole, drunk, decorated, alcoholic up
pinhole, small hole lacerated: (adj) torn, blasted, larder: (n) storeroom, pantry, food,
keystone: (n) keynote, headstone, mangled, hurt; (adj, prep) rent victuals, viands, provisions,
basis, foundation, key, quoin, lacework: (n) filigree provender, stowage, stillroom,
cornerstone, coigne, coign, base, lackey: (n) flunkey, sycophant, commissariat, spence
groundwork butler, attendant, bootlicker, toady, lark: (n) joke, fun, trick, prank, antic,
kindliness: (n) friendliness, geniality, truckler, waiter, servant, footman, caper, game; (n, v) romp, frolic,
amiability, grace, benignancy, flatterer gambol; (v) rollick
mercy, tenderness, compassion, laconic: (adj) curt, brief, terse, lash: (n, v) beat, chastise, scourge,
charity, consideration, helpfulness. compendious, succinct, pithy, goad; (v) flog, bind, batter; (adj, v)
ANTONYMS: (n) indifference, compact, taciturn, laconical, strap, tie, lace; (n) hit. ANTONYMS:
reserve, cruelty summary, short. ANTONYM: (adj) (v) unlash, untie
kitten: (n) cat, foal, kitty, colt, foetus; voluble latch: (v) bar, fasten, grab; (n, v) bolt;
(v) teem, flower, fructify, bear fruit, ladders: (n) washboard (adj, n, v) lock; (n) hasp, clasp, door
farrow, EAN lair: (n) burrow, hole, hideaway, latch, hook; (adj) link, yoke
knacker: (n) slaughterer, wrecker, hiding place, hideout, cell, retreat, laterally: (adv) sidelongly, obliquely,
butcher earth, sanctum sanctorum; (adj) sty, sidewise, sidely, collaterally,
knave: (n) cheat, jack, blackguard, sink of corruption sidewardly, sideway, lengthways,
crook, rascal, villain, cad, scalawag, lame: (adj) crippled, disabled, sideling; (adj) crabwise, parallel.
scallywag, scoundrel, varlet halting, feeble, halt, weak, paralytic; ANTONYM: (adv) logically
kneel: (v) genuflect, cringe, stoop, (adj, n) game; (adj, v) paralyze, latticed: (adj) interlaced, fretted,
bob, cry for quarter, dip, duck, maim, becripple lattice, reticulate, reticulated,
humble oneself; (n) kneeling, knee, lament: (v) bemoan, complain, latticelike, tabernacular, having
movement deplore, grieve, keen, bewail, frets, common, reticular
knocker: (n) boob, tit, breast, mourn; (n) dirge, complaint; (n, v) laudable: (adj) commendable,
doorknocker, nipple, knock, door- wail, moan. ANTONYMS: (n) creditable, admirable, praiseworthy,
knocker, depreciator, disparager, celebration, joy; (v) revel, rejoice, worthy, deserving, good, honorable,
detractor, hatemonger celebrate, applaud, praise, meritorious, applaudable, estimable.
knotted: (adj) knotty, gnarled, gnarly, compliment ANTONYMS: (adj) shameful,
involved, entangled, complicated, lamentable: (adj) grievous, pitiful, regrettable, unimpressive,
tangled, matted, knobbed, fastened; distressing, sad, dismal, sorrowful, lamentable, poor, despicable
(adj, v) kinky. ANTONYMS: (adj) piteous, unfortunate, lugubrious; laundress: (n) washwoman,
straight, tidy, relaxed (adj, v) pitiable, mournful. laundrywoman, laundryman,
koran: (n) Quran, Alcoran, Alkoran ANTONYMS: (adj) laudable, washer, bedmaker; (v) washerman
labor: (n, v) toil, endeavor, drudgery, fortunate laurel: (n) bays, honor, rose-laurel,
travail, struggle, confinement, lamentation: (n) dirge, grief, cassia, cinnamon, sweet bay,
childbirth, delivery, grind; (n) effort, mourning, plaint, regret, complaint, Daphne, bay tree, palm, garland,
exertion. ANTONYMS: (n, v) rest; cry, crying, wail, moan, condolence. fame
(v) relax, ignore; (n) management, ANTONYM: (n) celebration lavishly: (adv) profusely,
leisure, death, relaxation lamenting: (adj) weeping, wailing, profligately, prodigally, copiously,
laborious: (adj) hard, arduous, sad, whining; (adj, n) plaintive; (adj, generously, richly, wastefully,
backbreaking, heavy, industrious, v) bewailing, querulous; (n, v) abundantly, luxuriously, plentifully,
diligent, grueling, assiduous, complaining; (n) grief, sorrow; (v) amply. ANTONYMS: (adv)
exhausting, formidable, tough. dissatisfied meagerly, frugally, cheaply, scantily
ANTONYMS: (adj) simple, lance: (n) pike, javelin, shaft, lancet, lawless: (adj) disorderly, illicit,
effortless, undemanding, light, brisk assegai, fishgig, fizgig; (v) dart, anarchical, illegitimate, anarchic,
laboriously: (adv) painstakingly, impale, open, gore unlawful, unruly, illegal, mutinous,
toilsomely, toughly, onerously, lancet: (adj) bistoury; (n) knife, wrongful, seditious. ANTONYM:
arduously, strenuously, heavily, gimlet, probe, lancer, needle, gig, (adj) orderly
painfully, stiffly, diligently, hard. piercer, Rimer, scoop, fizgig layman: (n) commoner, layperson,
ANTONYMS: (adv) briskly, easily languor: (adj, n) inactivity, inertia, laic, laymen, laity, lay person,
outsider, common man, civilian, lay enthusiastic, industrious, spirited crystalline, perspicuous, pellucid,
reader, common person. lettered: (adj, v) erudite; (adj) lucid, liquid, hyaline, glassy.
ANTONYM: (n) clergyman learned, educated, enlightened, ANTONYM: (adj) opaque
lazar: (n) sufferer, beggar, diseased literate, knowledgeable, scholarly, limping: (n) lameness, gimp,
person knowing, literary; (v) instructed, claudication, gimpiness, gameness;
laziness: (n) indolence, acedia, leaned (adj) hobbling, crippled, halting,
inactivity, inertia, sloth, slowness, lettuce: (n) celtuce, folding money, inefficient, imperfect, claudicant
lethargy, inactiveness, faineance, cabbage, dough, cos, leaf lettuce, lioness: (n) lion, king of beasts
lassitude, dreaminess. ANTONYMS: boodle, bread, kale, iceberg lettuce, litany: (n) collect, speech,
(n) diligence, willingness, vigor, Chicago supplication, paternoster, address,
liveliness, interest lewd: (adj) indecent, dirty, bawdy, repetition, rogation, hymn
leaden: (adj) heavy, gray, sluggish, filthy, abandoned, carnal, lustful, livery: (adj) liverish, bilious; (n)
grey, inert, torpid, grave, languid, impure, debauched; (adj, v) clothing, accouterment, uniform,
drab, burdensome, livid. lecherous, dissolute. ANTONYMS: complexion, legal transfer, color,
ANTONYM: (adj) bright (adj) decent, refined, chaste, clean hue, dye, bailment
leafy: (adj) green, verdant, lush, lewdness: (n) bawdiness, indecency, livid: (adj) furious, irate, ashen, mad,
foliose, foliate, leafed, luxuriant, debauchery, sensuality, blue, gray, ghastly, leaden, colorless,
foliaceous, leaved, bowery, lasciviousness, lechery, dirtiness, angry, enraged. ANTONYMS: (adj)
flourishing. ANTONYMS: (adj) lubricity, salacity, lust, flushed, happy, pleased
leafless, urban, withering salaciousness. ANTONYM: (n) lizard: (n) Chamaeleon, lacertid,
leanness: (n) emaciation, decency gecko, saurian, skink, iguanid,
scrawniness, meagreness, libertine: (adj) dissolute, dissipated, gigolo, anguid lizard, agamid,
slenderness, slimness, tenuity, debauched, fast, lewd, lascivious, legless lizard, agamid lizard
bodily property, compactness, loose, licentious; (n, v) debauchee; loath: (adj) unwilling, disinclined,
barrenness, fineness, gauntness. (n) rake; (adj, n) wanton reluctant, loth, indisposed,
ANTONYM: (n) plumpness licentiate: (n) graduate, student, backward, hesitant, antipathetic,
lectern: (n) reading desk, pulpit, scholar antipathetical, loathe, shy of.
ambo, lattern, desk, prothesis, stand, licking: (n) thrashing, rout, debacle, ANTONYMS: (adj) eager, willing,
tribune, rostrum, platform, beating, drubbing, discomfiture, disposed, keen
baldachin whipping, lacing, lick, hiding, lobe: (n) lobule, Ventral lobe,
leech: (n) parasite, bloodsucker, reverse. ANTONYM: (n) victory Olfactory lobe, mesolobe, division,
physician, doctor, sponger, lief: (adj, v) leef; (adv) fain, willingly; flap, projection, branch, wing,
hirudinean, freeloader, sycophant, (adj) glad, acceptable lobular, loma
vampire; (v) bleed, phlebotomize lieu: (n) office, position, locality, locksmith: (n) wheelwright, smith,
legate: (n) envoy, delegate, emissary, stead, behalf, part, role, berth, sailmaker
deputy, minister, representative, station, site, seat lodging: (n) abode, apartment,
messenger, internuncio, consul, lifeless: (adj) inanimate, dull, insipid, accommodation, housing, hostel,
nuncio, ambassador defunct, inactive, flat, exanimate, residence, quarter, home,
lengthened: (adj) elongated, dreary, tedious, inert, lackluster. lodgement, address, hospice
prolonged, long, protracted, ANTONYMS: (adj) lively, stiff, loins: (n) waist, body part, haunch,
expanded, elongate, longer, alive, interesting, awake, moving, lends, pubic region, area, pubes
lingering, extensive, stretched out, upright, bright, brilliant, firm, lombard: (n) lombard-house,
lengthy inspiring Langobard
lengthwise: (adv) along, longwise, lighted: (adj) illuminated, lit, light, lookout: (n, v) guard, prospect,
endlong, longways, longitudinally, ablaze, bright, ignited, burn, expectation; (n) scout, watch, sentry,
endways, endwise, in company, burning, ignite, kindled, lighten sentinel, outlook, post, picture; (v)
across time; (adj) linear, lightness: (n) brightness, buoyancy, landscape
longitudinal. ANTONYM: (adj) frivolity, flightiness, delicacy, loophole: (n) crevice, gazebo,
crosswise airiness, agility, levity, light, alternative, keyhole, balistraria,
leprosy: (adj) gangrene, corruption, nimbleness, flippancy. aperture, eyelet, watchtower,
sphacelus, mortification; (n) ANTONYMS: (n) darkness, gravity, pigeonhole, mousehole; (v)
measles, meselry, lepry, eruption, weight, harshness, seriousness machicolation
infectious disease, lepra, Lepre limo: (n) motorcar, machine, loosened: (adj) disentangled, loose,
leprous: (n) leper; (v) morbid, mangy, automobile, Berlin, big car, car, auto freed, disengaged, extricated,
poisoned, tabid, tainted, vitiated; limp: (adv, n, v) hobble; (adj, v) unsnarled
(adj) lazarly, itchy, infectious, flabby; (n, v) hitch; (adj) flaccid, loosing: (adj) disengaging, detaching
corrupting slack, flexible, drooping, flimsy, lore: (n) erudition, folklore, letters,
lethargic: (adj, v) drowsy, dozy; (adj) weak, loose; (v) hop. ANTONYMS: literature, tradition, science,
languid, indolent, comatose, dull, (adj) taut, firm, hard, rigid, upright, acquired knowledge, knowledge,
sleepy, torpid, slow, listless, lazy. alive, strong, stiff, tight wide information, lesson, legend
ANTONYMS: (adj) alert, playful, limpid: (adj) transparent, bright, lorraine: (n) Lotharingia
lively, agitated, vigorous, awake, diaphanous, crystal clear, lout: (adj, n) gawk, goon, klutz; (n)
Victor Hugo 673
oaf, clown, boor, loon, rube, lump, nutmeg, rod, scepter magnifying: (adj) cumulative
lubber, hoodlum maddened: (adj) angry, furious, majestic: (adj) grand, awesome,
loutish: (adj) coarse, churlish, crude, deranged, angered, enraged, stately, imperial, royal, exalted,
oafish, rough, rude, uncouth, moonstruck, fierce, upset, glorious, kingly, August; (adj, v)
graceless, brutish, clownish, rustic. aggravated, ferocious; (v) frantic imposing; (adj, adv) regal.
ANTONYMS: (adj) civilized, polite, mademoiselle: (n) girl, signorina, ANTONYMS: (adj) pathetic, pitiful,
refined, genteel damsel, drum, silver perch, modest, lowly, undignified
louvre: (n) heat Louvre, jalousie, drumfish majestically: (adv) magnificently,
smoke hatch, Louvre museum, madly: (adv) insanely, furiously, regally, imperially, splendidly,
ventilation flap, Little Phoebe, sorely, frantically, wildly, devilishly, nobly, sublimely, solemnly, grandly,
cinque, flippers, fivesome, five, fin deadly, dementedly, foolishly, loftily, impressively, gloriously
lowly: (adj) base, lower, low, inferior, distractedly; (adj, adv) rabidly. mala: (n) cheekbone, bucca, malar
baseborn; (adv) meekly, meanly, ANTONYMS: (adv) sensibly, bone, os zygomaticum, zygomatic
modestly, poorly, softly, humbly. calmly, sanely, carefully; (adj) bone, bone
ANTONYMS: (adj) noble, slightly malady: (n, v) illness, ailment,
privileged, high, aristocratic, madman: (n) bedlamite, maniac, indisposition, distemper; (adj, n, v)
refined, exalted, comfortable crazy, loony, nut, madcap, looney, disorder; (adj, n) complaint,
loyally: (adv) steadfastly, devotedly, loco, sufferer, raver, nutcase infirmity; (n) sickness, condition,
staunchly, unwaveringly, madwoman: (n) madman, trouble, ill
constantly, steadily, dutifully, madperson, maniac, insane person malediction: (n) imprecation,
obediently, truly, trustily, firmly. magically: (adv) as if by magic, anathema, execration, denunciation,
ANTONYMS: (adv) disloyally, occultly, marvelously, charmingly, malison, oath, proscription,
unfaithfully, carelessly enchantingly, witchingly, maranatha, profanity, swear word,
lugubrious: (adj) dismal, gloomy, wonderfully, mysteriously, heavy calamity. ANTONYM: (n)
doleful, dark, funereal, melancholy, miraculously, supernaturally, blessing
grievous, somber, dolorous, mysticly malefactor: (adj, n) felon, culprit,
plaintive, miserable. ANTONYM: magician: (n) enchanter, conjurer, convict; (n) crook, delinquent,
(adj) cheerful illusionist, wizard, conjuror, outlaw, hood, hoodlum, evildoer,
lukewarmness: (n) apathy, tepidness, thaumaturge, magicians, performer, lawbreaker, miscreant
coldness, dullness, hebetude, magus, necromancer, prestidigitator malevolence: (n) malice, hatred,
inappetency, indifference, coolness, magisterial: (adj) haughty, spite, hate, ill will, bitterness,
frigidity, supineness, phlegm domineering, imperious, dictatorial, hostility, rancor, venom, grudge,
lull: (n, v) calm, quiet, hush, rest, authoritative, authoritarian, lordly, enmity. ANTONYMS: (n)
pause; (adj, v) assuage, pacify, peremptory, dogmatic, arbitrary, benevolence, good, affection,
tranquilize; (v) allay, still; (n) peace. bossy goodwill
ANTONYMS: (v) waken; (n) magistracy: (n) post, situation, spot, malevolent: (adj) malicious, malign,
activity, intensification position, office, place, jurisdiction, hateful, bitter, malefic, nasty,
luminary: (n) celebrity, star, leading berth spiteful, vicious, virulent, baleful,
light, personality, guiding light, VIP, magnetism: (n) attraction, charisma, unkind. ANTONYMS: (adj) kind,
authority, worthy, shining light, charm, allure, magnetics, appeal, merciful, loving, good, benign
Magnus Apollo, shiner glamour, magic, magnet, pull; (adj) maliciously: (adv) malevolently,
luxuriant: (adj, n) lush; (adj) gravity. ANTONYMS: (n) malignly, viciously, nastily,
abundant, lavish, exuberant, dense, repulsiveness, ugliness malignantly, rancorously,
thick, fertile, flourishing, fecund, magnificence: (adj, n) splendor, venomously, vindictively, bitterly,
opulent, profuse. ANTONYMS: brilliancy, gorgeousness; (n) glory, meanly, virulently. ANTONYMS:
(adj) barren, meager, unhealthy, pomp, brilliance, grandness, (adv) kindly, harmlessly,
arid, withering, sparse, shabby, greatness, dignity, majesty, loftiness. benevolently, friendly, genially,
unadorned ANTONYMS: (n) paucity, modesty, mercifully
luxuriantly: (adv) abundantly, shabbiness, poverty, austerity, malign: (v) defame, disparage,
opulently, plentifully, richly, unattractiveness asperse, libel, badmouth, vilify; (adj)
profusely, generously, bountifully, magnificently: (adv) beautifully, malevolent, harmful, malefic,
thickly, riotously, exuberantly, grandly, superbly, gloriously, injurious, evil. ANTONYMS: (v)
copiously majestically, gorgeously, praise, compliment; (adj) benign,
lynx: (n) cat, bobcat, caracal, wildcat, sumptuously, marvelously, beneficial, harmless
bay lynx, common lynx, cougar, wonderfully, fantastically, showily. mall: (n) center, esplanade, hammer,
desert lynx, Felis concolor ANTONYMS: (adv) poorly, plaza, promenade, walk, shopping
lyric: (n) tuneful, poem, song, modestly, badly, abysmally, simply, mall, square, sledge hammer,
language, verse; (adj) lyrical, choral, meagerly, incompetently crescent, circus
vocal, instrumental, operatic; (v) magnified: (adj) enlarged, inflated, maltreated: (adj) mistreated, battered,
write enlarge, hyperbolic, hypertrophied, aggrieved, assaulted, physically
mace: (n) cudgel, bludgeon, hammer, increased, overblown, overstated, abused, beaten, downtrodden,
official, shillelah, spice, sprig, stick, puffed up, made larger harmed, molested, persecuted,
injured masker: (n) disguiser, mummer, dejected, dismal, gloomy, doleful;
malus: (n) genus Malus Buffon, masquerader, guiser (n, v) low spirits; (n) gloominess,
mane: (n) encolure, head of hair, mastership: (n) dominion, command, depression. ANTONYMS: (n)
crest, wool, tresses; (adj) brush, situation, office, skill, superiority, happiness, cheerfulness,
beard, ringlet, whisker, tress, excellence, knack, masterdom; (adj) hopefulness, optimism; (adj) happy,
moustache panurgy bright, cheery, satisfied
mangled: (adj, prep) lacerated, rent; mastication: (n) chewing, chew, melodia: (n) tune
(adj) deformed, mutilated, lacerate, manducation, chaw, cud, gumming, memorials: (n) memoir
disabled, broken, maimed, distorted, change of state; (v) deglutition, menaced: (adj) doomed, exposed
damaged, blasted epulation, gulp, rumination menacing: (adj) threatening, sinister,
mania: (n) passion, craze, delirium, maternally: (adv) parentally, ominous, imminent, impending,
fad, fury, enthusiasm, rage, paternally, protectively, motherly minatory, ugly, frightening,
obsession; (adj, n) insanity, lunacy, mathematically: (adv) arithmetically, minacious, dangerous, formidable.
madness scientifically, punctually, ANTONYMS: (adj) auspicious,
manikin: (n) model, homunculus, algebraically, algebraicly approachable, promising,
dummy, mannikin, mannequin, mathias: (n) bob Mathias reassuring, soothing, favorable
Manacus, phantom, manakin, matting: (n) matt, mounting, carpet, menagerie: (n) zoo, vivarium,
figurine, form, fashion model gym mat, flatness, floor covering, menage, manage, installation,
mans: (n) mankind matte, master of arts in teaching, facility, collection, assemblage,
mantel: (n) mantelpiece, mantlepiece, lusterlessness aggregation, accumulation,
chimneypiece, lintel, mantelshelf, matutinal: (adj) early, earlier, earliest, menagery
mantle piece, mantleshelf, shelf, matinal, matutinary, matutine mendacious: (adj) false, lying,
drapery, drape, curtain maypole: (adj) pikestaff, pole, deceitful, untruthful, fraudulent,
mantlepiece: (n) mantel, mantle, flagstaff dishonest, insincere, faithless,
chimneypiece, shelf, drape, drapery, meander: (n, v) bend, curve, wander, trothless, unveracious, untrue.
cape, blanket, curtain turn, amble, saunter; (v) roam, stray, ANTONYM: (adj) honest
marbled: (adj) patterned, range, ramble, twist. ANTONYM: mendicancy: (n) beggary, begging,
multicolored, marbleized, (v) settle mendicity, indigence, penury,
marbleised meanest: (adj) last, least solicitation, beggarly appearance,
marceau: (n) marcel Marceau mechanically: (adv) mechanistically, mendication, extreme poverty
marchpane: (n) candy instinctively, routinely, mendicant: (n) pauper, cadger, friar,
marguerite: (n) Paris daisy, white involuntarily, industrially, maund, abbot, beggarwoman, lay
daisy, moon daisy, flower, oxeye unconsciously, automaticly, brother, conventual, cenobite,
daisy, chrysanthemum maximum, intuitively, impulsively, technically, beadsman, pilgrim
chrysanthemum frutescens, technologically. ANTONYMS: (adv) mephitic: (adj) noisome, poisonous,
marguerite daisy manually, consciously deleterious, toxic, fetid, venomous,
marquis: (n) lord, marquisate, noble, meddle: (v) intervene, interfere, septic, odorous, smelly, rank,
margrave, nobleman, Donald Robert intrude, monkey, interpose, fiddle, virulent
perry marquis, don marquis, Markis pry, dabble, interlope; (n) mercantile: (adj) commercial,
marseilles: (n) Marseille interference; (adj) moil. ANTONYM: business, trade, mercenary,
mart: (n) emporium, market, (v) disregard economic, merchant, trading,
marketplace, bazar, agora, forum, mediocre: (adj, n) mean, average; moneymaking, commercial
grocery, sale, center, outlet, store (adj) middling, ordinary, relations, for profit, industrial
marvel: (n, v) wonder; (n) prodigy, commonplace, fair, passable, merchandise: (v) market, deal; (n)
curiosity, phenomenon, amazement, indifferent, common, inferior, freight, cargo, product, commodity,
miracle, portent, marl, surprise, intermediate. ANTONYMS: (adj) goods, consignment, wares; (adj)
admiration; (v) admire. exceptional, excellent, impressive, commodities, ware
ANTONYMS: (v) disregard; (n) talented, unusual, exciting, superior, merciful: (adj) humane, gracious,
nightmare strong lenient, compassionate, kind,
marvellously: (adv) wondrously, meditate: (n, v) muse; (v) clement, benign, kindly, gentle,
wonderfully, terrifically, superbly, contemplate, consider, cogitate, beneficent, forgiving. ANTONYMS:
fantastically, miraculously, terrificly, reflect, speculate, wonder, ruminate, (adj) pitiless, merciless, unforgiving,
phenomenally, gloriously, ponder, think, bethink spiteful, harsh, impatient, severe,
tremendously, tally meditating: (n) conception hardhearted
marvelous: (adj) wonderful, fantastic, meditations: (n) contemplation, merriment: (n) fun, amusement,
incredible, fabulous, extraordinary, consideration, cogitation cheerfulness, hilarity, glee, jollity,
tremendous, grand, astonishing, medley: (n) mixture, miscellany, frolic, gaiety, happiness, festivity;
terrific, great; (adj, v) prodigious. jumble, melange, potpourri, (adj, n) mirth. ANTONYMS: (n)
ANTONYMS: (adj) ordinary, hotchpotch, concoction, admixture, misery, gloom, seriousness,
mundane, abysmal, bad, dreadful, hash; (adj) imbroglio, chaos despondency, boredom
unworthy, dire, humdrum, melancholy: (adj, v) dreary; (adj, n) meshes: (n) cobweb, mouse trap,
unimpressive, unremarkable, boring gloom, melancholic; (adj) depressed, toils, maze; (adj) awkwardness,
Victor Hugo 675
knot, Gordian knot, delicacy, ticklish astonishingly, staggeringly, warrant
card to play wondrously, startlingly, moat: (n) ditch, dike, dyke, trench,
metamorphosis: (n) alteration, phenomenally main, gully, sewer, siphon, sough,
change, conversion, transformation, mire: (n, v) bog, muck; (n) filth, barrier; (v) bulwark
metamorphism, translation, marsh, quagmire, dirt, sludge, clay; mocker: (n) derider, mockingbird,
transmutation, transfiguration, (adj, n, v) mud; (v) involve, bog scoffer, flouter, oscine, banterer,
revision, modification, down tease, mock, teaser, jester, joker
transmogrification mirth: (adj, n) merriment, jollity; (n) mocking: (adj) derisive, ironic,
metaphysics: (n) ontology, amusement, happiness, delight, joy, jeering, mock, quizzical, sarcastic,
metaphysic, outside actual hilarity, cheerfulness, festivity, taunting, derisory, teasing, sardonic,
experience, ontological, gladness, exhilaration. sneering. ANTONYMS: (adj)
cosmological, philosophy ANTONYMS: (n) gloom, sadness, respectful, approving,
metropolis: (n) city, capital, town, misery complimentary, sympathetic; (n)
municipality, buffalo, meshed, misadventure: (n) calamity, disaster, praise
borough, burgh, independence, hull, mischance, ill, plague, mishap, momentary: (adj) brief, fugitive,
bale misfortune, bad luck, catastrophe, transient, short, instantaneous,
microcosm: (adj) Elzevir edition, woe, ill luck ephemeral, passing, momentaneous,
epitome; (n) example, world misanthropy: (n) hatred, hate, temporary, impermanent, temporal.
midstream: (adv) center, centre, eye, incivism ANTONYMS: (adj) lasting, lengthy,
heart miscarry: (v) fail, founder, abort, fall, long
midsummer: (n) summer, solstice, flop, break down, go wrong, monolithic: (adj) monumental,
June solstice, June backfire, fall through, miss, lose uniform, largest, monolithal,
mien: (n, v) deportment, carriage, mischievous: (adj) bad, injurious, biggest, bigger, concrete, big,
bearing, demeanor; (n) look, detrimental, naughty, deleterious, totalitarian, unvaried, large
countenance, appearance, guise, impish, harmful, playful, maleficent, monologue: (n) soliloquy, speech,
manner, aspect, air arch; (adj, v) hurtful. ANTONYMS: words, apostrophe, discourse,
mildness: (adj, n) gentleness, (adj) harmless, serious language
kindness, benignity, compassion, misdeed: (n) misbehavior, monotonous: (adj) dull, flat, boring,
goodness; (n) lenity, mercy, transgression, misconduct, crime, dreary, tedious, insipid, monotone,
meekness, leniency, lenience, fault, offense, devilry, trespass, monotonic; (adj, v) dry,
tenderness. ANTONYMS: (n) misdemeanor, sin, wrong uninteresting, stupid. ANTONYMS:
roughness, pungency misfortunes: (n) misfortune (adj) exciting, varied, stimulating,
millet: (n) broomcorn millet, grain, mishap: (n) adversity, misfortune, lively, exotic, enthralling, brilliant,
hog millet, Panicum miliaceum, casualty, mischance, misery, flexible
kurakkan, miliary, cereal grass, food calamity, misadventure, disaster, ill, monseigneur: (n) Your Highness
grain, coracan, corakan, stem of bad luck, catastrophe moored: (v) on a rock, rock solid,
maize mislaid: (adj) misplaced, absent, tethered; (adj) stationary
mimic: (adj, v) mock; (v) imitate, disordered, gone astray, not there, moorings: (n) guy, halser, hawser,
mime, copy, impersonate, parody, missing, lost temporarily. jetty, line, mooring, wire, painter,
emulate; (n, v) counterfeit; (n) ANTONYM: (adj) found assistance, rope, ribbon
imitator, mimicker, ape misshapen: (adj) deformed, moorish: (adj) marshy, fenny, boggy,
mingle: (v) compound, combine, malformed, shapeless, crooked, moory; (n) Moorish architecture
merge, amalgamate, intermix, mix, ugly, contorted, monstrous, morion: (v) helmet, bulletproof vest,
commingle, associate, confuse, join, unshapely, grotesque, deformity, carapace, gauntlet, buffer, coat of
intermingle. ANTONYM: (v) part perverted. ANTONYMS: (adj) mail, corner stone, cowcatcher,
mingled: (adj) miscellaneous, straight, attractive cuirass, backplate; (n) cabasset
complex, indiscriminate, missive: (n) epistle, note, message, morn: (n) dawn, daybreak, forenoon,
heterogeneous, medley, confused, communication, billet, period, prime, aurora, a, amount of
eclectic, motley, different; (v) memorandum, encyclical, time, break of dawn, break of day,
blended, blent correspondence, alphabetic break of the day
mingling: (adj) blending, merging, character, correpondence, circular morose: (adj) grim, dismal, glum,
confluent, blended; (n) mixture, mistigri: (n) mistigris dark, moody, grumpy, dour,
mixing, commixtion, interchange, mitigation: (n) alleviation, easement, depressed, sullen, blue, dejected.
exchange, commixture; (adv) relief, assuagement, palliation, ANTONYMS: (adj) happy, cheery,
minglingly abatement, mollification, softening, stable
minstrel: (n) singer, musician, lessening; (n, v) relaxation; (v) morrow: (n) morning, future, mean
troubadour, artiste, folk singer, remission solar day, day
middleman, interlocutor, vocalist, mitre: (n) miter joint, headdress, morsel: (n, v) bite, mouthful; (n)
poet, corner man; (v) sing headgear crumb, chew, particle, fragment,
miraculously: (adv) astoundingly, mittimus: (n) brevet, bull, decretal, taste, piece, nibble; (adj, v) gobbet,
marvelously, strangely, remarkably, dispensation, edict, firman, mite
stupendously, supernaturally, passport, placit, prescription, ukase, motley: (adj) miscellaneous, mottled,
assorted, colorful, heterogeneous, mumble: (n, v) murmur, whisper, stable, secure, decided, firm,
multicolored, checkered; (n) medley, hum, rumble; (v) grumble, chew, immobile
miscellany, mixture, assortment. mutter, jabber, talk, utter, verbalize nave: (adj) naive, credulous,
ANTONYM: (adj) homogeneous mummer: (n) mime, pantomimist, immature, artless, gullible,
mouldy: (adj) moldy, mildewy, fusty, mimer, guiser, thespian, player, inexperienced, jejune; (n) fall guy
musty, stale, trite, hackneyed, well- pantomime, masque, clown, dumb naively: (adv) ingenuously,
worn, putrid, mould, frowsty show, guisard credulously, unsophisticatedly,
mountainous: (adj) colossal, mummery: (adj) tomfoolery, vagary; artlessly, inexperiencedly, simplely,
gargantuan, huge, hilly, giant, (n) flummery, pleasantry, nonsense, candidly, frankly, trustingly,
alpine, enormous, large, rugged, nonsensicality, masque, false colors, childishly, unaffectedly.
gigantic, cragged. ANTONYMS: sport, joke, escapade ANTONYMS: (adv) deliberately,
(adj) flat, tiny munitions: (n) ordnance, arms, astutely, sensibly, dishonestly,
mounts: (adj) mounted weapons, military stores, artfully
mourn: (v) bewail, grieve, deplore, armaments, artillery, guns, gun, naivete: (n) artlessness, innocence,
cry, bemoan, regret, distress, sad, military supplies, ordnance stores, naiveness, credulousness, gullibility,
wail, mourning, weep. defense ingenuousness, sincerity, simplicity,
ANTONYMS: (v) rejoice, celebrate, murmuring: (n) murmuration, naturalness, candor; (adj) bonhomie.
applaud murmur, complaint, grumble, ANTONYM: (n) sophistication
mournful: (adj) sad, miserable, muttering, mutter, murmur vowel; nape: (n) nucha, scruff, occiput, rear,
melancholy, funereal, dolorous, (adj) whispering, humming, back end, backside, chine
dark, pensive, gloomy, lugubrious, droning, murmurous napery: (n) table linen, mat, damask,
lamentable; (adj, n) plaintive. muses: (n) belles lettres, literature, linen, napkin, tablecloth
ANTONYMS: (adj) joyful, happy, republic of letters, classics, polite nasal: (n) Nasalis, os, continuant,
emotionless literature, humanities continuant consonant; (adj)
mournfully: (adv) sadly, sorrowfully, musket: (n) fusil, blunderbuss, gun, adenoidal, cadaverous, haggard,
glumly, woefully, unhappily, rifle emaciated, gaunt; (v) inarticulate,
plaintively, grievously, funereally, musketeer: (n) rifleman, skirmisher, guttural
dejectedly, dolorously, poignantly. sharpshooter, soldier, marcher, naught: (n) cipher, nothing, null,
ANTONYMS: (adv) cheerfully, infantryman, carabineer, foot aught, nix, nought, zip, cypher,
joyfully soldier, footslogger, jager nada; (adj, n, pron) nil; (n, pron)
mourning: (n) lament, lamentation, musketry: (n) proficiency, rifle, zilch
bereavement, gloom, woe, musket, facility, army unit nearing: (n) approach; (adj)
memorial, sorrowfulness, sadness, mute: (adj) dumb, silent, inarticulate, impending, forthcoming, oncoming,
sorrow; (adj) grieving; (v) lamenting dummy, tongueless; (v) muffle, coming, imminent, looming; (prep)
mouton: (n) mutton, em dampen, deaden, hush; (adj, v) on the verge of, toward
movable: (adj) portable, transferable, quiet, dull. ANTONYMS: (adj) neatness: (n) trimness, dexterity,
mercurial, adjustable, ambulatory, talkative, speaking, spoken; (v) orderliness, tidiness, spruceness,
changeable, transportable, amplify cleanliness, precision, compactness,
moveable, flexible, active; (v) mutilated: (adj) maimed, disabled, purity, cleanness, elegance.
shifting. ANTONYMS: (adj) truncated, crippled, lacerated, ANTONYMS: (n) untidiness,
immovable, unchangeable shapeless, mutilous, mutilate, largeness, clumsiness, disorder,
mule: (n) ass, donkey, jackass, hinny, lopped, lacerate, imperfect inelegance, clutter, chaos, messiness
mules, scuff, bullhead, slipper; (adj) mutiny: (n, v) insurrection, rebellion; necessities: (n) supplies, necessity,
hybrid, crossbreed, Metis (n) disobedience, uprising, essential, wants, support,
mules: (n) mule, scuffs, carpet revolution, outbreak, subsistence, requirement, bread
slipper, scuff insubordination, defiance, rising; (v) necklace: (n) collar, chain, chaplet,
muleteer: (n) mule driver, teamster, rebel, rise. ANTONYMS: (n) loyalty, bracelet, necklet, string, corona,
postilion, skinner, vetturino, manual obedience neckband, jewelry, coronet, crown
laborer, laborer, arriero, B f skinner, muzzle: (n) mouth, gunpoint, nose, necromancy: (n) sorcery, conjuration,
Cornelia Otis skinner, Fred skinner lip, gullet, nozzle, bit; (v) muffle, black magic, incantation,
multiform: (adj) different, silence, hush, curb enchantment, black art, divination,
multifarious, polymorphous, mystic: (adj, v) secret, recondite; (adj) witchcraft, charm, soothsaying,
multigenerous, manifold, mysterious, occult, cryptical, cryptic, thaumaturgy
miscellaneous, multiple, esoteric, inscrutable, weird, magical; needlework: (n) stitchery, sewing,
polymorphic, multiplex, (adj, n) psychic needlecraft, stitching, knitwork,
polyschematist, multifold nacelle: (n) enclosure crochet, crocheting, knit, knitting,
multiplication: (n) augmentation, nadir: (n) lowest point, foot, zero, fancywork, creation
increase, generation, expansion, rise, minimum, toe, root, sole, extreme, ne'er: (adv) never, certainly not
doubling, propagation, increment, the lowest, letdown, adversity. neglecting: (n) neglect, disregard
reproduction; (n, v) addition; (adj) ANTONYMS: (n) acme, peak, negligently: (adv) inattentively,
pullulation. ANTONYM: (n) pinnacle, zenith neglectfully, carelessly,
decrease nailed: (adj) fixed, tight, stationary, thoughtlessly, remissly,
Victor Hugo 677
nonchalantly, slackly, recklessly, magnificently, grandly, greatly, nullity, nihility, emptiness,
unmindfully, sloppily, unthinkingly. splendidly, honorably, heroically, insignificance, nonentity, blankness,
ANTONYMS: (adv) thoroughly, aristocratically, bravely, vacuum, cipher; (adj) nonbeing.
attentively, responsibly, seriously magnanimously, courageously. ANTONYMS: (n) being, importance,
neighbor: (v) abut, adjoin, populate, ANTONYMS: (adv) immorally, significance
touch; (n) acquaintance, poorly, timidly nourish: (v) foster, keep, bring up,
neighborhood, national; (adj) nocturnal: (adj) nightly, vespertine, nurture, sustain, aliment, cherish,
neighborly, neighbouring, nighttime, nocturnals, overnight, feed, maintain, cultivate; (n, v)
neighboring, adjacent. ANTONYM: night, autumnal. ANTONYM: (adj) cradle. ANTONYMS: (v) starve, sap
(n) foreigner daytime nourished: (adj) fostered
neighborhood: (n) vicinity, district, noiselessly: (adv) silently, nourishment: (n) food, alimentation,
area, community, locality, place, soundlessly, stilly, softly, mutely, meal, meat, diet, feeding, nutrition,
quarter, environs, section; (adj) delicately, wordlessly, gently, repast, sustenance, edible, fuel
neighboring, local speechlessly; (adj, adv) stealthily; nude: (adj, v) naked, bare; (adj) bald,
neighboring: (adj, adv) adjacent, (adj) noiseless. ANTONYMS: (adv) au naturel, exposed, unclothed,
near; (adj) adjoining, nearby, heavily, audibly stark, undressed, raw, uncovered;
contiguous, neighbor, abutting, noisily: (adv) clamorously, (n) nakedness. ANTONYMS: (adj)
next, neighborly, nigh, next to. boisterously, vociferously, riotously, clothed, dressed
ANTONYMS: (adj) distant, remote, raucously, uproariously, loudly, nudity: (n) nude, nudeness,
far, national blatantly, rowdily, stridently, nakedness, altogether, undress,
neighbors: (n) neighbourhood vocally. ANTONYMS: (adv) status, naked, raw, buff, birthday
neptune: (n) Nereid, triton, Poseidon, noiselessly, silently, calmly, suit, condition
naiad, solar system peacefully, softly numberless: (adj) countless,
ness: (n) cape, spit, tongue, headland, noisome: (adj) injurious, bad, fetid, innumerable, multitudinous,
promontory, earth, ground, land, mischievous, repugnant, foul, infinite, incalculable, endless,
mantle, dry land noxious, repulsive, detrimental, uncounted, unnumbered,
nestled: (adj) closer, close poisonous, deleterious. ANTONYM: innumerous, legion, untold.
nestling: (n) chick, bairn, toddler, (adj) moral ANTONYM: (adj) few
baby bird, bambino, changeling, fry, nombril: (n) midpoint numbness: (n) dullness, anesthesia,
kiddy, nesting, pullet, tadpole nomen: (n) title, denomination, stupor, torpor, apathy, symptom,
neutralizing: (v) neutralise; (n) designation, handle, nome torpidity, lethargy, deadness,
disarmament; (adj) negative, nook: (n) angle, niche, recess, hole, indifference, anaesthesia.
alkaline coign, bay, compartment, oriel, cove, ANTONYMS: (n) sensation, feeling
niggardly: (adj) mean, stingy, refuge, haven nuptial: (adj, n) bridal, marriage;
closefisted, parsimonious, grudging, noonday: (n) noontide, noon, high (adj) marital, matrimonial, spousal,
close, near, skimpy, miserable, noon, hour, twelve noon, afternoon; connubial, hymeneal, conjugal,
penurious; (adj, v) avaricious. (v) tide; (adj) meridional wedding, married; (n) matrimony
ANTONYM: (adj) graceful noose: (n) loop, trap, gin, lasso, net, nursed: (adj) care, suckled
nigh: (adj, adv, prep) near; (adj, adv) gibbet, gallows, bowstring, snare, nutshell: (n) summary; (v)
close, nearly, almost, nearby, most, girdle; (v) hang summarize, sum up, abridge, digest,
all but, about, adjacent; (prep) by; northward: (adj, adv) north; (adj) simplify, shorten, reduce, distill,
(adj) approximate northbound; (adv) northerly, concentrate, abbreviate
nightfall: (n) dusk, evening, twilight, northwards, in the north, to the nymph: (n) dryad, houri, cocoon,
sunset, gloaming, evenfall, dark, north naiad, Daphne, caterpillar, Aurelia,
eventide, sundown, darkness, fall. nosegay: (n) posy, flower, garland, Ariel, maiden, wench, staddle
ANTONYMS: (n) daybreak, sunrise festoon, corsage, chaplet, tassel, oaken: (adj) woody
nightingale: (n) bulbul, nurse, bunch, flower arrangement, aroma, obedient: (adj) submissive,
philomel, the lady with the lamp, fragrance compliant, good, conformable, tame,
singer, nighthawk, night bird, notary: (n) clerk, official, lawyer, acquiescent, dutiful, meek, biddable,
Florence nightingale, etc scrivener, scribe, recorder, legal amenable, subservient.
nimbly: (adv) adroitly, alertly, representative, draughtsman, ANTONYMS: (adj) defiant,
lightly, energetically, cleverly, copyist, brief, attorney assertive, rebellious, crooked,
hastily, deftly, rapidly, readily; (adj) notch: (n, v) mark, dent, hack, nick, intractable, naughty, wild, resistant
dexterously; (adj, adv) neatly. score, nock, hollow, scratch; (n) gap, obelisk: (n) dagger, monument,
ANTONYMS: (adv) lethargically, incision; (v) indent. ANTONYM: (v) monolith, pinnacle, minaret, graphic
heavily, awkwardly fill symbol; (adj, n) column, pillar; (adj)
nitric: (adj) nitrous, azotic acid notched: (adj) serrated, jaggy, serrate, spire, steeple, turret
nobleman: (n) patrician, aristocrat, toothed, erose, rough, uneven, objecting: (adj) disappointed,
lord, peer, marquis, nobility, indented, ragged, apprenticed, disinclined, opposed
grandee, baron, duke, armiger, indentured. ANTONYM: (adj) oblique: (adj) circuitous, devious,
burgrave smooth lateral, side, roundabout, slanting,
nobly: (adv) generously, nothingness: (n) nothing, void, evasive, collateral, sloping, inclined,
tortuous. ANTONYMS: (adj) direct, (adj) detestable, hideous, nasty, humble, unadorned, impoverished
level, perpendicular, parallel, overt, execrable, disgusting, abhorrent, oration: (n) discourse, harangue,
explicit, straight, clear, upright; (n) abominable, heinous, forbidding. lecture, speech, declamation,
nominative ANTONYMS: (adj) pleasant, homily, tirade, say, recitation,
obliterated: (adj) obliterate, delightful, agreeable, lovable, nice oratory, language
destroyed, lost, forgotten, invisible; odor: (n) aroma, scent, odour, orator: (n) elocutionist, speechmaker,
(v) erased, effaced bouquet, flavour, perfume, flavor, speaker, lecturer, Cicero, speechifier,
oblivion: (n) limbo, Lethe, void, savor, stink; (n, v) smell, stench demagog, demagogue, eulogist; (v)
absolution, forgiveness, ogive: (n) dirt band, cumulative oratrix, oratress
obliviousness, silence, remission, frequency curve, front oratory: (n) elocution, rhetoric,
pardon; (n, v) amnesty; (adj) olfactory: (adj) olfact, odorous, declamation, speech, oration,
nonbeing. ANTONYMS: (n) sensory church, chapel, tabernacle,
consciousness, fame olivier: (n) sir Laurence Kerr Olivier valediction, cathedral, public
oblong: (adj) oval, elliptical, olympian: (adj) Olympic, speaking
rectangular, rounded; (v) exceptional, exceeding, imperial, ordinance: (n) command, edict,
longitudinal; (n) block, quadrangle lofty, proud, regal, gallant, order, law, act, observance,
obscurity: (n) gloom, darkness, prodigious, surpassing; (n) Olympic regulation, institution, institute,
shade, dimness, obscureness, night, God enactment, ceremony
oblivion, haze, ambiguity, shadow, olympus: (n) Olimbos orgy: (n) debauchery, binge, debauch,
cloudiness. ANTONYMS: (n) clarity, omelette: (n) fluffy omelet, dish, firm Saturnalia, bacchanal, drunken
fame, light, simplicity, prominence, omelet revelry, riot, Bacchanalia,
celebrity, brightness omit: (adv, v) neglect, disregard; (adj, pampering, rite, splurge
obsequies: (n) funeral, exequies, v) miss, skip, jump, pretermit; (v) orifice: (n) mouth, gap, hole,
interment, obit, exequy, parentation, delete, forget, exclude, except, leave. aperture, vent, port, puncture, inlet,
last rites, wake, decease, death, ANTONYMS: (v) add, remember muzzle, chops, nozzle
funeral procession omnibus: (n, v) bus, autobus; (n) oriole: (n) cacique, bobolink, old
observatory: (n) observation tower, motorbus, coach, charabanc, world oriole, blackbird, cazique,
lookout station, structure, tower, collection, anthology, compilation, meadowlark, lark, American oriole,
outlook, observation post, lookout jitney, car, motorcoach oscine, northern oriole, American
cupola, edifice, lookout man, onward: (adv) ahead, forwards, songbird
construction, building before, forth, onwards, along, in orison: (n) invocation, intercession,
obstinacy: (n) stubbornness, advance, frontward, forrader; (adv, supplication, benediction, request,
firmness, bullheadedness, prep) on; (adj) progressive. rogation, communion, entreaty,
determination, contumacy, ANTONYM: (adv) backward commination, collect, blessing
mulishness, impenitence, resolve, opaque: (adj) dense, muddy, obscure, orleans: (n) siege of Orleans
resoluteness, impenitency, cloudy, hazy, murky, thick, ornament: (n) decoration, adornment,
pertinacity. ANTONYMS: (n) unintelligible, milky, misty, vague. embellishment, decor; (v) beautify,
cooperation, compliance ANTONYM: (adj) transparent decorate, deck, embellish, adorn; (n,
obstinately: (adv) obdurately, openwork: (n) lace, net v) garnish, dress. ANTONYM: (v)
mulishly, persistently, perversely, opportune: (adj, v) appropriate; (adj) strip
doggedly, refractorily, unyieldingly, favorable, apropos, auspicious, ornamented: (adj) embellished,
willfully, pigheadedly, waywardly, expedient, happy, handy, timely, beautified, fancy, flowery, ornate,
firmly. ANTONYM: (adv) helpfully felicitous, favourable; (v) becoming. adorned, bedecked, decked,
obstructed: (adj) blind, blocked, ANTONYMS: (adj) untimely, festooned, feathered, florid
congested, impeded, impedite, disadvantageous, inappropriate, orphan: (n) waif, caterpillar, nymph,
foiled, tight, thwarted, stymied, inconvenient, unfortunate, unlucky nympha, cocoon, Aurelia, tyke,
frustrated, impassable. ANTONYM: opprobrium: (n) infamy, dishonor, staddle, youngster, shaver; (adj)
(adj) unobstructed disgrace, defamation, reproach; (n, orphaned
obstructing: (adj) impedimental, v) insult, abuse, invective, orphaned: (adj) unparented,
impeditive contumely; (adj, n) obloquy, odium. parentless
occult: (adj) hidden, obscure, ANTONYM: (n) fame orpheus: (n) Terpsichore, Euterpe,
mysterious, cryptic, cryptical, dark, opulence: (n) fortune, wealth, luxury, Apollo
esoteric, magical, unseen, exuberance, comfort, luxuriousness, orpiment: (n) auripigment
confidential; (adj, n, v) secret prosperity, wealthiness, plenty; (adj, orthography: (n) spelling,
occupant: (n) tenant, inhabitant, n) riches, affluence. ANTONYMS: ideography, boustrophedon,
dweller, denizen, occupier, inmate, (n) poverty, paucity, shabbiness, cuneiform, hieroglyph,
holder, citizen, householder, austerity hieroglyphic, writing, writing
dalesman, coaster opulent: (adj) rich, affluent, system, syllabic, syllabary, scriptural
octagonal: (adj) octangular luxurious, lush, deluxe, wealthy, ottoman: (n) hassock, footstool,
octave: (n) tetrachord, stanza, church sumptuous, copious, lavish, footrest, fauteuil, Osmanli, settle,
festival, interval, musical interval generous, costly. ANTONYMS: (adj) Turk, Ottomite, woolsack, fag, pouf
odious: (adj, v) hateful, obnoxious; meager, shabby, Spartan, stark, outcast: (n) exile, castaway, leper,
Victor Hugo 679
expatriate, outlaw, vagabond, lown, huitre, shellfish, blue point, capiz, pantheon: (n) temple, assemblage,
loon, refugee; (adj, n) derelict; (adj) bluepoint memorial, collection, aggregation,
homeless. ANTONYM: (n) native paganism: (n) heathenism, heresy, accumulation, monument
outcry: (n, v) clamor, exclaim, call, pagan religion, idolatry, atheism, panther: (n) cougar, jaguar, leopard,
shout, vociferation; (n) noise, religion, faith, barbarism, ethnicism, puma, mountain lion, painter, Felis
exclamation, din, uproar, gentilism, gentility onca, Felis concolor, cat; (adj) lion,
commotion, racket. ANTONYM: (n) pagoda: (n) tower, pagod, pagody, tiger
acceptance temple panting: (adj) gasping, breathless,
outrageously: (adv) disgracefully, pained: (adj) offended, aggrieved, blown, winded, puffed; (v)
scandalously, preposterously, distressed, displeased, sore, grieved, palpitation; (n) heaving, gasp,
shockingly, exorbitantly, miserable, injured, wounded, asthma, heave, puff
ridiculously, shamefully, worried, upset. ANTONYM: (adj) parallelism: (n) parallel, likeness,
extortionately, nastily, excessively, unaffected similitude, analogy, affinity,
crazily. ANTONYMS: (adv) paladin: (n) champion, hero, similarity, parity, eurythmy,
admirably, sensibly, politely, calmly, defender, fighter, guardian, knight, harmony, approximation,
modestly, commendably protagonist, protector, heron, conformity
outspread: (adj) spread, extended, hoagie, hoagy parallelogram: (n) rhomb, tetragon,
widespread, dispersed, pallet: (n) bed, stillage, berth, range, quadrilateral, diamond, rhombus,
outstretched, stretched, broad, wide; tester, stretcher, shakedown, scope, rhomboidal, quadrangle, oblong,
(v) unfold reach, bunk, paillasse rhomboid, rhombic
overdress: (v) dress up, dress, attire, pallid: (adj) ghastly, wan, bloodless, paralyzed: (adj) palsied, crippled,
overclothe, bedizen, bone, grind lurid, cadaverous, sickly, ashen, disabled, helpless, torpid,
away, get up, deck out, fig out, white, pasty, livid, watery. powerless, prostrate, enervated,
fancy up ANTONYMS: (adj) healthy, rosy, dead, impotent, inert
overflowing: (adj) full, copious, vivid parapet: (n) bulwark, breastwork,
exuberant, flooding, bountiful, palpable: (adj) tangible, obvious, fortification, railing, bastion,
generous, brimming, profuse; (n, v) evident, apparent, clear, battlement, wall, banister, handrail,
flood, inundation, deluge. transparent, indubitable, noticeable, earthwork; (v) sunk fence
ANTONYMS: (adj) sparse, scarce lucid, patent, perceptible. paraphernalia: (n) gear, apparatus,
overloaded: (adj) overcrowded, ANTONYMS: (adj) imaginary, outfit, kit, tackle, equipment,
burdened, congested, encumbered, intangible, impalpable, doubtful, appurtenances, fitting, things,
busy, filled to capacity, laden, furtive, imperceptible, insignificant, belongings, baggage
packed, overfull; (n) weight in obscure, unclear parch: (v) desiccate, burn, grill,
excess, fuller palpitate: (n, v) throb, pant, thrill, dehydrate, sear, scorch, drain, dry,
overloading: (n) level of congestion, heave; (v) flutter, pulsate, shiver, broil, inflame, dry up. ANTONYM:
congestion, overcrowding, shake, quiver, pound, flicker (v) swell
overfilling palpitating: (adj) fluttering, parched: (adj, n) thirsty; (adj) arid,
overmuch: (n) excess, surfeit, throbbing, aflare, flittering, flying, adust, torrid, barren, desiccated,
overabundance; (adj) inordinate, unsteady, vibrant, flaring dehydrated, scorched, baked,
exorbitant, superabundant, undue; paltry: (adj, n) mean; (adj) withered, shriveled. ANTONYMS:
(adv) overly, too, unduly, too much contemptible, measly, trifling, abject, (adj) quenched, humid
overthrown: (adj) overcome, insignificant, inconsiderable, puny, parchment: (n) vellum, sheepskin,
conquered, battered, overpowered, little, trivial, low. ANTONYMS: lambskin, diploma, testament, will;
dejected, cast down, dissolute, (adj) generous, substantial, plentiful, (v) foolscap, tablet, table, slate, pillar
doomed, flooded, discomfit, mat enormous, important, profound parentheses: (n) bracket, brackets
overtook: (v) overtake pampas: (n) downs, desert, wold, parley: (v) negotiate, converse,
overwhelm: (v) overpower, defeat, savanna, veldt, weary waste, confer, consult; (n, v) talk, treat; (n)
inundate, flood, overthrow, drown, geographical region, grassland, conversation, interview, colloquy,
deluge, crush, engulf, astound, heath, plain, geographic region meeting, consultation
overturn. ANTONYMS: (v) pandemonium: (n) chaos, confusion, parody: (n, v) caricature, lampoon,
encourage, amplify, capitulate, hubbub, disorder, commotion, spoof; (v) mimic, mock; (n)
incite, install, lose, protect, submit racket, turmoil, noise, mayhem, imitation, mockery, charade, satire,
owing: (adj) due, unpaid, unsettled, clamor, hullabaloo. ANTONYMS: travesty, farce
outstanding, overdue, owed, (n) order, peace, calm parry: (v) evade, dodge, fend off,
payable, undischarged, indebted, pane: (n) window pane, paneling, avoid, deflect, duck, hedge, block,
fulfilling obligation, lawful. pane of glass, panelling, circumvent, elude; (n, v) counter
ANTONYM: (adj) settled windowpane, window-pane, board, partaking: (n) input, contribution
oxen: (n) bull, ox, cows, cow, cattle, square, sheet of glass, leaf, box parti-colored: (adj) varicolored,
Bos Taurus, bullock, kine, milker, panelling: (n) paneling, lining, panel, multicolored, dappled, speckled
beef, dairy cow dado, pane of glass, wainscot, parvis: (n) courtyard, Pervis
oyster: (v) clam, ostracize, frumenty, wainscoting, fairing passably: (adv) reasonably, middling,
oatmeal, chowder, damper; (n) panes: (n) Fauni moderately, tolerably, adequately,
enough, well enough, okay, pealing: (n) axial motion, roll, coil, pensive: (adj) contemplative,
impartially, indifferent; (adj) pretty thunder, curl, curlicue, drum roll, meditative, musing, wistful,
well. ANTONYMS: (adv) gyre, paradiddle, cast; (adj) loud dreamy, melancholy, abstracted,
insufficiently, intolerably, pebble: (n) boulder, crystal, flint, broody, reflective, moody; (adj, v)
unsatisfactorily, inadequately rock, scree, cobblestone, calculus, sad. ANTONYMS: (adj) shallow,
passe: (adj) demode, antique, crag, granite, pebblestone; (adj) satisfied, carefree
antiquated, effete, run out, ex, quartz pensively: (adv) thoughtfully,
outdated; (v) wilted, shaken, pedagogical: (adj) educational, reflectively, wistfully,
shabby, secondhand academic contemplatively, sadly, ponderingly,
passer: (n) passerby, passenger, pediment: (n) gable, epistyle, frieze, musingly, mournfully, abstractedly,
forward passer, genus passer coping stone, capital, architrave, dreamily, broodingly. ANTONYMS:
passer-by: (n) eyewitness cornice, pedicle, gable wall, (adv) rashly, unthinkingly, alertly
pasticcio: (n) miscellany, ambigu, entablature, gable end pentameter: (n) hexameter, verse
hotchpot, mess, melange, magma, peep: (n, v) glance, peek, look, gaze, pentecost: (n) Feast of Weeks,
patchwork, odds and ends, tertium glint, squeal; (n) glimpse, cheep; (v) Whitsun, Shabuoth, Shavuot,
quid, all sorts chirp, peer, pry. ANTONYMS: (v) Shavuoth, sabbath
pastime: (n) game, avocation, stare, gaze; (n) examination penthouse: (n) awning, apartment,
entertainment, recreation, hobby, peeping: (n) cheeping, tweeting, canopy, outhouse, hovel, pentice,
distraction, interest, fun, pursuit, chirping; (adj) inquisitive penthouse apartment
amusement, sideline peerage: (n) aristocracy, baronage, peopled: (adj) multinominal,
patched: (adj) mean, besmirched, old, nobility, peerdom, gentry, noblesse multiple, manifold, multiplied,
damaged, ragged, flyblown peevish: (adj) fretful, fractious, multitudinous, populous, inhabited,
pater: (n) dad, pa, daddy, pappa, morose, testy, irascible, moody, thick, studded, teeming, crowded.
papa, Dada, sire, begetter, pop, male captious, petulant, cross, ANTONYM: (adj) uninhabited
parent, Dadaism cantankerous, touchy perceiving: (n) feeling, sensing,
paternal: (adj) parental, agnate, pegasus: (n) Rocinante, Bucephalus hearing, looking at, recognition,
maternal, agnatic, concerned, pell-mell: (adv) helter-skelter, thought, vision, lipreading; (adj)
solicitous, patrimonial, ancestral, blindly; (adj, adv) posthaste conscious, percipient, reasonable
fatherlike, racial, fraternal. penance: (n) atonement, sacrament, perceptible: (adj) conspicuous,
ANTONYMS: (adj) filial, motherly confession, compunction, penalty, appreciable, evident, discernible,
patriotism: (n) nationalism, expiation, remorse, repentance, obvious, visible, palpable, apparent,
nationality, love of country, punishment, reparation, hair shirt detectable, manifest, observable.
chauvinism, jingoism, loyalty, pendent: (adj) pendulous, ANTONYMS: (adj) intangible,
public spirit, xenophobia, suspended, pendant, dangling, unclear, inaudible, inconspicuous,
Americanism, national character, pending, unsettled, undecided, obscure, undetectable, invisible
civism. ANTONYM: (n) disloyalty pensile, drooping, projecting; (n) perchance: (adv) maybe, possibly, by
patroness: (n) supporter, sponsor, stipend chance, peradventure, accidentally,
benefactress, support, donor, fairy pendulous: (adj) drooping, hanging, incidentally, mayhap, chance,
godmother cernuous, droopy, nodding, haphazard, probably, haply
patronizing: (adj) condescending, flagging, swinging, pensile, flabby, perching: (adj) insessorial
haughty, patronising, superior, wavering, unstable perdition: (adj, n) downfall, fall, ruin;
arrogant, snobbish, arch, pendulum: (n) metronome, horologe, (n) hell, inferno, infernal region,
supercilious; (v) patronize; (n) gnomon, dial, setup, pendant, nether region, deperdition, bane,
patronage; (adv) patronizingly. clepsydra, weight; (v) flap, skirt, destruction, overthrow.
ANTONYMS: (adj) humble, pony tail ANTONYM: (n) heaven
deferential, modest penetrating: (adj) astute, sharp, perdu: (v) buried, underground; (adj)
patter: (v) clatter, rumble, roll, rattle, cutting, discerning, incisive, invisible, perdue, concealed
drum, scuttle, skip, tiptoe; (n) line of piercing, perceptive, discriminating, peremptorily: (adv) absolutely,
gab, vernacular, jargon trenchant; (adj, v) biting, acute. positively, imperatively, flatly,
pauli: (n) Wolfgang Pauli ANTONYMS: (adj) mild, soft, dogmatically, magisterially,
pave: (v) case, face, veneer, impave, mellow, low, gentle, dull, dense commandingly, imperiously,
hard surface; (adj) causewayed penitent: (adj) contrite, apologetic, authoritatively, decidedly,
peaceable: (adj) gentle, calm, pacific, sorry, remorseful, regretful, guilty, decisively
amicable, quiet, friendly, sorrowful, rueful, penitential; (n) perfecting: (n) development,
inoffensive, moderate, meek, serene; flagellant, religionist. ANTONYMS: reiteration
(adj, v) peaceful. ANTONYMS: (adj) (adj) unrepentant, impenitent, perfunctory: (adj) cursory, casual,
argumentative, belligerent, unashamed, unremorseful automatic, passing, superficial,
intemperate, quarrelsome, crooked, penitential: (adj) repentant, contrite, offhand, mechanical, indifferent,
disruptive, harsh, disordered remorseful, apologetic, sorry hurried, sketchy, formal.
peal: (n) ding, noise, clang, dingdong, pennon: (n) pennant, flag, banner, ANTONYMS: (adj) careful,
blast; (v) chime, knell, toll, echo; ensign, wing, standard, streamer, thoughtful
(adj, n) swell; (n, v) bang pennoncel, pennoncelle, colors, waft periodical: (n) journal, magazine,
Victor Hugo 681
newspaper, review, organ, manifestation, trope; (adj, n) type; disagreeable person, Mawworm,
publication, book; (adj) intermittent, (adj) metalepsis, anagoge sophist
cyclic, recurrent, annual perspiration: (n) diaphoresis, pharmacy: (n) dispensary, drugstore,
periphrase: (n) periphrasis, verbiage hidrosis, sudor, sweating, pharmaceutics, apothecary, chemist,
perishing: (adj) chilly, cold and extravasation, secretion, exertion, druggist, pharmacology,
damp, crumbly, starving, inclement; exudation, effort, lather, water dispensatory, medicine, chemist's
(n) decay perspiring: (adj) sweaty, sweating, shop, store
pernicious: (adj) detrimental, evil, wet, warm, activity, sudatory, phial: (n) ampoule, bottle, cruet,
bad, injurious, fatal, noxious, perspirable, emitting perspiration, ampul, ampule, noggin, caster, flask,
deadly, baneful, mischievous, body process, bodily process, bodily stoup
mortal, malign. ANTONYMS: (adj) function philosophic: (v) platonic, staid,
favorable, pleasant, harmless perturbation: (n) commotion, stayed, stoical; (adj) thoughtful,
peroration: (n) harangue, close, agitation, fuss, emotion, excitement, rational, patient, learned, ideologic,
conclusion, speech, formal speech, confusion, dislocation, ideological. ANTONYM: (adj)
lecture, delivery, epilogue, say, discomposure, interruption; (adj, n, nonphilosophical
tirade, tag v) trepidation; (adj, n) flutter philosophize: (v) think, reason,
perpendicular: (adj) upright, vertical, perverted: (adj) perverse, immoral, generalize, cogitate, cerebrate
steep, plumb, straight, right, sheer, distorted, kinky, corrupt, twisted, phiz: (n) countenance, visage,
orthogonal, normal, precipitous, abnormal, debauched, deviant, physiognomy, face, mug, forehead,
true. ANTONYMS: (adj) horizontal, reprobate, unnatural. ANTONYMS: contour, brow, Artemus ward,
parallel, inclined, oblique, prone, (adj) normal, moral, unchanged mark, smiler
gentle pestilence: (n) pest, epidemic, blight, phlegmatic: (adj) indifferent, listless,
perpendicularly: (adv) uprightly, disease, curse, infectious disease, stolid, unconcerned, phlegmatical,
erectly, straightly, upright, contagion, infection, virus; (adj) lethargic, passive, inert, nonchalant,
orthogonally, sheerly, precipitously, murrain, pox cold, careless. ANTONYM: (adj)
normally, plumb; (adv, v) sheer; petit: (adj) small, insignificant demonstrative
(adj, adv) directly petrifaction: (n) petrification, fossil, phoebus: (n) sun, Phoebus Apollo,
perpetually: (adv) eternally, stupor, trance, obduracy, orb of day, aurora
everlastingly, always, incessantly, lapidification, callousness; (adj) phosphoric: (adj) phosphorous,
continually, endlessly, permanently, induration phosphorical
unceasingly, ceaselessly, ever; (adj, petrified: (adj) mineralized, phosphorus: (n) phosphor,
adv) forever. ANTONYMS: (adv) motionless, frightened, scared, Phosphorus paste, P, element,
erratically, sporadically numb, stiff, harder, firm, mineral, Lucifer, daystar, chemical element,
perpetuated: (adj) perpetuate like a statue, lacking sensation. atomic number, morning star
perpetuity: (n) immortality, ANTONYMS: (adj) mobile, fearless phthisis: (n) pulmonary tuberculosis,
sempiternity, permanency, infinity, petticoat: (adj, n) female; (n) marasmus; (adj) pertussis, necrosis,
permanence, endlessness, underskirt, skirt, she, woman, her, ringworm, quinsy, pneumonia,
continuity, time without end, crinoline, wife, undergarment, psora, pyrosis, rachitis, rubeola
everness, sequence, aye apron; (adj) petty physiognomy: (n) face, kisser, phiz,
perplexed: (adj) confused, puzzled, pettish: (adj) peevish, irritable, cross, visage, mug, look, brow, contour,
baffled, confounded, doubtful, nettlesome, cranky, huffy, touchy, aspect, physnomy , metoposcopy
distracted, disconcerted; (adj, v) fretful, techy, petulant, tetchy picador: (n) equestrian, horseman,
intricate, complicated, lost, petulant: (adj) irritable, peevish, horseback rider, bullfighter
involved. ANTONYMS: (adj) cross, testy, irascible, cranky, picardy: (n) Picardie
unperplexed, assured, clear, fractious, fretful, pettish, touchy, pickaxe: (n) pickax, mattock, option,
knowing choleric. ANTONYMS: (adj) edge tool, cream, choice, filling
perplexity: (n) confusion, dilemma, easygoing, amiable, calm, affable, pierce: (n, v) cut, prick, stick; (v)
bewilderment, maze, labyrinth, cheerful perforate, bore, enter, thrust,
embarrassment, quandary, pewter: (n) chowchow, solder, alloy puncture, penetrate; (adj, v) stab,
complication, enigma; (adj, n) phantasmagoria: (n) hallucination, wound. ANTONYM: (v) seal
difficulty, distress. ANTONYM: (n) representation, light show, pierced: (adj) punctured, perforate,
understanding dissolving views, optical illusion, penetrated, cut, cleft
persecuted: (adj) downtrodden, phantasmagory, mental piercing: (adj, n) sharp, cutting; (adj,
aggrieved, laden, mistreated, representation, internal v) keen, penetrating, biting, bitter,
wronged representation harsh, shrill; (adj) high, raw, loud.
personage: (n) person, notable, phantasmagorical: (adj) surrealistic, ANTONYMS: (adj) quiet, dull, soft,
celebrity, personality, individual, dreamy, fantastic, dreamlike, surreal hot
bigwig, figure, somebody, human, phantom: (n, v) apparition, piety: (n) godliness, devoutness,
character, being phantasm, vision, phantasma; (n) faith, righteousness, holiness,
personification: (n) incarnation, spectre, specter, appearance, shade, reverence, religion, religiousness,
avatar, epitome, personation, shadow, wraith, spirit piousness, sanctity, goodness.
prosopopoeia, figure of speech, pharisee: (n) Pecksniff, Jesuit, Janus, ANTONYMS: (n) sin, profanity,
wickedness dolefully banter, sport, jocosity
pikes: (n) muskellunges, pickerels, pitiable: (adj) forlorn, abject, pathetic, plebeian: (adj) low, vulgar, ignoble,
family Esocidae miserable, pitiful, wretched, humble, coarse, mean; (n) pleb,
pilgrim: (n) hadji, passenger, lamentable, poor, squalid; (adj, v) commoner; (adj, n) proletarian; (adj,
journeyer, palmer, traveler, deplorable, mournful. ANTONYMS: v) ordinary, general. ANTONYMS:
wanderer, conventual, monk, (adj) privileged, strong (adj) cultivated, proletarian,
mendicant, lay brother, hajji pitiful: (adj, n) abject; (adj) pathetic, patrician, refined; (n) aristocrat,
piling: (n) pile, stacking, pillar, spile, lamentable, piteous, contemptible, noble
heap, buttress, caking, stack, stilt, miserable, distressing, mean, pliant: (adj, v) pliable, limber; (adj)
cumulus, mess wretched, poor, sad. ANTONYMS: elastic, plastic, ductile, malleable,
pillage: (n, v) loot, ransack, spoil, (adj) generous, heartwarming, adaptable, compliant, flexile, supple,
rape; (v) despoil, harry, rob, rifle; (n) admirable, cheerful, fine, happy, lithe. ANTONYMS: (adj) inflexible,
depredation, despoliation, impressive rigid, rebellious
devastation pitiless: (adj) merciless, brutal, harsh, pluck: (adj, n) nerve; (v) cull, jerk,
pillaged: (adj) plundered, despoiled, cruel, ruthless, implacable, gather, pick, fleece, grab; (n) grit,
blasted, desolate, desolated, remorseless, inexorable, inhuman, courage, boldness; (n, v) pull.
destroyed, devastated, emptier, heartless, hard. ANTONYMS: (adj) ANTONYMS: (n) cowardice,
assaulted, made uninhabitable, merciful, charitable, soft, gutlessness; (v) undercharge
sacked compassionate, warmhearted, plucking: (n) harvesting, rip out
pillaging: (adj) looting, marauding, sympathetic, flexible, caring, plumage: (n) feather, plume,
predatory; (n) depredation, tolerant feathering, quill, aftershaft, alula,
despoliation, plundering, rapine, pittance: (n) mite, meed, alimony, marabou, finery, animal material;
robbery, spoliation, despoilment, chicken feed, a few, donation, a (adj) plumosity, alular
loot smidgen, a little bit, driblet, trifle, plume: (n) feather, plumage, quill,
pillared: (adj) columned payment panache, aigrette, crest, feathering;
pillion: (n) saddle, pannel, seat plaint: (n) complaint, mourning, (v) pride, pluck, dress, preen
pillory: (n) stocks, whipping post, lamentation, wail, moan, jeremiad; plumed: (adj) plumate, crested,
instrument of punishment; (v) (v) hue and cry, hullabaloo, outcry, emplumed, plumy, plumose,
punish, crucify, slate, attack, libel, clamor, chorus decorated, flying, feathery
malign, penalize, pick holes in. plaintive: (adj) pathetic, piteous, plunder: (n, v) pillage, spoil; (v)
ANTONYMS: (v) compliment, lugubrious, doleful, sad, wistful, despoil, harry, devastate, maraud,
praise sorrowful, woeful, elegiac, dolorous, destroy, strip, ransack; (n) booty,
pincers: (n) tweezers, pliers, nippers, lamentable depredation
tweezer, pair of tongs, nipper, plaintively: (adv) piteously, plundered: (adj) pillaged, despoiled,
pinchers, pair of pincers, vice; (n, v) sorrowfully, mournfully, pitifully, raped, robbed, emptier, empty,
tongs; (v) clutches ruefully, grievously, lugubriously, fleeced, ransacked
pinching: (adj) biting, niggardly, pathetically, woefully, lamentingly, plundering: (n) rape, pillage,
fresh, piercing, cutting, inclement, wistfully depredation, despoliation, rapine,
keen, bitter, niveous, bleak; (adv) plait: (n, v) braid, plat, double; (n) spoliation, despoilment, plunder,
pinchingly pigtail, pleat, tuck; (v) lace, crease, looting; (adj) predatory, marauding
pindaric: (n) Alcaic, sapphic, ionic, entwine, interlace, intertwine plunging: (adv) diving, headlong,
Pindaric ode; (adj) pindarical plaited: (adj) woven, folded, plicated pitching, headfirst; (adj) precipitous,
pinnacle: (n) apex, top, height, crest, plank: (n) timber, beam, slat, girder, low, plummeting; (n) descent
zenith, crown, summit, acme, panel, parachute, matchboard, poaching: (n) trespass, illicit fishing,
heyday, climax, culmination. footbridge, hardboard; (v) flump; (n, cooking, cookery, contraband; (adj)
ANTONYMS: (n) nadir, base, v) planch raiding
bottom, trough plastered: (adj) drunk, tight, poetical: (adj) imaginative, rhetorical,
piously: (adv) religiously, reverently, intoxicated, pixilated, loaded, poematic, figurative, inventive
godly, spiritually, devotedly, soaked, sloshed, smashed, wet, poetize: (v) verse, compose, elegize,
righteously, sacredly, earnestly, inebriated, pissed write, scan, sing, rhyme, make
saintly, purely, devotionally platonic: (adj) chaste, spiritual, verses, indite, pen, poetise
pirouette: (n, v) spin, whirl; (v) ghostly; (v) staid, philosophical, polishing: (n) shining, brightening,
gyrate, wheel, rotate, turn round, philosophic, stayed, reflective, print polishing, brushing,
roll; (n) circination, revolution, thoughtful, studious, stoical. mechanical polishing, bobbing; (adj)
volutation, turbination ANTONYM: (adj) physical cultural, abrasive
pitchfork: (v) bolt, fulminate, drive, pleader: (n) defender, counselor, politeness: (n) civility, courteousness,
sling, branch; (n) hayfork, hand tool, counsel, counsellor, attorney, courtliness, manners, decorum,
shakefork lawyer, conveyancer, equity gentility, good manners, niceness,
piteously: (adj, adv) sadly; (adv) draftsman, protector, special refinement, gallantry, decency.
pitifully, wretchedly, ruefully, pleader, proponent ANTONYMS: (n) vulgarity,
woefully, poorly, plaintively, pleasantry: (n) joke, wit, jocularity, rudeness, incivility, neglect
sorrily, grievously, sorrowfully, jest, fancy, waggery, drollery, esprit, politic: (adj, v) tactful; (adj) discreet,
Victor Hugo 683
judicious, circumspect, shrewd, possessor: (n) owner, holder, preordination, predetermination,
prudent, suave, calculating, tricky, proprietor, householder, occupant, election, premeditation, kismet
cute, chary. ANTONYMS: (adj) landowner, landholder, proprietary, predestined: (adj) fated,
injudicious, unwise, impolitic, somebody, someone, soul foreordained, certain, predestinate,
foolish posterity: (n) race, descendants, intended, fatal, predetermined,
polyglot: (n) linguist, someone, issue, offspring, descendant, future, ordained, meant, doomed, designed
somebody, soul; (v) different, generation, progeny, breed, preeminence: (n) excellence,
diverse, heterogeneous, descendent, spat eminence, supremacy, dominance,
multifarious; (adj) hexaglot, diglot, postern: (n) gate, ostiary, portal, note, dominion, mastery, primacy,
multilingual porch, wicket, vestibule, trapdoor, superiority, government note; (adj)
polyhedron: (n) dodecahedron, threshold, back door; (adj, n) rear; supereminence. ANTONYM: (n)
hexahedron, octahedron, (adj) side inferiority
icosahedron, pentahedron, pout: (v) brood, sulk; (adj, v) frown, pre-eminently: (adv) principally,
decahedron, trapezohedron, convex protrude; (adj) lower, glower, scowl, eminently
polyhedron, ideal solid, concave gloam, look downcast; (n) eelpout, prefecture: (n) region, county,
polyhedron; (adj) icosahedral hornpout situation, spot, wardenship,
polyphemus: (n) Cyclopes, Cyclops pouting: (adj) sullen administrative district, area,
pomp: (n) grandeur, parade, powdered: (adj) powdery, fine, administrative division, position,
ostentation, show, ceremony, glory, crushed, milled, ground, broken up, place, state
luxury, pageantry, magnificence, finer, minced, pulverised; (n) preposterous: (adj) absurd, irrational,
state, splendor. ANTONYMS: (n) punctated, milk ludicrous, nonsensical, foolish,
understatement, modesty precede: (v) lead, head, forego, ridiculous, laughable, derisory,
ponce: (n) pandar, pander, panderer, antecede, antedate, anticipate, monstrous, inconsistent; (adj, v)
fancy man, whoremonger, introduce, forerun, pass, preface, go. extravagant. ANTONYMS: (adj)
paramour, procurer, whoremaster, ANTONYMS: (v) succeed, postdate sensible, reasonable, impressive,
offender, procuress precept: (n) canon, decree, command, plausible
poniard: (n) dagger, bodkin, dirk, mandate, charge, lesson, injunction, presentable: (adj) decent, personable,
cutlass, stiletto, stylet, bilbo, Toledo, law, commandment, principle; (adj, satisfactory, acceptable, suitable,
tuck, brand; (v) stab n) rule passable, comely, tidy, neat,
pontifical: (adj) papal, apostolic, precincts: (n) entourage, arena, becoming, sufficient. ANTONYMS:
Episcopal, portentous, apostolical, outskirts, neighbourhood, walk, (adj) unsatisfactory, untidy,
overblown, grandiloquent, neighborhood, proximity, inadequate
pretentious, Episcopalian, popish, surroundings, vicinity, limitations, presentiment: (n) premonition,
clerical suburbs hunch, apprehension, feeling,
poppy: (n) opiate, celandine, preciously: (adv) expensively, foreboding, anticipation, intuition,
creamcups, opium poppy, Papaver precious, rarely, pricelessly, boding, suspicion; (v) augury; (n, v)
somniferum, celandine poppy, belovedly, goldenly, finely, richly, omen
swallowwort, corn poppy, field darlingly, petly, artificially preserves: (n) conserve, jam,
poppy, bocconia; (v) balm precipice: (n) abyss, chasm, chowchow, conserves, jelly,
populace: (n) multitude, masses, escarpment, gulf, steep, crag, verge, marmalade, canned food, confiture,
inhabitants, public, commonalty, brink, abysm, ravine, drop European federation of importers of
mob, crowd, population, nation, precipitate: (adj, n) hasty; (adj, n, v) dried fruit, preserved food, apple
man, country deposit; (adj) impetuous, headlong, butter
populated: (adj) populous, thick. sudden, immediate, instant, presuming: (adj) forward, arrogant,
ANTONYM: (adj) uninhabited precipitant; (n, v) accelerate, insolent, familiar, overconfident,
populous: (adj) multitudinous, expedite; (v) hurry. ANTONYMS: conceited, assuming, rash, brash,
crowded, densely populated, (adj) overdue, cautious, protracted; pretentious, confident
multiple, thick, inhabited, (v) retard pretender: (n) fraud, fake, imposter,
numerous, manifold, multiplied; precipitately: (adv) rashly, sham, hypocrite, claimant, cheat,
(adj, v) teeming; (v) closely packed. immediately, instantly, passionately, quack, shammer, humbug; (v)
ANTONYM: (adj) uninhabited rapidly, precipitously, impetuously, fanfaron
pore: (n) stoma, interstice, impulsively, foolhardily, pretext: (n) pretense, pretension,
emunctory, gully hole; (v) speculate, prematurely; (adj, adv) headlong. color, pretence, mask, plea, guise,
meditate, contemplate, concentrate, ANTONYM: (adv) deliberately sham, appearance; (n, v) excuse,
centre, engulf, engross precipitating: (adj) down cloak
porn: (n) pornography, porno, precursor: (n) harbinger, herald, prettily: (adv) beautifully,
erotica, obscenity; (adj) messenger, predecessor, antecedent, charmingly, pleasantly,
pornographic, naughty indication, ancestor, sign, forebear, handsomely, finely, neatly,
portliness: (n) fatness, corpulence, omen, leader. ANTONYM: (n) gracefully, picturesquely, elegantly,
obesity, fleshiness, plumpness, successor delightfully, pleasingly.
stoutness, chubbiness, beefiness, predestination: (n) fate, doom, ANTONYMS: (adv) unattractively,
heaviness destiny, lot, fatality, foredoom, unpleasantly
priestly: (adj) ministerial, hieratic, forebear, forefather, primogenitor, prostrate: (adj, v) prone, exhaust,
sacerdotal, priestlike, hieratical, genitor, parent, forbear level, fatigue; (v) fell, overwhelm,
religious, theocratic, ecclesiastical; prognosticate: (v) augur, predict, overcome, floor, overthrow; (adj)
(adv) divinely, hieratically, forecast, presage, foretell, portend, deject, knock down. ANTONYM:
theocratically. ANTONYM: (adj) anticipate, bode, divine, forebode, (adj) upright
secular prophesy protruded: (adj) extant, outstanding
primate: (n) ape, monkey, bishop, prognostication: (n) divination, proverb: (n) adage, byword,
archpriest, lemur, anthropoid, prediction, prognosis, prevision, aphorism, dictum, saying, axiom,
hominid, clergyman, high priest, presage, omen, forecast, parable, motto, expression; (n, v)
hierarch, reverend anticipation, vaticination, prophecy; maxim, saw
primo: (adj) special, primary, unique, (adj, n) augury proverbial: (adj) axiomatic,
remarkable, outstanding, leading, projectiles: (n) archery hackneyed saying, common saying,
foremost, fantastic, fabulous, projecting: (adj) projected, notorious, famed, legendary,
extraordinary; (adv) first off protruding, jutting, protrusive, famous, common, true saying, trite
proboscis: (n) beak, nozzle, neb, pendent; (adj, v) overhanging, saying, recognizable
trunk, muzzle, snout, bole, boot, jutting over, salient; (v) beetling, proverbs: (n) proverb
olfactory organ, automobile trunk, protuberant, convex providence: (n) forethought, fortune,
luggage compartment prologue: (n) preface, introduction, fate, discretion, God, destiny, care,
procurator: (n) agent, proxy, preamble, foreword, Prolog, economy, caution, precaution,
assignee, attorney, substitute, overture, proem, preliminary, chance. ANTONYM: (n)
lawyer, deputy, vicegerent, beginning, prolegomena, opening. improvidence
placeholder, bureaucrat, ANTONYMS: (n) conclusion, provost: (n) burgomaster, chancellor,
administrative official postscript magistrate, prefect, archon, syndic,
procure: (v) get, obtain, buy, earn, prolonging: (adj) delaying, rector, warden, lieutenant, academic
win, gain, have, purchase, induce, continuing; (n) continuation, administrator, consul
derive, find. ANTONYM: (v) give perseverance prow: (n) bow, stem, fore, beak, nose,
prodigious: (adj) gigantic, enormous, promiscuously: (adv) licentiously, obeisance, forepart, curtain call,
huge, phenomenal, portentous, miscellaneously, randomly, bowknot, bowing, arc
stupendous, exceptional, colossal, wantonly, mixedly, loosely, prowess: (n) bravery, valor, art,
immense, gargantuan; (adj, v) undiscriminatingly, confusedly, heroism, proficiency, mastery,
monstrous. ANTONYMS: (adj) sluttishly, every which way, expertise, gallantry, intrepidity,
unexceptional, normal, average, arbitrarily chivalry, skill. ANTONYMS: (n)
tiny, weak promontory: (n) cape, headland, inability, ineptitude
prodigiously: (adv) astonishingly, mull, point, ness, head, bluff, prowler: (n) sneak, thief, interloper,
enormously, immensely, vastly, foreland, projection, peninsula, cliff intruder, burglar, robber, raider,
marvelously, exceptionally, prompter: (n) autocue, supporter, impostor, canary, fink, looter
colossally, largely, wonderfully, tempter, call boy, helper, theater prudery: (n) primness, modesty,
hugely, tremendously prompter, help, device, assistant coquetry, priggishness, prudishness,
profane: (v) desecrate, abuse, violate, propitious: (adj) fortunate, lucky, demureness; (v) sentimentalism
defile, outrage, debauch; (adj) good, benign, happy, opportune; prune: (v) pare, cut, cut back, crop,
irreverent, impious, sacrilegious, (adj, v) auspicious; (adj, n, v) trim, curtail, abbreviate, dress,
unholy; (adj, v) foul. ANTONYMS: friendly; (adj, n) promising, shear, snip; (adj, n, v) lop.
(adj) devout, sacred, moral, advantageous, kind. ANTONYMS: ANTONYMS: (v) lengthen, augment
religious, reverent (adj) unfortunate, unlucky, prying: (adj) inquisitive,
profaned: (adj) defiled, impure, unpropitious, inopportune, hopeless meddlesome, nosy, inquiring, nosey,
unclean proportioned: (adj) attemperate, intrusive, busy, snoopy; (n)
profundity: (n) deepness, shapely, regular, properly adapted, nosiness, curiosity; (adj, n)
profoundness, abstruseness, even, balanced. ANTONYM: (adj) meddling. ANTONYMS: (adj)
penetration, wisdom, obscurity, asymmetrical apathetic; (n) apathy
astuteness, abstrusity, erudition; prosaic: (adj) commonplace, dull, pseudo: (adj, n) fake, phony; (adj, v)
(adj) profound, extensive. monotonous, pedestrian, prosy, mock; (adj) false, artificial, bogus,
ANTONYMS: (n) superficiality, ordinary, uninteresting, trite, boring, imitation, imitative; (adj, n, v) sham;
banality, flippancy, height, humdrum, everyday. ANTONYMS: (n) pseud, phoney
mildness, simplicity (adj) idealistic, imaginative, psyche: (n) mind, brain, ego, spirit,
profusion: (n) opulence, abundance, sensitive, inspired, exciting, intellect, ghost, heart, mentality,
prodigality, plenty, excess, inspiring, interesting, original, soul, Hydropsyche, head.
cornucopia, plenitude, profuseness, romantic ANTONYM: (n) body
copiousness, exuberance; (adj) prosaically: (adv) tritely, prosily, ptisan: (n) balm, balsam, cordial,
amplitude. ANTONYMS: (n) humdrumly, commonly, trivially, theriac, tisane
insufficiency, scarcity dully, pedestrianly, ordinarily, pudgy: (adj) stocky, podgy, dumpy,
progenitor: (n) ancestor, father, boringly, commonplacely, chubby, plump, obese, thick, squab,
forerunner, antecedent, ascendant, unimaginatively tubby, thickset, stubby. ANTONYM:
Victor Hugo 685
(adj) thin verse, triplet radiant: (adj, v) bright, glittering,
puff: (adj, n, v) gasp; (n, v) blow, quaver: (n, v) quiver, quake, shake, lustrous, beamy, glorious; (adj)
whiff, gust, drag; (v) boast, inflate, shudder, shiver, tremble; (n) tremor, beaming, luminous, effulgent, lucid,
huff, heave, brag, distend eighth note; (v) warble, flutter, glowing, beautiful. ANTONYMS:
puffed: (adj) puff, bloated, distended, flicker (adj) gloomy, dark, pale, unhappy
puffy, tumid, turgid, swell, quavering: (adj) trembling, radiantly: (adv) effulgently, brightly,
breathless, bepuffed, overflowing, tremulous, unsteady, shaky, beamingly, luminously, refulgently,
out of breath shivering, shaking, decrepit, shiningly, lucidly, sparklingly,
puffing: (adj) gasping, breathless, doddery, doddering sunnily, beautifully, lustrously
panting, bloated, bouffant, breathing queer: (adj) fantastic, odd, eccentric, radiating: (adj) radiate, shining,
heavily, out of breath, distended, funny, curious, gay, peculiar, glowing, radious, burning; (adv)
puffed; (n) expansion, snorting strange, quaint, fishy, outlandish. radiately
puissant: (adj) powerful, mighty, ANTONYMS: (adj) conventional, radish: (n) Raphanus sativus, root,
forcible, hard, robust, vigorous, normal, well cruciferous vegetable, genus
strong, stout, efficacious, quench: (adj, v) extinguish, allay, Raphanus, Raphanus
adamantine, cogent slake; (v) appease, quash, put out, railing: (n) balustrade, rail, barrier,
pulpit: (n) platform, dais, ambo, destroy, assuage, annihilate, calm, guardrail, banister, fence, pale,
lectern, hustings, stump, rostrum, chill. ANTONYMS: (v) stimulate, paling, breastwork, handrail; (adj, n)
forum, desk, stand, state light invective
purgatory: (n) limbo, abyss, quibbles: (n) disreputable tricks raillery: (n) mockery, joke, irony,
purgation, hell, situation, imaginary quickness: (n) celerity, expedition, quiz, persiflage, derision, ridicule,
place, living death, punishment, promptness, alacrity, agility, speed, pleasantry, tease, jest, badinage
Gehenna, grief dispatch, dexterity, fleetness, hurry, rainy: (adj) moist, pluvial, damp,
purging: (n) purge, catharsis, readiness. ANTONYMS: (n) pluvious, stormy, juicy, dirty,
purgation, cleaning, cleanup, awkwardness, delay, ineptness soppy, raining, drizzly; (adj, v)
purification, clearing, katharsis, quicksand: (n) trap, bog, running showery. ANTONYM: (adj) pleasant
abreaction; (adj) purifying, sand, SIRT, syrt, Syrtis, pit, pitfall, rallying: (n) effort, mobilization,
purgatorial cavity, mire mobilisation, mass meeting, feat,
pyramids: (n) billiards, pingpong, quieted: (adj) composed deed, exchange; (adj) moving,
pool, bagatelle, jackstones, pushball, quip: (n, v) joke, gag, jest, jeer, flout; encouraging, convalescent
hopscotch (n) gibe, epigram, crack, wisecrack, ramparts: (n) rampart, fortification
pyrrhonism: (n) skepticism, atheism conceit, remark ranch: (n) estate, property, spread,
pythagorean: (n) Pythagorean tuning quits: (n) quit, par, even, equal, cattle ranch, cattle farm, Arado,
quadrangular: (adj) square, abandon, leave, quittance, a wash merestead, plantation, paste; (v)
tetragonal quitting: (n) departure, resignation farm, raunch
quadrilateral: (adj) quadrangular, quiver: (adj, n, v) shudder, shiver, rancid: (adj) putrid, sour, high, rank,
multilateral, bilateral, tetragonal; (n) tremble, shake; (v) flicker, flutter, fetid, stale, rotten; (adj, v) musty,
quad, tetragon, parallelogram, vibrate; (n, v) palpitate, quaver; (n) decayed, moldy, tainted
rectangle, polygonal shape, vibration, tremor rancor: (adj, n) gall, venom; (n)
trapezium, trapezoid quivering: (adj, n) trembling, tremor, grudge, enmity, hostility, ill will,
quaff: (v) drink, gulp, swig, guzzle, quaking, trepidation; (n) palpitation, spite, malice, animosity, hatred,
drain, sup, sip, swill, swallow, quiver, vibration; (adj) flutter, hate. ANTONYMS: (n) amicability,
carouse; (n) potation quavering, shivering, tremulous. goodwill, harmony, affection
quaint: (adj) odd, funny, picturesque, ANTONYM: (adj) steady ransack: (v) loot, pillage, seek,
comical, fanciful, curious, quod: (n) bilboes, Bastille, prison, despoil, comb, rifle, rake, raid, sack,
whimsical, strange, queer, peculiar, stocks pry, foray
droll. ANTONYMS: (adj) modern, quoth: (v) quod ransacked: (adj) plundered, pillaged,
ordinary, dull rabbi: (n) priest, rabbin, chaplain emptier, despoiled, empty
quandary: (n) predicament, plight, rabble: (n) crowd, masses, trash, ransacking: (n) rummage, hunting,
difficulty, puzzle, doubt, problem, herd, canaille, people, rout, ragtag, depredation, digging
embarrassment, hole, uncertainty, horde, gang, riffraff raphael: (n) Raffaello Santi
perplexity; (adj, n) nonplus rabidness: (n) furiousness rapidity: (n) expedition, quickness,
quartette: (n) quartet, quadruplet, racer: (n) runner, race car, blacksnake, promptness, dispatch, celerity,
foursome, quart , set, tetrad, contestant, stock car, race-horse, haste, velocity, pace, fleetness,
quaternity, quaternion, assemblage, messenger, automobile driver, beast, promptitude, speed. ANTONYM:
composition, four beast of burden, black racer (n) tardiness
quarts: (n) quart racine: (n) Jean Baptiste Racine rapier: (n) bilbo, brand, blade, foil,
quasi: (adv) nearly, almost, partly, radiance: (n) gleam, glory, brilliance, glaive, whinyard, saber, Glave, steel,
practically, just as; (adj) mock, luster, lustre, beam, brightness, cimeter, broadsword
ostensible, similar, pseudo; (n) semi effulgence, sparkle, light; (adj, n) rapine: (n) rape, plunder, pillage,
quatrain: (n) distich, couplet, canto, brilliancy. ANTONYMS: (n) brigandage, robbery, pillaging,
line, heroic stanza, elegiac stanza, darkness, gloominess despoliation, rapacity, raven,
despoilment; (v) razzia proceeding, proceeding memorable, chronic. ANTONYMS:
rapture: (n) joy, bliss, delight, receptacle: (n) box, holder, case, (adj) irregular, intermittent,
happiness, exaltation, elation, torus, can, outlet, pocket, pyx, spasmodic, unusual, rare, occasional
exultation, enchantment; (adj, n) beehive, cuspidor, pix redden: (adj, v) flush; (v) color,
enthusiasm; (n, v) transport; (adj, n, recital: (n) account, description, crimson, glow, go red, encrimson,
v) passion. ANTONYMS: (n) narrative, explanation, history, rubify, rubricate, rose; (adj) mantle,
indifference, boredom, misery, performance, reading, statement, color up. ANTONYMS: (v) blench,
gloom, agony, hell, despair recitation, concert, relation blanch
rascal: (n) villain, rapscallion, recite: (v) relate, enumerate, describe, reddened: (adj) red, ablaze, aflame,
monkey, miscreant, knave, narrate, recount, repeat, say, flushed, crimson, inflamed, blazing,
scoundrel, scamp, rogue, varlet, rehearse, detail, lecture; (n, v) aroused, blemished, red as scarlet,
vagabond, brat declaim spotty
rascally: (adj) dirty, contemptible, recklessly: (adv) rashly, carelessly, reddish: (adj) ruddy, rosy, crimson,
abject, mean, mischievous, imprudently, hastily, heedlessly, cherry, rufescent, rufous, rubicund,
scoundrelly, roguish, scabby, negligently, foolhardily, scarlet, rubedinous, ruby, colorful
scurvy, shabby, paltry inattentively, wildly, wantonly, redeem: (v) recover, deliver, atone,
ravages: (n) devastation, destruction, neglectfully. ANTONYMS: (adv) recoup, expiate, ransom, reclaim,
negative effects prudently, responsibly, calmly, save, free, extricate, refund.
raven: (v) guttle, feed, devour, gulp, discreetly, sensibly, cautiously ANTONYMS: (v) hock, pawn, lose
harry, eat; (n) crow, plunder; (adj) reckoning: (n) calculation, redeemed: (adj) ransomed, blessed
black, jet; (n, v) gorge computation, bill, score, computing, red-hot: (adj) impassioned, flaming,
ravine: (n, v) gap, cleft; (n) chasm, liquidation, clearance; (n, v) count, burning, fiery, incandescent, torrid,
canyon, dell, defile, gully, glen, pass, enumeration, account, estimation enthusiastic, boiling, up-to-date,
abyss, valley reclaim: (v) recover, reform, cultivate, sultry, contemporary
raving: (adj, v) wild; (adj) frantic, claim, repossess, claim back, regain, redness: (n) red, blush, glow,
delirious, furious, mad, insane; (adj, recycle, salvage, correct, redeem. crimson, carmine, catarrh, cellulitis,
n) madness, distraction, rage; (n) ANTONYMS: (v) lose, discard cerise, mastoiditis, colitis, enteritis
rabid, delirium reclining: (adj, v) leaning; (adj) redouble: (v) intensify, double,
ravishing: (adj, n) rapturous, ecstatic; recumbent, decumbent, accumbent, magnify, echo, duplicate, deepen,
(adj) beautiful, gorgeous, charming, lying, lying down, obligatory, idle, enhance, repeat, reproduce, escalate,
fascinating, enchanting, delightful, prone, prostrate; (n) relaxation reduplicate. ANTONYMS: (v)
stunning, irresistible, heavenly recluse: (n) hermit, anchoret, solitary, reduce, decrease
razing: (n) demolishing, leveling, ascetic, eremite, loner, troglodyte; redoubled: (adj) ingeminate
demolition, devastation, tearing (adj) reclusive, secluded, cloistered, redoubtable: (adj) dreadful,
down, equalisation, laying waste, withdrawn. ANTONYM: (n) native illustrious, glorious, horrid,
grading, equalization, destruction recollect: (v) recall, remember, fearsome, fearful, terrible, alarming,
reanimated: (adj) animated, alive recognize, call to mind, remind, dire, resolute, strong
reap: (v) harvest, gain, glean, gather, mind, think, call up, reminisce, reefs: (n) sunken rocks, rocks, coral
obtain, cut, receive, earn, acquire; refresh, retrieve. ANTONYM: (v) reef
(adj, v) mow; (adj) clip. forget reeking: (adj) dripping, overly
ANTONYMS: (v) lose, scatter recompense: (n, v) pay, redress; (n) diluted, odorous, noisome, high,
reaping: (n) harvesting, crop, compensation, amends, atonement, fetid, stale; (v) sloppy, soft, soaking,
attainment, farming payment, consideration, sodden
reappear: (v) recur, come back, indemnification, indemnity; (v) re-enter: (v) return, come back
appear, repeat, be restored, get back, compensate, reimburse. refectory: (n) restaurant, dining
happen again, haunt, persist, revert, ANTONYMS: (v) penalize, receive; room, canteen, hall, mess hall, mess,
resume. ANTONYM: (v) disappear (n) penalty eatery, cafeteria
rearrangement: (n) relocation, shift, reconciled: (adj) consistent, resigned, refraction: (n) deflexion, deflection,
juggle, juggling, transposition, serene, meet; (v) made friends, deviation, aberration, diversion; (v)
transfer, reorganization, affriended. ANTONYM: (adj) obliquation, virtual image,
redeployment, reshuffle, step, unreconciled spectrum, warp; (adj) reflection,
rescheduling reconstruct: (v) alter, restore, build, refractive
rebec: (n) bawd, prostitute, ribibe mend, rehabilitate, repair, refractory: (adj) disobedient,
rebus: (n) puzzle, conundrum, reconstitute, reconstructing, obstinate, perverse, recalcitrant,
enigma, problem, charade, nut to rebuilding, redo, retrace stubborn, fractious, contumacious,
crack, mystery, logogriph recur: (v) resort, repeat, go back, headstrong, unruly, wayward,
recapitulate: (v) repeat, sum up, reappear, duplicate, revert, return, restive
enumerate, reiterate, resume, persist, fall back, cycle, circulate. refreshment: (n) bite, drink,
summarize, narrate, recite, brief, ANTONYM: (v) cease recreation, collation, repose, relief,
restate, reword recurring: (adj) frequent, intermittent, rest, entertainment, treat; (v)
receivership: (n) legal proceeding, cyclic, periodic, periodical, repeated, invigoration; (n, v) regalement
proceedings, office, judicial repetitive, customary, accustomed, regaining: (n) regain, clawback,
Victor Hugo 687
proceeds, payoff, paying back, (adj, v) odious, hateful, repulsive. refusal. ANTONYMS: (v) attract,
reappearance, indemnity, issue, ANTONYMS: (adj) alluring, accept, delight, yield, please; (n, v)
recapture, recurrence, redress. appealing, attractive, pleasant, nice, welcome
ANTONYM: (n) loss delightful repulsive: (adj) offensive, detestable,
regale: (v) entertain, treat, feed, repent: (v) deplore, bewail, rue, ugly, disagreeable, nauseous,
divert, amuse, crop, browse, graze; mourn, lament, atone, sorry, hideous, loathsome, abhorrent; (adj,
(n) banquet, regalia; (adj) bemoan, feel remorse, grieve, be v) abominable, hateful, obnoxious.
refreshment sorry ANTONYMS: (adj) pleasant,
reintegration: (n) redintegration replying: (adj) respondent, delightful, desirable, reputable,
rejoin: (v) reply, retort, respond, join, responsive lovely, lovable, humane, appealing,
return, come back, riposte, meet, repose: (n, v) recline, peace, lie, calm; laudable
rebut, answer back, react (n) composure, ease, quiet, leisure, reputed: (adj) supposed, renowned,
relic: (n, v) memento, souvenir, recreation, relaxation; (v) lay. famous, conjectural, assumed,
keepsake; (n) token, trace, ANTONYMS: (n, v) work; (n) famed, eminent, prominent, alleged,
remainder, remains, antique, relict, activity, panic, agitation well-known, distinguished.
vestige, remnant reposeful: (adj) restful, relaxing, ANTONYM: (adj) known
reliquary: (n) casket, desk, caisson, calm, quieter requisition: (n, v) request, claim,
pix, pyx, chest, box, bureau, coffer, repress: (v) inhibit, crush, quash, command; (v) commandeer, call,
case, container control, suppress, put down, bridle, require, exact; (n) application,
reminiscences: (n) memoirs keep down, subdue, restrain, requirement, order, exaction.
remnant: (n) end, relic, remains, reduce. ANTONYMS: (v) declare, ANTONYMS: (v) supply, restore
residue, fragment, leftover, survival, liberate, incite reread: (v) read, read again, brush up,
trace, oddment, balance, stub repressed: (adj) inhibited, look over
remorse: (n) penitence, contrition, suppressed, pent-up, forgotten, residences: (n) grove
repentance, regret, guilt, penance, subconscious, inner, composed, resolute: (adj, n) constant, firm, fixed,
sorrow, grief, qualm, ruefulness, reserved, unconscious steady; (adj, v) determined; (adj)
compassion. ANTONYM: (n) reprieve: (n, v) pause, postponement, inflexible, brave, adamant, dogged,
shamelessness pardon, stay; (n) relief, delay, unbending, courageous.
rend: (v) pull, lacerate, break, divide, abatement, remission, grace; (v) ANTONYMS: (adj) weak, uncertain,
rive, tear, disrupt, mangle; (n, v) rip, remit, adjournment. ANTONYM: uncommitted, timid, fickle, feeble,
split, slash (n) charge indecisive, flexible, flippant,
rending: (adj) ripping, excruciating, reprint: (n, v) reissue; (n) offprint, hesitant, undecided
cacophonous, cacophonic; (v) new edition, reprinting, separate, resound: (v) ring, reverberate, boom,
harrowing; (n) division, outbreak reimpression, republication, new peal, roar, blare, resonate, sound,
rennet: (n) reed, renning, compound, printing, copy; (v) reproduce, print reecho, clatter, resounding
coagulant, chemical compound, calf reproach: (n, v) blame, rebuke, respectful: (adj) deferential,
stomach, runnet charge, abuse, disgrace, reprimand, mannerly, dutiful, courteous,
renown: (n, v) fame; (n) glory, invective; (v) accuse, chide, attentive, obedient, reverential,
distinction, eminence, notoriety, condemn; (n) condemnation. regardful, reverent, polite, humble.
kudos, name, popularity, prestige, ANTONYMS: (n, v) praise; (v) ANTONYMS: (adj) cheeky,
prominence, honor. ANTONYMS: commend, approve; (n) compliment, impudent, insolent, rude,
(n) infamy, commonness; (adj) commendation, approval contemptuous, disobedient,
anonymity reproducing: (adj) fruitful, fecund scornful, nasty, sneering, irreverent,
repairing: (n) repair, adjustment; reptile: (n) reptilian, creeper, basilisk, impolite
(adj) remedial sneak, wretch, mammal, bird, resplendent: (adj, n) bright, lucid;
reparation: (n) redress, recompense, shellfish; (adj) abject, vile, sordid (adj) radiant, luminous, illustrious,
atonement, indemnity, correction, repugnance: (n) horror, hatred, splendid, flamboyant, glorious,
restoration; (n, v) indemnification, antipathy, inconsistency, repulsion, magnificent, gorgeous, effulgent.
compensation, repair, remuneration, nausea, revulsion, loathing, ANTONYM: (adj) dull
restitution detestation, aversion, hate. reticence: (n) reserve, reservation,
repast: (n) feast, food, banquet, ANTONYMS: (n) pleasantness, love, uncommunicativeness, taciturnity,
dinner, lunch, refection, collation, attractiveness, adoration, liking silence, reticency, restraint, secrecy,
luncheon, spread, potluck, eating repugnant: (adj) abominable, reservedness, muteness, humility.
repel: (v) nauseate, revolt, disgust, abhorrent, odious, hateful, ANTONYMS: (n) chattiness,
repulse, sicken, rebuff, decline, loathsome, ugly, adverse, obscene, honesty, nerve, boldness, openness,
displease, drive back, reject, refuse. offensive; (adj, v) repulsive; (adj, n) arrogance, brashness
ANTONYMS: (v) draw, charm, contradictory. ANTONYMS: (adj) retort: (n, v) answer, return, riposte;
welcome, incline, yield, please, attractive, agreeable, desirable, (n) response, rejoinder, repartee,
delight lovable, nice, delightful comeback; (v) respond, repay,
repellent: (adj) offensive, disgusting, repulse: (n, v) rebuff, defeat; (v) rejoin, alembic
loathsome, distasteful, foul, repel, nauseate, disgust, drive back, retrace: (v) recollect, recall, trace,
repugnant, forbidding, revolting; revolt, reject, refuse, beat back; (n) etymologize, recognize, construct,
call up, bethink oneself, speculate; ridicule: (n, v) laugh at, deride, ANTONYMS: (adj) airy, fresh
(n, v) reconsider; (n) flyback banter, insult, taunt, scorn, scoff; (n) robber: (n) highwayman, bandit,
retreating: (n) flight; (adj) moving derision, mockery; (adj, n) irony; (v) mugger, outlaw, plunderer, pillager,
back jeer. ANTONYMS: (n, v) praise, burglar, pirate, crook, filcher, spoiler
reverberated: (adj) rebounding, respect; (v) approve; (n) approval, robbing: (adj) freebooting, practicing
repellent, driven back admiration freebootery; (n) theft
reverberating: (adj) resounding, ridiculously: (adv) absurdly, romanticism: (n) utopianism,
reverberant, ringing, resonating, preposterously, idiotically, silly, idealism, romance language,
deep, rumbling, muted, stupidly, farcically, nonsensically, quality, sentiment, love story, love
reverberative, booming, rolling, dull laughably, comically, derisorily, affair, Latinian language,
reverberation: (n) echo, rebound, foolishly. ANTONYMS: (adv) humanities, humanistic discipline,
noise, peal, replication, reaction, impressively, solemnly, sensitively, arts. ANTONYM: (n) classicism
recoil, boom, reflectivity; (n, v) rationally romeo: (n) lover, love, Don Juan
reflection; (v) reflexion. ANTONYM: rigidity: (n) firmness, inflexibility, rondo: (n) rondeau, round, ode,
(n) silence rigor, hardness, stiffness, rigour, roundelay, rondel, Anacreontic,
reverence: (n, v) respect, regard, fear, inflexibleness, tension, rigidness, lyric, pastoral, bucolic, idyl,
worship, honor, esteem, adore; (n) severity, inelasticity. ANTONYMS: dithyramb
deference, adoration, admiration, (n) malleability, pliability, softness, roofed: (adj) testudinated, arched.
awe. ANTONYMS: (n) despise, limpness, looseness, relaxation, ANTONYMS: (adj) roofless,
disrespect, irreverence, disdain, cooperation, weakness exposed, open
disparagement, contempt; (v) rigor: (n) harshness, austerity, rose-colored: (adj) rosy, optimistic,
dishonor grimness, exactness, cruelty, hopeful, rose-coloured
reversion: (n) relapse, atavism, hardness, asperity, inclemency, rosier: (n) rosebush
regression, regress, return, reversal, hardship, precision, strictness. rosin: (n) colophony, gum, kino gum,
lapse, inheritance, inversion, ANTONYMS: (n) laxness, flexibility organic compound, natural resin
heritage, escheat rigorously: (adv) severely, strictly, rostrum: (n) podium, pulpit, snout,
revery: (n) dream, daydream, castle stringently, carefully, harshly, platform, dais, beak, bill, bow,
in Spain, air castle, castle in the air, exactly, austerely, closely, narrowly, hustings, stump, reading desk
imagine, dreaming; (v) low spirits, stiffly, gravely. ANTONYMS: (adv) rota: (n) round, stated time, routine,
melancholy, ill humor, despondency leniently, lightheartedly, negligently roster, timetable, roll, register, list,
revile: (v) abuse, rail, vilify, reproach, rind: (n) bark, crust, cortex, husk, calendar, period, diary
taunt, vituperate, attack, denounce; coat, hull, paring, fur, hide, surface; rotary: (n) circle, roundabout, rotary
(n, v) malign; (adj, v) profane, (n, v) skin press; (adj) rotatory, rotating,
blaspheme. ANTONYM: (v) praise ringer: (n) faker, dead ringer, bunko rotative, vertiginous, turning,
rewrite: (n) rescript, revision, writing; steerer, four flusher, capper, image, circular; (adj, n) whirligig, round
(v) transliterate, decode, correct, carpetbagger, horse coper, fraud, rotatory: (adj) revolving, rotational,
redraft, write, reform, adapt, copy straw bidder, spieler peritropal, peristrephic, circuitous,
rewriting: (n) rescript, revisal, revise, ripple: (v) bubble, murmur, gurgle, revoluble; (n) turning
revising, rewrite, rephrasing, billow, surge, burble, cockle; (n, v) rotisserie: (n) grill, broiler, eating
redaction, recasting, editing, wave, swell, riffle, purl house, eating place, oven,
rewording rippling: (n) ripple, wave, riffle, restaurant, skewer
rhyme: (n) poetry, verse, poem, song, corrugation, moving ridge, wavelet, rotted: (adj) roted, crappy, icky,
alliteration, numbers, rhythm; (n, v) ripple formation; (adj) flowing, lousy, rotten, unsound
rime, measure; (v) poetize, versify billowy rotting: (adj) rotten, decaying,
rhymester: (n) versifier, poetaster, riveted: (adj) immovable, immobile, decayed, moldering, mouldering,
bard, poetizer, poetiser, poet, writer, irremovable, rooted, wrapped up, decomposing, putrid; (n) rot,
lyricist; (adj, n) rhymist intent; (v) wrapped in, engrossed in, putrefaction, decomposition, deep
ribald: (adj) coarse, gross, obscene, rapt, absorbed, transfixed. etching
lewd, indelicate, filthy, dirty, ANTONYM: (adj) detached rouse: (v) provoke, excite, arouse,
salacious, licentious, loose, broad roam: (adj, v) stray; (v) wander, kindle, awaken, instigate, actuate,
richelieu: (n) Armand Jean du gallivant, meander, range, gad, disturb, move, agitate, incite.
Plessis, cardinal Richelieu walk, drift, tramp, journey, stroll. ANTONYMS: (v) dampen,
rickety: (adj) unstable, wobbly, ANTONYMS: (v) rush, settle dishearten, suppress, douse, inhibit,
decrepit, dilapidated, insecure, roaming: (adj) wandering, roving, stifle, quench
ramshackle, rachitic, flimsy, errant, itinerant, Peripatetic, roused: (adj) excited, awake,
precarious, cranky, wonky. traveling, vagabond, astray; (n) susceptible, emotional, elated,
ANTONYMS: (adj) stable, sturdy, ramble, journey, ubiquity interested
firm, secure roasted: (adj) fried, baked rousseau: (n) Le douanier Rousseau
riddle: (n) mystery, conundrum, roasting: (n) barbecuing, cookery, rout: (adj, n, v) defeat; (n, v)
puzzle, problem, poser; (n, v) screen, cooking; (adj) broiling, baking, discomfiture, overthrow, discomfit;
sieve; (v) puncture, strain, filter, sift. burning, boiling, airless, blazing, (v) conquer, overpower, overcome,
ANTONYM: (n) explanation close; (adj, n) scorching. crush, beat, overwhelm; (n) flight.
Victor Hugo 689
ANTONYMS: (v) lose, surrender whisper, larceny; (adj) murmurous, striking, obvious, noticeable,
rowing: (n) boating, athletics, dustup, susurrous, active, soughing spectacular; (n) notable, protrusion,
quarrel, course; (adj) nautical sabbath: (n) day of rest, Saturday, ledge. ANTONYMS: (adj)
ruddy: (adj) cherry, rubicund, rosy, vacation, recess, holiday, dies non, unimportant, minor
flushed, florid, sanguine, reddish, Pentecost, sabbat salsify: (n) black salsify, herb, root,
glowing, blooming, crimson; (adj, sacerdotal: (adj) hieratic, priestly, root vegetable, vegetable oyster,
adv) blushing clerical, ministerial, pastoral, herbaceous plant
rudely: (adv) crudely, coarsely, hieratical, theocratic, ecclesiastical, salutations: (n) respects
uncivilly, indelicately, impolitely, religious, priestlike, capitular salve: (n) ointment, balm, unguent,
roughly, harshly, vulgarly, brutally, sacerdotalism: (adj) odium liniment, oil; (v) relieve, salvage,
meanly, wildly. ANTONYMS: (adv) theologicum; (n) ultramontanism, assuage, heal, soothe, appease
respectfully, graciously, decently, belief, Episcopalianism samaritan: (n) Good Samaritan
civilly, properly, attentively, sacrilege: (n) profanity, profanation, sanctity: (n) sanctitude, godliness,
agreeably, tactfully, thoughtfully, violation, curse, defilement, sacredness, devotion, piety,
acceptably, gently sacrilegiousness, impiety, vulgarity; saintliness, purity, halidom,
rudiment: (n) basis, fundamental, (adj, n) blasphemy, desecration; (v) sanctimony, religion, innocence.
germ, element, egg, principle, violate. ANTONYMS: (n) piety, ANTONYM: (n) unholiness
essential, embryo, bedrock, respectfulness, reverence, sanctus: (n) Ave Maria
fundamentals, vestige consecration sandal: (n) shoe, boot, pump,
ruffled: (adj) rippled, frilly, frilled, sacristan: (n) sexton, beadle, verger, espadrille, pusher, huaraches,
upset, disordered, excited, almoner, sacrist, Anne sexton, sandals, sandalwood, galoche,
disconcerted, decorated, tousled, caretaker, church officer, Suisse goloshes, huarache
tangled, turbulent sacristy: (n) sacristanry , altar, holy of sanguine: (adj) hopeful, optimistic,
ruffs: (n) Philomachus Holies, room, sanctuary, sanctum bloody, rubicund, confident,
ruining: (n) ruin, laying waste, sanctorum, sextary, sextry, shrine crimson, cheerful, buoyant,
devastation, wrecking, razing, saddened: (adj) sorry, sad, depressed, sanguineous; (adj, n) red, florid.
damage, collapse, desolation, dejected, upset, dismayed, unhappy, ANTONYMS: (adj) pessimistic,
destruction, dilapidation; (adj) dissatisfied, troubled, disillusioned, gloomy, doubtful
deleterious in a state. ANTONYM: (adj) sans: (adj) without, devoid, minus,
ruinous: (adj) harmful, baleful, satisfied short, in need
disastrous, calamitous, injurious, safekeeping: (n) keeping, care, sapping: (adj) murderous
deleterious, dilapidated, blasting, guardianship, charge, protection, sarcophagus: (n) casket, urn, tomb,
baneful, pernicious; (adj, n) conservation, preservation, trust, shell, pall, cinerary urn, bier, hearse,
subversive. ANTONYMS: (adj) hands, responsibility; (adj) tutelage catafalque
beneficial, fortunate, harmless sagacious: (adj, v) judicious, prudent, sardonic: (adj) dry, wry, cynical,
rumbling: (adj, n) grumbling; (n) discreet; (adj) rational, astute, acute, ironic, ironical, cutting, biting, bitter,
grumble, noise, boom, thunder, roll, discerning, keen, perspicacious, derisive, mocking; (adj, v) satirical.
roar; (adj) hollow, low; (v) intelligent, shrewd. ANTONYMS: ANTONYM: (adj) approving
bombination, berloque (adj) foolish, stupid, dense sash: (n) girdle, cincture, band,
rummage: (n, v) search; (v) ransack, sagacity: (n, v) discernment, cummerbund, baldric, framing,
jumble, root, look for, rifle, seek, judgment, penetration; (n) waistband, framework, frame, fillet,
forage; (n) explore, trash, scan judiciousness, sense, prudence, fascia
rumor: (n) hearsay, talk, news; (n, v) gumption, acumen, perspicacity; satanic: (adj) infernal, hellish,
gossip, fame, buzz, bruit, noise, (adj, n) discretion, wisdom. fiendish, diabolical, diabolic,
rumour; (v) repute, reputation. ANTONYM: (n) foolishness demonic, demoniacal, wicked,
ANTONYM: (n) truth sage: (adj) sagacious, discerning, unholy; (adj, v) mephistophelian,
runaway: (adj, n) renegade, intelligent, prudent, judicious, Stygian
delinquent; (n) deserter, romp, learned, profound, knowing; (adj, v) satiated: (adj) full, replete, gorged,
walkaway, refugee, absconder, grave; (n) philosopher, scholar satisfied, jaded, sated, glutted, fat,
runagate, escapee, laugher; (adj) salamander: (n) bear, poker, olm, fed up, corpulent, disgusted.
decided. ANTONYM: (n) challenge hellbender, fire hook, amphiuma, ANTONYM: (adj) insatiate
ruse: (n) guile, artifice, deceit, brasier, warming pan, satire: (n) sarcasm, lampoon,
maneuver, plot, deception, trick, dicamptodontid, sow, alpine mockery, parody, ridicule,
device, dodge, scheme, ploy salamander caricature, burlesque, quip, spoof,
rushes: (n) rush, grasses salamanders: (n) caecilians, class derision; (v) squib
rustic: (n) countryman, peasant; (adj) Amphibia, Congo snakes, family saturnalia: (adj, n) debauch; (n) orgy,
rural, pastoral, boorish, country, Salamandridae, frogs, order revelry, revel, riot, debauchery,
bucolic, provincial, hick, agrestic, Caudata, Salamandridae, amphibia, drunken revelry; (adj) jollification,
countrified. ANTONYMS: (adj) newts carousal, drinking bout, Babel
town, urbane, cultured, city, salic: (adj) Salique saucy: (adj, n) pert; (adj) bold,
sophisticated salient: (adj) conspicuous, impudent, audacious, insolent,
rustling: (n) rustle, whispering, outstanding, remarkable, signal, fresh, forward, impertinent,
flippant, rude, brazen. ANTONYM: Protestantism, breach. ANTONYMS: thoroughly, inquisitive, searching,
(adj) respectful (n) convergence, heresy penetrating
savant: (n) scholar, connoisseur, scholastic: (adj, n) academic; (adj) sculptured: (adj) sculpted, graven,
scientist, initiate, learned person, scholarly, pedantic, school, learned, modeled, engraved, carved, incised,
wrangler, Schoolman, specialist; (n, erudite; (n) pedant, purist; (v) in refief, etched, anaglyptic, shapely,
v) enlightened; (v) solid; (adj) savant, blue, enlightened carven
erudite schoolmaster: (n) master, preceptor, scutum: (v) aegis, shield, buckler,
savory: (adj) spicy, dainty, fragrant, pedagogue, headmaster, dominie, armor, carapace, fender, face guard,
appetizing, tasteful, delectable, teacher, principal, educator, head, cowcatcher, corner stone,
tasty, delicious, piquant, aromatic; Lutjanus apodus, housemaster bulletproof vest, buffer
(adj, n) savoury. ANTONYMS: (adj) scilicet: (adv) videlicet scythe: (n) crotch, crutch, crane,
unpleasant, unappetizing, sweet scoff: (n, v) gibe, flout, deride, jibe; elbow, ankle, fluke, groin, knee,
savoy: (n) head cabbage (n) mockery, hoot, jeering; (v) mock, zigzag; (n, v) sithe; (v) reap
saxon: (adj) academical, pure, chaste, ridicule, sneer, scorn. ANTONYMS: seasoned: (adj) veteran, flavoured,
severe; (n) Englishman, Sassenach, (v) approve, nibble flavored, mature, ripe, versed,
Lowlander scoffing: (n) scoff, mockery, jeer, hardened, confirmed, practised,
scabbard: (n) case, vagina, casing, derision, sibilation, gibe; (adj) accustomed, sophisticated.
pod, covering, cover, pouch, pocket, mocking, derisive, cynical, scoptical, ANTONYMS: (adj) green,
fob jesting unseasoned, inexperienced, mild
scabby: (adj) paltry, dirty, mangy, scoffs: (n) derision, jeering, mocking sedition: (n, v) rebellion, insurrection,
shabby, abject, rascally, little, scold: (v) reprimand, chide, berate, mutiny; (n) disloyalty, fomentation,
sneaking, scabrous; (adj, n) rebuke, abuse, lecture, reproach, disobedience, treason, instigation,
contemptible, scurvy rail, grouch; (n, v) nag; (adj, n) violation, unrest, uprising.
scaffold: (n) frame, scaffolding, shrew. ANTONYMS: (v) praise, ANTONYM: (n) loyalty
framework, foundation, gallows, compliment, approve seditions: (adj) lawless, riotous
stand, transom, summer, trave, scolding: (n) rebuke, lecture, seditious: (adj) incendiary, rebellious,
Travis, stage castigation, admonition, reproof, insurgent, subversive, disloyal,
scaffolding: (n) frame, unit, system, objurgation, chiding, dressing, insubordinate, mutinous, factious,
skeleton, staging, centering, beam, jobation, scold, rating. ANTONYMS: turbulent, lawless, revolutionary
echafaudage, racking (n) compliment, approval seigneur: (n) lord, seignior, overlord,
scaled: (adj) armored, armoured, scorpions: (n) horseshoe crabs master
lepidote, leprose, scabrous, scaley scourging: (n) flagellation seigneury: (n) seigniory, signory,
scamp: (n) rascal, imp, miscreant, scowl: (n, v) glare, grimace, roar, demesne, estate, land, landed estate,
scalawag, rogue, monkey, villain, sneer; (v) glower, pout, lower, sulk; acres
brat, scallywag, rapscallion; (v) (adj) black looks, mumps; (n) growl. seignory: (n) seigneury, landed
skimp ANTONYMS: (n, v) grin estate, demesne, estate
scantily: (adv) sparingly, scarcely, scowling: (adj) frowning, angry, dire, seine: (n) fishnet, purse Seine, Seine
poorly, sparsely, insufficiently, frowny, grim, threatening, ugly, river; (v) fish
skimpily, meagerly, scantly, unfriendly, dark seizing: (v) seize; (n) seizure,
slenderly, sparely; (adj, adv) thinly. scraping: (n) scrape, scratching, clutches, prehension, taking,
ANTONYMS: (adv) plentifully, scratch, rub, sizing, rament, incision, apprehension, capture, infection;
profusely, fully mark, prick; (v) rubbing; (adj) (adj) catching, galling, controlling
scanty: (adj) insufficient, few, grating self-love: (n) egoism, vanity, pride,
inadequate, bare, deficient, poor, scrawled: (adj) scribbled, hard to arrogance
narrow, scant, light; (adj, v) spare, decipher, incomprehensible, written, self-possession: (n) composure,
lean. ANTONYMS: (adj) generous, unreadable, indecipherable, poise, imperturbability, serenity,
abundant, ample, strong impossible to read aplomb, coolness, balance, restraint,
scapegrace: (n) black sheep, screech: (n, v) cry, shout, shriek, yell, self-control, morale, presence
scalawag, miscreant; (adj) rashling, screak, yelp, yowl, roar; (n) semicircle: (n) arch, semi-circles, half
madcap, fire eater, desperado, screaming; (v) squawk, pipe circle, half-circle, plane figure, arc,
daredevil, hotspur, bully, bravo scribbler: (n) writer, penman, pen, curve
scarecrow: (n) hobgoblin, bugaboo, author, the scribbling race, hack, seneca: (n) genus polygala
simulacrum, malkin, frump, ogre, scrivener, Augustin Eugene scribe, seneschal: (n) burgomaster, bailiff,
jackstraw, shewel, goblin, scribe, pamphleteer, journalist Corregidor, castellan, factotum,
ragamuffin; (adj) octopus scroll: (n, v) roll, list, roller, record; warden, servant, shepherd,
sceptic: (n) doubter, skeptic, atheist, (n) curlicue, curl, archive, helix, portreeve, retainer, alderman
pessimist, infidel, incredulous, book, whorl; (v) role senor: (n) signor
distrustful, disbeliever, sceptical, scrutinize: (v) inspect, examine, sens: (n) marijuana, hemp, great deal,
unbeliever, skeptical review, consider, audit, investigate, green goddess, crumb, mickle, grass,
schism: (n) division, split, rift, explore, search, analyze, check; (adj, good deal, Gunter Grass, ganja, gage
cleavage, heresy, faction, discord, v) scan. ANTONYM: (v) ignore senseless: (adj) foolish, mindless,
rupture, estrangement, scrutinizing: (adj) exploring preposterous, pointless, irrational,
Victor Hugo 691
absurd, stupid, insensible, idiotic, ditch, gully, dike, culvert, sewerage, shaved: (adj) shave, lacking hair,
fatuous, purposeless. ANTONYMS: drainpipe, moat, main; (adj) latrines hairless, beardless, shiny on top,
(adj) meaningful, wise, conscious, shaded: (adj) dark, shads, sheltered, bald, smooth on top, whiskerless.
provoked, prudent, useful, shadowed, umbrageous, twilight, ANTONYM: (adj) unshaven
worthwhile sunless, subdued, soft, colored, shaving: (adj, n) paring, sliver,
sensibility: (adj, n, v) feeling, notion; darksome. ANTONYM: (adj) shiver; (n, v) shave; (n) cut, splinter,
(n, v) sensation, appreciation, sense; unshaded rasher, grazing, slice; (adj) clipping,
(n) emotion, sensitivity, shadowing: (n) screening, shielding, driblet
consciousness, perceptivity, shading, pursuit, cast shadowing; sheaf: (n) fagot, faggot, bunch, bale,
awareness; (adj, n) sentiment. (adj) following surreptitiously package, bundle, truss, stack, parcel,
ANTONYM: (n) insensitivity shagreen: (n) leather, pellicle, fell, fardel, packet
sensuality: (n) sensualism, fur, skin sheath: (n, v) cover; (n) envelope,
animalism, sensualness, lust, shakes: (n) hangover, jitters, vagina, scabbard, blanket, casing,
carnality, concupiscence, animal nervousness, tension, anxiety skin, holster, tegument; (v) sheathe,
gratification, bodily enjoyment, sham: (adj, adv, n, v) counterfeit; (adj, envelop
hedonism, sensationalism, n, v) fake; (adj, v) pretend, put on; sheathing: (n) casing, overlay,
debauchery (adj, n) imitation, phony; (v) feign; overlayer, skin, sheeting, covering,
sepulchral: (adj, v) hollow, hoarse; (adj) false; (n) fraud, impostor, cover, cladding, involucrum,
(v) mortuary, harsh, rough, falsehood. ANTONYMS: (adj, v) planking, lagging
horrisonous, grum; (adj) ghastly, real; (n) original, truth, truthfulness, shedding: (n) molting, abscission,
raucous, husky; (n) funeral honesty; (adj) valid fluffing, effusion, moulting,
sepulchre: (n) mausoleum, burial, shameful: (adj) scandalous, biological process, desquamation,
monument, repository, crypt, dishonorable, opprobrious, sloughing, emission; (adj, n) peeling;
sepulture, burial chamber, tomb, shocking, ignominious, (adj) flaking
bier; (v) inter, bury disreputable, despicable; (adj, v) shipwreck: (n, v) ruin; (adj, v) sink;
sequins: (n) tinsel foul, base, gross, black. (v) defeat, scuttle, destroy, fail; (n)
seraglio: (n) hareem, palace, zenana, ANTONYMS: (adj) honorable, hulk, accident, wreckage, wrack,
serai, quarters, living quarters, serail noble, dignified, admirable, ruination
serenade: (n) divertimento, chivaree, faultless, reputable, glorious, shipwrecked: (adj, v) stranded; (adj)
cheer, canon, callithump, compassionate, praiseworthy, castaway, stuck, rejected, high and
callathump, belling, charivari, song, commendable, excellent dry; (v) wrecked, cast away,
opus; (v) court shamelessly: (adv) barefacedly, capsized, grounded, foundered,
serene: (adj) peaceful, calm, quiet, impudently, boldly, brazenly, swamped
placid, composed, impassive, clear, brashly, insolently, audaciously, shopkeeper: (n) merchant,
pacific, gentle, cool; (adj, v) tranquil. immodestly, unblushingly, tradesman, merchandiser, shopman,
ANTONYMS: (adj) agitated, unabashedly, gracelessly. seller, storekeeper, florist, hosier,
anxious, noisy, nervous, impatient, ANTONYMS: (adv) ashamedly, market keeper, cleaner, dealer
excitable, scatterbrained, harsh, penitently shrank: (v) minify
boisterous, excited, disturbed shapeless: (adj) amorphous, shred: (n) rag, piece, scintilla, iota,
serenity: (n) quiet, peace, calm, misshapen, unformed, unstructured, bit, strip, remnant, sliver; (adj, n)
quietness, equanimity, calmness, nebulous, inchoate, unshapely, scrap; (v) rip, tear
quietude, repose; (adj, n) indistinct, uncrystallized, shriek: (n, v) screech, cry, shout, call,
composure, tranquility, placidity. embryonic, vague. ANTONYMS: howl, yell, yowl, screak; (v) bellow,
ANTONYMS: (n) anxiety, uproar, (adj) distinct, defined, tailored caterwaul, shrill. ANTONYM: (v)
chaos, anger, panic, bustle, sharks: (n) Elasmobranchii, rays, sigh
disturbance, impatience, turbulence, Selachii, subclass Elasmobranchii, shrieking: (n) shriek, screeching,
turmoil subclass Selachii screech, scream, belly laugh, shright,
serge: (n) cloth, fabric, material sharpening: (n) grinding, training, howler, riot; (adj) sharp
serpent: (n) snake, ophidian, viper, filing, dressing, acumination, shrill: (adj) piercing, penetrating,
snake in the grass, reptile, aggravation; (adj) abrasive strident, keen, shrewd; (v) shriek,
rattlesnake, colubrid, contrafagotto, sharpness: (n, v) keenness, edge; (n) screech, scream, yell; (adj, v) high,
cor anglais, hautboy; (v) goose severity, bitterness, asperity, sharp. ANTONYMS: (adj) low,
serpentine: (adj, v) snaky; (adj) acumen, poignancy, pungency, quiet, resonant
insidious, crooked, snakelike, quickness, perspicacity; (adj, n) shrilly: (adv) sharply, acutely,
tortuous, winding, sinuous, curved, roughness. ANTONYMS: (n) penetratingly, stridently, noisily,
cunning; (v) circling, meander dullness, haziness, softness, harshly, raucously, keenly, loudly,
sever: (n, v) part, cut; (v) break, slowness, indistinctness, gentleness, discordantly, shrewdly.
detach, cut off, separate, rupture, evenness, courtesy, blandness, ANTONYM: (adv) softly
rend, disconnect, crack, divorce. stupidity, kindness shrivelled: (adj) shriveled, withered,
ANTONYMS: (v) join, associate, shatter: (v) fragment, ruin, smash, wizened, shrunken, sere, sear, thin,
establish, initiate, unite, mend destroy, burst, dash, rupture, crash, lean, dry, shrunk, dryer
sewer: (adj, n) cloaca; (n) channel, crumble, crack, demolish shroud: (adj, n, v) cover; (n, v) cloak,
hide, conceal; (adj, n) shelter; (v) cornerstone, sole, window sill, destroy, massacre, put to death,
shield, envelop, enshroud; (n) windowsill remove, finish, butcher
covering, mantle, pall. ANTONYM: silvery: (adj) silvern, argent, bright, sleeplessness: (n) wakefulness,
(v) disclose white, gray, rich, silverish, restlessness, nerves, insomnolence,
shrouded: (adj) hidden, covered, melodious, fair, Argentine, clear disquietude, unrest; (v) vigil.
veiled, cloaked, secret, wearing a similes: (n) imagery, images, ANTONYM: (n) sleepiness
veil, unseen, ulterior, masked, metaphors sleeveless: (adj) bootless, futile,
enclosed, misty sine: (n) without, circular function, otiose, conceited, unproductive,
shrunk: (adj) contracted, wizened, hell, cotangent, angle, cosine, vain, ineffectual, giddy, egotistic; (n)
withered, shrivelled, shriveled, hypothenuse frivolous, volatile. ANTONYM: (adj)
wizen, insipid, drawn grain, wearish sinful: (adj) wicked, impious, bad, sleeved
shuddering: (adj, n) quivering, iniquitous, ungodly, depraved, sling: (v) pitch, fling, hurl, dangle,
shaking; (adv) shudderingly; (n) immoral, profane, criminal, wrong, chuck, toss, throw, heave; (adj)
cold sweat, tremor; (adj) rough, unholy. ANTONYMS: (adj) pious, hang; (adj, v) suspend; (n, v) cast
shaky, jumpy, quaking, shivery, virtuous, moral, right, pure slipper: (n) mule, sandal, pump, boot,
bumpy. ANTONYM: (adj) smooth singsong: (adj) chantlike, carpet slipper, bootee, slider, patten,
shutter: (n, v) close, shade; (n) monotonous, toneless, rhythmic, scuffs, slipshoe, vertical
curtain, shut, blind, window, rhythmical; (v) sing, intonate, synchronized slipper
skylight, deadlight, lid, louver, intone, displace; (n) pitch contour, sloped: (adj) slanting, oblique,
jalousie intonation sloping, inclined, aslope, diagonal,
sickle: (n) reaping hook, hook, elbow, singularly: (adv) peculiarly, aslant, leaned, leant, colored, biased
ankle, groin, fluke, knee, reap hook, uniquely, unusually, curiously, sloping: (adj, v) oblique, slope; (adj)
knuckle, crotch, crane rarely, uncommonly, oddly, solely, slanting, inclined, slanted, diagonal,
sickly: (adj, adv) poorly; (n) invalid; exceptionally, individually; (adj, leaning, sloped; (adj, adv) aslope,
(adj) sick, ailing, pale, sallow, adv) remarkably aslant; (v) slant. ANTONYMS: (adj)
indisposed, morbid, diseased; (adj, sinner: (n) criminal, miscreant, horizontal, upright
n, v) infirm; (adj, v) faint. culprit, sinful, trespasser, slowness: (n) dilatoriness, lethargy,
ANTONYMS: (adj) healthy, bitter, transgressor, evildoer, magdalen, lateness, backwardness,
robust rascal, villain, sinners awkwardness, deliberation,
sidelong: (adj) indirect, oblique, side, sire: (v) generate, engender, beget, dullness, sluggishness, stupidity,
asquint, askance, askant; (adv) procreate, mother, get, make; (n) indolence; (adj, n) delay.
sideways, obliquely, askew, aslant, forefather, ancestor, patriarch, pater ANTONYMS: (n) haste, quickness,
sideling. ANTONYM: (adj) direct sirius: (n) blazing star, Canicula, rapidity, intelligence, cleverness,
signboard: (n) sign, billboard, poster, Sothis nimbleness, speediness,
placard, shingle, hoarding, label, sisterhood: (n) sorority, family promptness, punctuality, vigor
plate, tag, tablet, structure relationship, relationship, Women's sluggard: (n) loafer, idler, slugabed,
signification: (n, v) meaning, import; Liberation, cousinhood, society, slacker, layabout, lazybones; (n, v)
(n) purport, intent, consequence, fellowship, order, kinship, sistership drone; (v) loiterer, lingerer, lag; (adj)
significance, moment, implication, skein: (n, v) mesh; (n) tangle, flock, sluggish
gist, connotation, denotation maze, covey, snarl, bevy, tuft; (v) sluggish: (adj) inert, indolent,
signified: (n) common sense, net, plexus, sleeve inactive, idle, slow, torpid, slack,
acceptation, good sense, horse sense, skipping: (n) jumping, leaping, languid; (adj, n) lazy, drowsy,
mother wit, sensation, sense, absenteeism; (adv) skippingly, heavy. ANTONYMS: (adj) energetic,
sensory faculty, sentience, sentiency; leapingly fast, brisk, lively, alert, speedy,
(adj) implied slackened: (adj) leisurely industrious
signor: (n) signior, man, sir, adult slain: (v) slay; (adj) overthrown, mat, sluice: (n) lock, floodgate, channel,
male, senor, mynheer fallen, dejected, cast down valve; (v) flush, flow, stream, wash,
silhouette: (n) contour, outline, slang: (n) lingo, cant, vernacular, pour, outlet, scour
shape, form, figure, circuit, lines argot, dialect, patois, language; (v) slumber: (n, v) rest, doze, snooze,
tournure, ambit, perimeter, put one over, put one across, put on, nap, drowse, repose, catnap; (v) be
periphery; (n, v) shade dupe asleep, kip, take a nap; (n) siesta
silken: (adj) glossy, silk, sleek, soft, slash: (n, v) gash, rip, slice, tear, split, smallness: (n) diminutiveness,
satiny, satin, shiny, smooth, slick, wound; (v) reduce, hack, clip, hew, minuteness, slightness, puniness,
downy, mild. ANTONYMS: (adj) cut down. ANTONYMS: (v) raise, insignificance, scantiness, delicacy,
coarse, dull, rough upgrade scantness, narrowness; (adj)
silky: (adj, v) silken; (adj) glossy, soft, slates: (n) tiling meagerness, slenderness.
smooth, satiny, delicate, fine, fluffy, slaughterer: (n) butcher, murderer, ANTONYM: (n) tallness
sericeous, slick, downy. knacker, bungler, killer, assassin, smeared: (adj) smudged, unclean,
ANTONYMS: (adj) rough, harsh, blunderer, bumbler, fumbler, soiled, grubby, smirched, muddy,
coarse, dull botcher, slayer messy, smudgy, grimy, greasy
sill: (n) ledge, threshold, doorstep, slay: (n, v) murder, assassinate; (v) smock: (n) duster, shirt, chemise,
rung, step, round, stone, dispatch, execute, slaughter, gaberdine, sark, dust coat, overalls,
Victor Hugo 693
dress, blouse, smicket, coverall solemnity: (n) seriousness, sobriety, filthy, grimy, base, cheap,
smote: (v) smite earnestness, formality, ceremony, despicable, dishonorable, mucky,
snail: (v) sluggard, loiterer, lingerer, impressiveness, austerity, low. ANTONYMS: (adj) respectable,
pull together; (n) conch, sedateness, display, pomp, pleasant, wholesome, reputable,
hodmandod, gastropod, garden grandeur. ANTONYMS: (n) humor, honorable, clean, attractive, humane
snail, edible snail, dodman; (adj) levity, cheerfulness, understatement sorrowful: (adj) melancholy, doleful,
whelked soles: (n) family Soleidae sad, rueful, lugubrious, gloomy,
snare: (n, v) mesh, gin, ambush, soliciting: (n) traffic, suit; (adj) dreary, grievous, piteous, unhappy,
hook; (v) catch, ensnare, entrap, petitory, petitioning mournful. ANTONYMS: (adj)
entangle, capture, enmesh; (n) lure solicitude: (n) care, consideration, cheerful, content, joyful, successful
snarl: (n, v) tangle, growl, knot, anxiety, thought, apprehension, sorrowfully: (adv) dolefully,
muddle, yap, howl, bark; (adj, v) regard, attention, fear, disquietude, mournfully, gloomily, woefully,
snap; (v) entangle; (n) kink, maze. heed, fret. ANTONYMS: (n) unhappily, sorrily, ruefully,
ANTONYMS: (v) facilitate, undo negligence, serenity, dejectedly, grievously, forlornly,
snatching: (n) capture thoughtlessness contritely. ANTONYMS: (adv)
sneer: (n, v) deride, jeer, scorn, flout, solidified: (adj) fixed, firm, stiff, happily, unrepentantly, joyfully,
ridicule, scoff, mock, leer, grimace, concrete, curdled, thick, coagulate, cheerfully
gird; (n) smirk grumous, grumose; (v) consolidated, soundly: (adv) sound, fully, solidly,
snoring: (n) stertor, respiration; (adj) joined thoroughly, deeply, substantially,
stertorous, asleep solidity: (n) consistency, firmness, validly, strongly, stably, fastly,
snout: (n) proboscis, beak, neb, density, compactness, reliability, safely. ANTONYMS: (adv)
nozzle, hooter, rostrum, snoot, rigidity, substance, consistence, harmfully, halfheartedly, fitfully,
trunk, schnozzle, honker; (v) muzzle hardness; (adj, n) stiffness, unconvincingly
snowy: (adj) white, pure, clean, soundness. ANTONYMS: (n) southward: (adv) southwards,
blank, hoary, achromatic, snow- softness, hollowness, porosity, southernly; (adj) southbound,
white, unblemished, wintry, wet, looseness, instability, slenderness, southern
favorite lightness, clearness, limpness sovereigns: (n) crowned heads,
snub: (n, v) repulse, insult, cut, slight, sonant: (adj) voiced, vocal, sonorous, royals, royalty
put down; (v) disregard, offend, oral, resonant, vibrant, spoken, sower: (n) seeder, farmer, sodbuster,
ignore, check, humiliate; (n) rebuke. peremptory; (n) voiced sound, husbandman, granger, seed drill
ANTONYMS: (v) accept, vowel, speech sound. ANTONYM: spangled: (adj) sequined, jeweled,
acknowledge, notice, boost, include; (adj) surd bejewelled, jewelled, bejeweled,
(n) acceptance sonorous: (adj) rotund, resonant, beady, beaded, bespangled,
snuff: (v) smell, kill, douse, slay, clear, rich, resounding, harmonious, buttonlike, spangly, twinkling.
scent, snuffle, bump off, smother, round, full, ringing, vibrant, sonant. ANTONYM: (adj) dull
snort; (adj) tobacco, nicotine ANTONYMS: (adj) shrill, thin sparely: (adv) sparingly,
sobbing: (adj) crying, weeping, sooth: (n) verity, soothsaying, fact, superfluously, savingly,
weepy, tearful; (n) lamentation, truth, reality supernumerarily, scantily, thinly,
shortness of breath, shit, prick, soothed: (adj) composed savely, meagerly, supererogatorily,
motherfucker, tear, lament sophism: (n) fallacy, quibble, frugally, stingily
softening: (adj) emollient, salving, casuistry, sophistry, deception, sparing: (adj, n) economical, saving;
relaxing; (v) soften; (adj, n) soothing; sophistication, elench, evasion, false (adj, v) scanty, poor, chary, meager,
(n) maceration, mitigation, belief, paralogism, refutation parsimonious, spare, moderate; (adj)
easement, mollification, soprano: (adj) high, tenor, voce di thrifty, careful. ANTONYMS: (adj)
inteneration, encouragement testa, penetrating, piercing, sharp, spendthrift, generous, wasteful,
soiled: (adj) grubby, dirty, nasty, shrill; (n) mezzo, lind, high pitch, extravagant
grimy, unclean, filthy, muddy, high frequency sparkle: (n, v) flicker, flash, shimmer,
black, mucky, polluted, foul. sorbonne: (n) Paris university, spark, shine, blaze, fizz, gleam,
ANTONYMS: (adj) pure, university of Paris glitter; (v) blink, glare.
immaculate sorcerer: (n) magician, magus, ANTONYMS: (n) apathy, dullness,
sola: (n) shola necromancer, enchanter, conjurer, lifelessness
solace: (n) consolation, relief, balm, wizard, conjuror, sorcer , diviner, sparrow: (n) hedge sparrow,
solacement; (v) console, allay, exorciser, exorcist sparrows, passerine, house sparrow,
relieve, recreate; (n, v) ease, cheer, sorceress: (n) sorcerer, witch, accentor, true sparrow, spur, snag,
support. ANTONYMS: (n) distress, magician, enchanter, warlock, passeriform bird, incitement
grief wizard, lamia, necromancer sparrows: (n) sparrow, finches, order
soldering: (n) bonding, welding, sorcery: (n) charm, incantation, Passeriformes, Passeriformes,
brazing, attachment, soft soldering, witchcraft, enchantment, black robins, rooks, etc
fastening; (v) sticking magic, magic, diabolism, sparsely: (adv) infrequently, lightly,
soldierly: (adj) soldierlike, military, necromancy, black art, witchery, rarely, scatteredly, meagerly,
courageous, valiant, warlike, diablerie scantily, poorly, sporadically,
manful, hostile, warriorlike sordid: (adj) ignoble, nasty, foul, slenderly, scarcely, leanly.
ANTONYMS: (adv) thickly, densely rage, lien, malice, bitterness, squalling: (adj) unquiet
spatula: (n) palette knife, shovel, rancour, huff, grudge, rancor. squarely: (adv) straightforwardly,
trowel, thimble, watch glass, ANTONYM: (n) affection square, forthright, rightly, fairly,
tablespoon, putty knife, dipper, splendidly: (adv) gallantly, quadrately, truely, right, squaredly,
filling knife, food turner, hand tool brilliantly, famously, beautifully, correspondly, straightly
specialty: (n) speciality, gloriously, gorgeously, squatting: (adj) crouching; (n) leg
specialization, metier, specialism, resplendently, superbly, exercise, colonization, movement,
field, long suit, covenant, feature, sumptuously, excellently, grandly. knee bend; (v) couchant; (adv)
particularity, foible, mannerism ANTONYMS: (adv) badly, terribly, asquat
spectre: (n) phantasm, shadow, abysmally, modestly, simply, stacks: (n) piles, set of bookshelves,
shade, phantom, apparition, ghost, meagerly rafts, plenty, oodles, mountain,
spook, wraith, revenant, terror, splendor: (adj, n, v) brilliancy; (n) scores; (adj, n) loads, myriad, lots;
eidolon magnificence, pomp, sheen, lustre, (adj) ample
sped: (v) done for luster, glory, ostentation, glitter; (n, stag: (v) spy, peach, denounce; (n)
speechless: (adj) silent, mute, dumb, v) brightness; (adj, n) radiance. buck, dog, boar, cock, deer, roe, doe,
dumbfounded, voiceless, quiet, ANTONYMS: (n) dullness, reynard
tongueless, tacit, noiseless, mum, ordinariness, paucity, austerity, stagnant: (adj) quiet, motionless,
wordless. ANTONYMS: (adj) understatement, shabbiness, inert, dead, slow, still, standing,
loquacious, eloquent, talkative simplicity, unattractiveness immobile, inactive, stagnate,
speedily: (adj, adv) quickly, quick, spluttering: (adj) noisy stationary. ANTONYMS: (adj)
immediately; (adv) rapidly, spondee: (n) dactyl, trochee, metrical active, moving
promptly, hastily, swiftly, fast, unit, metrical foot, foot, anapest stairway: (n) ladder, stairs, flight,
apace, hurriedly, fleetly. spoonful: (n) mouthful, handful, stair, steps, flight of steps,
ANTONYMS: (adv) later, eventually armful, cochleare, tablespoonful, companionway, roadway,
sphinx: (adj) phoenix, hydra; (n) dose, containerful, blob, capful, backstairs, escalator, pathway
monitor, Tiresias, statue, enigma, taste; (adj) thimbleful stammer: (v) falter, hesitate, stumble,
mythical monster, Cassandra, sportive: (adj) frolicsome, jocund, bumble, fumble, mumble, utter,
Minotaur, mystery, mythical gay, jolly, cheerful, lively, merry, verbalize, waver, halt, splutter
creature rollicking, mirthful, vivacious, blithe stammering: (n) hesitation, hesitancy,
spire: (n) pinnacle, minaret, top; (adj, spout: (n, v) jet, spurt, squirt, spirt, psellism, indistinct pronunciation,
n) steeple; (v) coil, hover; (adj) outlet; (v) gush, burst; (n) nozzle, doubt; (adj) halting, hesitating,
tower, column, obelisk, pillar, pipe, nose, flow inarticulate, incoherent, broken,
monument springing: (v) jumping, climbing, ashamed
spite: (n) malice, grudge, hatred, bounding, furious, conspicuous, stamping: (n) impression, blocking,
malevolence, rancour, venom, prominent, ascending, projecting coin, postage, stamping of rail
rancor, maliciousness, ill will, outwardly; (n) growth, suspension, standstill: (n) impasse, deadlock,
animosity; (n, v) pique. emanation cessation, pause, halt, stagnation,
ANTONYMS: (v) please; (n) sprinkled: (adj) scattered, speckled, inaction, stay, stop, interruption;
benevolence, goodwill, love, wet, dotted (adj, n) stand. ANTONYM: (n)
affection, harmony sprouts: (n) sprouting, Combes progress
spiteful: (adj) malicious, malevolent, spurred: (adj) barbed, calcarated stanza: (n) couplet, quatrain, strophe,
sinister, nasty, malignant, spurring: (n) spur, goad, prodding, stave, line, octave, antistrophe,
venomous, despiteful, ill-natured, prod, goading, gad, encouragement, sestet, poetry, envoy, canto
vindictive, cruel, hateful. branch line, acceleration, urging, starry: (adj) sidereal, starlike, radiant,
ANTONYMS: (adj) benevolent, spine showy, gleaming, bright, lustrous,
harmless, merciful, kindhearted, sputter: (v) spit, sizzle, crackle, shiny, lucid, stellar, fulgent.
friendly, pleasant, loving, benign, expectorate, babble, fizz; (n, v) ANTONYMS: (adj) starless, dull
generous, gentle, flattering splutter, spatter; (n) sputtering, statuary: (n) sculptor, carver,
spitting: (n) spiting, expectoration, splatter, splash figuriste, modeler, chaser, statue,
ejection, sizzle, projection, forcing sputtering: (n) splutter, splatter, sculptress, assemblage,
out, expulsion, saliva spattering, spatter, splattering, dab, accumulation, aggregation,
spittle: (n) slaver, slobber, spit, splashing, splash; (adj) spluttering, collection
phlegm, sputum, drivel, dribble, noisy; (v) sizzle stead: (n) behalf, room, lieu, spot,
drool, spital, mucus, expectoration squalid: (adj) sordid, nasty, foul, location, station, space, seat,
splashed: (adj) dabbled, bespattered, seedy, filthy, grimy, abject, dingy, position, office, locality
besplashed, spattered, marked, grubby, seamy, sleazy. steadfastly: (adv) steadily, solidly,
unclean, dirty, splattered, ANTONYMS: (adj) clean, reputable, unwaveringly, resolutely,
distributed, showy, dotted smart, respectable, fresh, unfalteringly, unswervingly,
splashing: (n) spatter, spattering, comfortable, wholesome, habitable determinedly, faithfully,
painting, splattering, dab, plash; squall: (n, v) cry; (v) shriek, howl, persistently, permanently,
(adj) liquid scream, screech, shrill, bawl, holler; staunchly. ANTONYMS: (adv)
spleen: (n) spite, anger, resentment, (n) gust, blast, gale unreliably, irresolutely, unfaithfully
Victor Hugo 695
stealer: (n) thief, robber, burglar, keen. ANTONYMS: (adj) stingless, artifice
cracksman, larcener, larcenist, crook, gentle stratum: (n) layer, bed, level, seam,
plagiarist, embezzler, ghoul, lifter stings: (adj) stung floor, ply, stage, story, horizon,
stealthily: (adv) furtively, sneakily, stinking: (adj) malodorous, putrid, class, plane
surreptitiously, covertly, fetid, foul, smelly, loathsome, strayed: (v) stray
clandestinely, underhandly, noisome, odorous, disgusting, straying: (n) digression, departure,
underhandedly, in secret, privately, funky, lousy. ANTONYMS: (adj) error; (adj) errant, mistaking,
sneakingly; (adj, adv) noiselessly. fragrant, clean, fresh containing error, incorrect,
ANTONYM: (adv) brazenly stitched: (adj) sewed, bound in paper misleading, astray, mistaken,
stealthy: (adj) clandestine, secret, covers, seamed erroneous
surreptitious, sneaky, covert, stoical: (adj, n) stoic; (adj) indifferent, streaked: (adj) veined, striped,
private, backstairs, concealed, feline; patient, imperturbable, calm, streaky, brindled, lined, mottled,
(adj, v) sly, insidious. ANTONYM: spirited, princely, phlegmatic, virgated, patterned; (v) areolar,
(adj) blatant exalted, elevated, lofty cancellated, grated
steed: (n) horse, mount, charger, stoically: (adv) indifferently, strewing: (n) scatter, spreading,
knight, courser, warhorse, pony, patiently spread, sprinkling, sprinkle,
stallion, mare stoned: (adj) intoxicated, drugged, dispersion
steeped: (adj) seasoned, experienced tight, zonked, drunken, inebriate, strewn: (adj) spread, distributed,
stentorian: (adj) booming, vocal, inebriated, ecstatic, rabid, high, disordered, strewed, confused,
piercing, strident, resonant, unconscious covered, diffuse, disconnected,
powerful, flourishing, full, fuller, stoning: (n) pitting, lapidation disjointed, circulated, dispersed
palmy, stentorophonic stools: (n) shit, excrement, stripping: (n) baring, denudation,
stiffen: (v) set, ossify, indurate, evacuation, dejection striping, removal, disforestation,
toughen, tighten, brace, congeal, stoop: (v) crouch, bend, deign, scrubbing, strippingly, uncovering,
reinforce, jell, intensify, fortify. condescend, descend, squat, couch, find, back washing, cornhusking
ANTONYMS: (v) relax, loosen, cringe, lean, lower oneself; (n) stronghold: (n) bastion, fortress,
soften, flex porch. ANTONYM: (v) straighten keep, fortification, fort, bulwark,
stiffening: (n) stiffness, rigidification, stooped: (adj) hunched, stoop, redoubt, strength; (adj, n) castle,
reinforcement, process, rigidifying, stooping, crooked, bended, not fastness; (v) hold
procedure straight, inclined, not erect, arched, strove: (v) strive
stiffness: (n) hardness, severity, asymmetrical, droopy strutting: (n) boasting, stiffening,
inflexibility, rigor, clumsiness, storehouse: (adj, n, v) magazine; (n) bracing; (adj) boastful
firmness, awkwardness, inclemency, granary, depot, barn, depository, studded: (adj) muricated, bristling,
harshness, tension, roughness. arsenal, repertory, treasury, storage, peopled, crowded, manifold,
ANTONYMS: (n) softness, entrepot; (adj, n) repository multinominal, multiple, multiplied,
looseness, suppleness, weakness, stoutly: (adv) sturdily, robustly, multitudinous, populous; (v)
ease, malleability, friendliness, strongly, solidly, lustily, vigorously, freckled
relaxation, leniency, smoothness, toughly, resolutely, stockily, portly, stumble: (adj, n, v) slip; (n, v) lurch,
limpness obstinately. ANTONYM: (adv) fall, err, stagger; (adj, v) blunder,
stifle: (v) smother, suffocate, repress, feebly flounder, fumble; (n) misstep; (v)
dampen, muffle, extinguish, stradivarius: (n) Antonio Stradivari, hit, falter
strangle, quell, hush up, asphyxiate, Antonius Stradivarius stumbling: (adj) lurching,
check. ANTONYMS: (v) express, straighten: (v) tidy, unbend, neaten, astounding, hesitant, halting,
arouse, stimulate, light, exacerbate, square away, extend, dress, adjust, awkward, astonishing, maladroit,
show stretch, unwind, right, straight. clumsy, weaving; (adv) stumblingly;
stifled: (adj) strangled, suppressed, ANTONYMS: (v) bend, sink, (n) hesitation. ANTONYM: (adj)
muffled, deafened, completely withdraw, align, stoop, distort, firm
covered, dead, deadened, weak, confuse, complicate, tilt stung: (adj) sting, bit, annoyed,
deaf corn, regardless, decayed strangle: (v) smother, stifle, roiled, irritated, nettled, peeved,
stifling: (adj) close, oppressive, asphyxiate, scrag, tighten, repress, pissed, riled, stings, thrust
sweltering, stuffy, heavy, hot, torrid, constrict, pinch, strangulate; (adj, v) stunted: (adj) scrubby, little, scrawny,
sticky; (n) crushing, quelling, throttle; (n) strangling diminutive, puny, short, spare,
suppression. ANTONYMS: (adj) strangled: (adj) smothered, weak, underdeveloped, dwarfish;
fresh, airy, cool, temperate completely covered, muffled, (v) strangulated. ANTONYM: (adj)
stigma: (adj, n) blot, stain; (n, v) suppressed; (v) bowstringed tall
brand; (n) mark, ignominy, strappado: (v) gantlet, fustigation, stupefaction: (adj, n) stupor; (n)
reproach, blemish, slur, disgrace, flagellation, estrapade, stick law, astonishment, daze, amazement,
scandal, defect. ANTONYM: (n) argumentum baculinum, bastinado, shock, bewilderment, perplexity,
credit rap on the knuckles surprise, awe, grogginess,
stinging: (adj) cutting, bitter, piquant, stratagem: (n) scheme, ruse, plan, semiconsciousness
prickling; (adj, v) caustic, acrid, trick, dodge, ploy; (n, v) contrivance, stupefied: (adj) stunned, amazed,
piercing, poignant, biting, pungent, maneuver, deceit, intrigue; (adj, n) astonished, bewildered, astounded,
dumbfounded, stupid, confused, succor: (n, v) relief, support, comfort, indispensable, important, essential,
flabbergasted, dumfounded, groggy. aid, assistance, succour, ease; (v) basic, pertinent
ANTONYMS: (adj) precise, assist, relieve; (n) ministration, superhuman: (adj) supernatural,
unimpressed consolation. ANTONYM: (n) heavenly, preterhuman, superman,
stupidly: (adv) dully, thickly, distress epic, daring, godlike, gallant, brave,
obtusely, senselessly, fatuously, suckle: (v) lactate, suck, breastfeed, celestial, incredible. ANTONYM:
slowly, insanely, unwisely, foster, give suck, raise, nourish, (adj) normal
doltishly, crassly, densely. draw, harbour; (n) nurture, dry superintending: (adj) administrative,
ANTONYMS: (adv) shrewdly, nurse overseeing, superintendent
brightly, sensibly, wisely, suffocate: (v) strangle, stifle, smother, supernatural: (adj) mystical,
sensitively, prudently, carefully asphyxiate, throttle, gag, extinguish, preternatural, weird, superhuman,
stupor: (n) lethargy, stupefaction, drown, die, quench; (adj) eerie, uncanny, unnatural,
coma, shock, insensibility, suffocating mysterious, ghostly, divine; (n)
unconsciousness, trance, suffocated: (adj) suffocate; (v) occult. ANTONYM: (adj) normal
sluggishness, torpor, haze, asphyxied supersede: (n, v) supplant, displace;
grogginess. ANTONYMS: (n) sullen: (adj, n) morose, sulky, sour; (v) substitute, replace, succeed,
alertness, awareness, wakefulness (adj) gloomy, gruff, glum, moody, commute, annul, deputize, cut out,
stuttering: (n) hesitation, psellism; dark, cross, surly; (adj, v) grim. overrule; (n) remove
(adj) incoherent, halting, ashamed ANTONYMS: (adj) bright, cheery; superstition: (n) superstitious, taboo,
styled: (v) titled, named, benempt (n) cheeriness religion, old wives' tale,
styx: (n) Avernus, pit of Acheron, sulphurous: (adj) stifling, acerb, hot, superstitious notion, lore, folklore,
Stygian creek, Tartarus, Cocytus, sulphureous, infernal, brimstony, fanaticism, fallacy, belief, magic.
river Styx virulent, caustic, containing acid, ANTONYMS: (n) science, truth
subjection: (n) conquest, oppression, sultry, burning hot superstitious: (adj) superstition, false,
captivity, bondage, confinement, summarily: (adj, adv) briefly; (adv) groundless, eerie, irrational,
servitude, dependence, shortly, succinctly, tersely, fallacious
enslavement, slavery, repression, immediately, compendiously, suppers: (n) supper
subjugation compactly, concisely, speedily, supple: (adj, v) flexible, pliable,
submissive: (adj) obedient, passive, condensedly, abridgedly. limber, pliant; (adj) lithe, soft,
meek, dutiful, obsequious, docile, ANTONYM: (adv) eventually plastic, graceful, lithesome, lissom,
compliant, resigned, subject, lowly, sumptuary: (adj) monetary, lissome. ANTONYMS: (adj) rigid,
servile. ANTONYMS: (adj) crumenal, fiscal, financial, inflexible, stocky, clumsy, hard,
assertive, resistant, disobedient, restrictive, numismatical rough, slow, tight, unyielding
defiant, obstinate, rebellious, wild, sumptuous: (adj) magnificent, suppliant: (n) petitioner, applicant,
intractable, proactive; (adv) bossily luxurious, opulent, splendid, besieger, postulant, prayer, lover,
submitting: (n) submission, gorgeous, deluxe, costly, lush, suer; (adj) beseeching, supplicatory,
delegation; (v) submit; (adj) ductile lavish, grand, plush. ANTONYMS: imploring, humbly entreating
subservient: (adj) submissive, (adj) unadorned, humble, ascetic, supplicate: (v) plead, entreat,
subordinate, obsequious, accessory, meager, scanty, impoverished beseech, request, pray, solicit,
obedient, servile, slavish, ancillary, sumptuousness: (n) splendor, implore, beg, invoke, crave, petition
menial, compliant, humble. luxuriousness, opulence, lavishness, supplicating: (adj) imploring,
ANTONYMS: (adj) disobedient, sumptuosity, wealth, magnificence, soliciting, beseeching, entreating,
independent, superior, assertive affluence, expensiveness, richness, petitioning, apologetic, begging,
subsisting: (adj) extant, living stateliness. ANTONYMS: (n) manifesting entreaty, petitory,
subterfuge: (adj, n) quibble; (n) austerity, poverty, shabbiness piteous; (v) supplicate
excuse, pretense, deception, ruse, sunburned: (adj) bronzed, brown, supplicatingly: (adv) beseechingly,
dodge, evasion, pretext, blind, tan, tanned imploring, supplicate
artifice; (n, v) shift sunrise: (n) dawn, sunup, daybreak, supposition: (n, v) conjecture; (n)
subterranean: (adj) underground, daylight, aurora, first light, assumption, hypothesis,
backdoor, profound, subaqueous, dayspring, twilight, dawning, break presumption, premise, speculation,
submarine, subterrene, of day, crack of dawn. ANTONYMS: surmise, guess, supposal, thought,
subterrestrial, deep, hole-and- (n) sunset, sundown, nightfall imagination. ANTONYMS: (n) fact,
corner, subterraneous, subterrany superabundance: (n) overabundance, knowledge, proof, reality, practice
successively: (adv) in turn, one after glut, surplus, surfeit, abundance, surcoat: (n) chesterfield, capote,
the other, in succession, overmuchness, copiousness, greatcoat, tunic, coat, great coat,
sequentially, serially, running, in plethora, redundancy, superfluity, Ulster, hooded coat, overcoating,
order, gradually, subsequently, surplusage raincoat, topcoat
repeatedly, one after another superfluous: (adj, v) spare; (adj) surfeited: (adj) full, gorged, perfect,
succinctly: (adv) compactly, briefly, needless, extra, excess, excessive, satiate, sick, impaired, overfull,
tersely, shortly, summarily, unnecessary, surplus, pointless, made pregnant, jaded, impregnated,
compendiously, laconically, pithily, superabundant, supernumerary, plenteous
curtly, sententiously, condensedly supererogatory. ANTONYMS: (adj) surging: (adj) rolling, billowing,
Victor Hugo 697
boiling, heaving, seething, stormy, swelled: (adj) big, inflated, bloated, remiss; (adj, adv) backward,
swelling, rising and falling; (n) swollen, adult, boastful, bighearted, dilatory, behindhand; (adj) belated,
foaming, wash bad, fully grown, crowing, elder slack, overdue, delayed, sluggish.
surly: (adj) sullen, grumpy, peevish, swiftness: (n) speed, haste, rapidity, ANTONYMS: (adj) early, punctual,
crusty, churlish, grouchy, gruff, celerity, acceleration, quickness, premature, speedy
morose; (adj, n) harsh, rude; (adj, promptness, pace, velocity, agility, tares: (adj) weeds
adv) unfriendly. ANTONYMS: (adj) dispatch. ANTONYM: (n) tarnish: (adj, n, v) sully, blot, soil; (n,
cheerful, gentle, pleasant, courteous, clumsiness v) blemish, taint, spot, stain,
easygoing, friendly swine: (n) hog, boar, beast, sow, disgrace, foul; (v) smear; (adj, v)
surmise: (n, v) guess; (v) suppose, Eohyus, babiroussa, babirussa, blur. ANTONYMS: (v) uncorrupt,
suspect, presume, imagine, divine, barrow, brute, razorback, grunter clean, Polish, purify, enhance,
doubt; (n) hypothesis, supposition, swoon: (adj, n, v) faint; (adj, n) dignify, respect
speculation, assumption. collapse; (n) fainting, syncope, tarnished: (adj) stained, tainted, dim,
ANTONYMS: (n) knowledge, prostration, deliquium; (v) conk, besmirched, spotted, imperfect,
measurement black out, pass out, die; (adj) puff damaged, flyblown, dull, messy,
surmount: (v) overcome, conquer, swordfish: (n) broadbill, scombroid maggoty. ANTONYMS: (adj) clean,
subdue, defeat, master, excel, fish, scombroid, saltwater fish unblemished, famous
transcend, outstrip, surpass, symbolical: (adj) emblematic, tartarus: (n) Gehenna, pit of Acheron,
vanquish, outmatch. ANTONYMS: emblematical, representative, hell, inferno, Tartary, tartar, Styx,
(v) yield, fail figurative, sign, symbolics, allusive, Stygian creek, Hades, Cocytus,
surmounted: (adj) beaten exemplary Avernus
surnames: (n) surname, family name synagogue: (n) tabernacle, house of tastefully: (adv) elegantly, neatly,
surplice: (n) robe, Geneva gown worship, place of worship, temple, refinedly, beautifully, smartly,
frock, gown, pallium church, Mormon tabernacle, house stylishly, classily, savorily,
surtout: (n) spencer of prayer, house of God unobtrusively, decently,
suspending: (adj) suspended, tabernacle: (n) church, synagogue, inconspicuously. ANTONYMS:
suspensory, depending, hanging dwelling, chapel, meetinghouse, (adv) indecently, obviously
suspense: (n) doubt, expectancy, abode, address, subtectacle, sojourn, tasting: (n) degustation, gustation,
anticipation, indecision, insecurity, seat; (v) tent savoring, relishing, sample,
unrest, expectation, irresolution, tabernacles: (n) Feast of Tabernacles, gustatory sensation, gustatory
suspension, tension; (adj, n) Feast of Booths perception, discernment, drinking,
hesitation. ANTONYM: (n) taciturn: (adj) silent, quiet, reserved, eating, feeding
knowledge uncommunicative, speechless, tattered: (adj) shabby, ragged,
sustaining: (adj) underneath, secretive, mute, withdrawn, distant, scruffy, dilapidated, threadbare,
alimentary, at the bottom of, mum, incommunicative. frayed, seedy, worn out, torn,
comforting, filling, fundamental, ANTONYMS: (adj) wordy, voluble, shattered; (adj, v) bedraggled.
healthy, profitable, rich; (n) communicative, forthcoming, fluent, ANTONYMS: (adj) elegant, smart,
continuation, maintenance open new
suzerain: (n) seignior, tyrant, thane, tallow: (n) grease, lard, oil, suet, tatters: (n) rags, clothing
feudal lord, chief, despot, oligarch, cream, butter, cicatrix, beef tallow, tattle: (v) gossip, babble, chat, chatter,
country, sovereign, autocrat, body dubbin, animal oil, scar blather, snitch, blabber, talk, prate,
politic talon: (n) talus, ogee, unguis, sere, prattle, blither. ANTONYMS: (v)
swallowing: (adj) absorptive, renewal coupon, stock hide, conceal
unsuspecting, absorbent, absorbing; talons: (v) claws, tenaculum, unguis, tawny: (n) tan, buff; (adj, n) brown,
(n) consumption tentacle, teeth; (n) clutches auburn; (adj) luteous, golden,
swallows: (n) sparrows, rooks, tambourine: (n) drum, tympan, sallow, russet, chestnut, creamy,
robins, Passeriformes, Hirundinidae, timbrel, tamburin, tambourin, moderately black
etc, order Passeriformes membranophone tedium: (n) ennui, monotony,
swarm: (n) host, horde, multitude, tamed: (adj) tame, broken, tediousness, dullness, sameness,
drove, throng, cloud, assembly; (n, domesticated, under control, tamer, dreariness, lifelessness, difficulty,
v) mob; (v) teem, pour; (adj) shoal. meek, gentle, domestic, docile, drabness; (adj) dull work,
ANTONYMS: (v) retreat; (n) few controlled, cultivated humdrum. ANTONYMS: (n)
swarming: (adj) full, crowded, alive, tapering: (adj) narrow, narrowing, excitement, diversion, variation,
packed, populous, sensitive, thick; pointed, angustation, coarctation, entertainment, ease
(v) dense, crowded to suffocation, conical, dwindling, constricting, tempest: (adj, n) storm, gust; (n) gale,
serried, closely packed. constrictive, decreasing; (n) hurricane, squall, disturbance,
ANTONYMS: (adj) clear, deserted crowning cyclone, typhoon, agitation, tornado,
swarthy: (adj) dusky, black, swart, tapestry: (n) arras, tapis, textile, blizzard. ANTONYM: (n) serenity
sable, somber, dun, tawny, coloured, embroidery, hanging, carpet, cloth, tempestuous: (adj, n) rough,
colored, atramentous; (n) brunette. complexness, fabric, material, boisterous, severe; (adj) raging,
ANTONYMS: (adj) fair, light mending furious, wild, angry, windy, fierce,
sweeps: (n) sweep period tardy: (adj, adv, v) late; (adj, v) slow, gusty; (adj, v) turbulent.
ANTONYMS: (adj) mild, moderate, dumpy, chunky, fat, stumpy, squab, lightning, thunder, thunderclap,
relaxed dense; (adj, n) burly; (adj, v) bombshell, surprise, flash, shackle,
temporizing: (n) timeserving compact. ANTONYMS: (adj) slight, quarrel, streak of lightning, streak
tenable: (adj) reasonable, justifiable, slender, slim thunderous: (adj) earsplitting,
maintainable, plausible, thieving: (n) larceny, stealing, deafening, loud, booming, roaring,
invulnerable, excusable, believable, robbery, embezzlement, terrific, shrill, boisterous,
credible, defendable, sensible. misapplication, misappropriation, unpropitious, turbulent, thriving
ANTONYMS: (adj) unbelievable, peculation, defalcation, burglary, thunderstruck: (adj) astonished,
untenable thievery; (adj) thievish. flabbergasted, dumbfounded,
tenacious: (adj) obstinate, dogged, ANTONYMS: (adj) philanthropic, amazed, stupefied, stunned,
adhesive, persistent, resolute, tough, benevolent speechless, dumfounded, aghast,
sticky; (adj, v) strong, steadfast; (v) thinker: (n) intellect, mind, longhead, dazed; (v) awestruck
retentive; (adj, n) firm. head, intellectual, creative thinker, tiara: (n) crown, coronet, circlet,
ANTONYMS: (adj) fickle, loose, theorist, sage, wise person, pundit, miter, triple crown, cap of
slack, surrendering, unattached, ruminator. ANTONYM: (n) realist maintenance, jewelled headdress,
weak, compliant, yielding, malleable thinness: (n) slenderness, slimness, jewelry, tiar
tenderly: (adv) softly, kindly, tenuity, leanness, rarity, tickled: (adj) tickled pink, overjoyed,
delicately, affectionately, fondly, narrowness, slightness, fluidity, delighted, detective novel, ecstatic,
warmly, painfully, sensitively, fluidness, maceration, emaciation. elated, jubilant, happy, glad, excited.
caringly, sympathetically, gently. ANTONYMS: (n) plumpness, ANTONYM: (adj) disappointed
ANTONYMS: (adv) roughly, stoutness, width, thickness, fatness, tigress: (n) tiger, shrew
severely, disapprovingly, harshly roundness, coarseness, strength tiled: (adj) paved, lined, smooth,
tenfold: (adj) decuple, decimal, tenth, thistle: (adj) porcupine, beard, cemented
containing ten hedgehog, feather, mote, chevaux de timidity: (n) shyness, fear,
tenon: (n) projection, protuberance frise, dust, down, brier; (n) nodding bashfulness, nervousness, reserve,
testudo: (n) protective covering, thistle, carline thistle cowardice, fearfulness, timidness,
genus testudo, protection thither: (adv) hither, whither, on that modesty, humility, coyness.
tetrahedral: (adj) subulate, setarious, point, in that respect, at that place, ANTONYMS: (n) confidence,
xiphoid in that location; (adj) further, boastfulness, swagger, brashness,
themis: (adj) Astraea, nemesis ulterior, remoter, succeeding, more security
thence: (adv) therefore, thus, distant timidly: (adv) fearfully, timorously,
therefrom, thereof, consequently, thrash: (v) flog, whip, beat, pound, cautiously, shyly, diffidently,
then, so, thereafter, thenceforth, defeat, whack, lam, drub, baste, lick, anxiously, nervously, shily,
since, on account of clobber gingerly, modestly, apprehensively.
thenceforth: (adv) thenceforward, threadbare: (adj, v) stale, shabby, ANTONYMS: (adv) confidently,
thence, elsewhere, absent, not there, dilapidated, bald, frayed, faded; bravely, daringly, brashly,
then (adj) hackneyed, worn, banal, trite, fearlessly, decisively, brazenly
theocracy: (n) democracy, form of tattered. ANTONYMS: (adj) new, tinge: (n, v) color, hue, tint, dye,
government, ideology, divine unused, reliable, fresh, unworn, stain, touch, tincture; (n) shade, cast,
sovereignty, political system, pristine, original undertone; (adj, n, v) dash.
oligarchy, political orientation, thrice: (adv) three times, thirdly ANTONYMS: (v) whiten, pale; (n)
political theory thrilling: (adj, n) electric; (adj) white, information, pallor
theocratic: (adj) pastoral, ministerial, exciting, sensational, exhilarating, tinged: (adj) plausible, bright,
clerical, priestly, capitular, theistic, electrifying, emotional, rousing, painted, fey, touched, specious,
theocratical, prelatical gripping, stimulating; (adj, v) colorful, stained, tined, dyed, tinct
thereon: (adv) on that, thereupon, impressive; (n, v) swelling. tinsel: (adj, n) frippery, finery; (adj, v)
afterward, at once, early, ANTONYMS: (adj) boring, meretricious; (v) gloss; (adj) gaudy,
immediately, therefore depressing, discouraging, upsetting, trumpery, tawdry, showy; (n)
thereto: (adv) thereunto, moreover; uninspiring gimcrack, gewgaw, clinquant
(adj) likeness, accurate, coincidence, throng: (n, v) swarm, herd, mob, tint: (n, v) color, tinge, hue, stain,
correct, correctness, deportment, flock, press; (n) multitude, host, dye, tinct; (n) shade, tincture, tone,
detail, exact, expected horde, mass, assembly, concourse. cast; (v) paint. ANTONYMS: (n)
thereupon: (adv) hereupon, next, ANTONYMS: (n) trickle, few; (v) white, pallor; (v) whiten, pale
then, immediately, therefore, disperse tipsy: (adj) tight, intoxicated, soused,
therewith, in the sequel, close upon, thronged: (adj) throng, busy, blotto, inebriated, fuddled, taut,
upon which, whereupon, populous, brisk, teeming, swarming, stringent, loaded, besotted, close
accordingly sprightly, sensitive, replete, tiptoe: (v) tip, tippytoe, creep, patter,
thicket: (n) brake, coppice, brush, overflowing; (n) persistent skirt, skip, tilt, sidle, lean; (adj) alert;
grove, spinney, bush, brushwood, thrusting: (n) thrust, push, jab, poke, (n) quieter. ANTONYM: (v) clump
cluster, underbrush, undergrowth, jabbing, stab, driving force, scoke, tiresome: (adj) tedious, dull,
underwood sack, punch, Phytolacca Americana laborious, irksome, monotonous,
thickset: (adj) thick, squat, heavyset, thunderbolt: (n) bolt of lightning, annoying, slow, dreary, bothersome;
Victor Hugo 699
(adj, v) wearisome, troublesome. torturer, pesterer, annoyer, teaser, slide, limpidity, pellucidness,
ANTONYMS: (adj) stimulating, fun, tease, tantalizer, persecutor, gadfly, lucidity, diaphaneity, translucency,
varied, soothing, pleasant, brisk, flat overhead, foil, pellucidity.
exciting, convenient, refreshing torpid: (adj) inactive, sluggish, ANTONYMS: (n) ambiguity,
titan: (n) colossus, heavyweight, indolent, dull, slow, dormant, lazy, opacity, dirtiness, impurity
monster, behemoth, Goliath, dead, lifeless, flat, supine. transverse: (adj, v) cross; (adj)
Hyperion, Ahriman, hulk, cocus, ANTONYMS: (adj) energetic, lively crosswise, oblique, crossing,
atlas; (adj) gigantic torrent: (n) flood, cloudburst, thwartwise, thwart, diagonal,
toad: (n) batrachian, anuran, overflow, stream, downpour, rain, grumpy, perversely irritable; (v)
salientian, crapaud, sneak, sheep shower, soaker, inundation; (adj, n) traverse; (adv) transversely
frog, robber frog, spadefoot, volley, eruption. ANTONYMS: (n) trapdoor: (n) postern, ostiary, porch,
spadefoot toad; (v) toady; (adj) satyr drought, trickle, shower pitfall, gate, false bottom, door, back
tocsin: (n) alarm, bell, alert, larum, torrents: (n) white water, rapids door, sliding panel, wicket, hatch
alarum, signal of distress, alerts, fire tortoise: (v) sluggard, loiterer, trapezium: (n) os trapezium, carpal,
cross, hue and cry, note of alarm, lingerer; (n) gopher, desert tortoise, carpal bone, quadrangle,
signal gopher tortoise, giant tortoise, quadrilateral, tetragon, the
toils: (n) net, cobweb, meshes, mesh gopher turtle, testudo trapezium, trapezium bone
tolerable: (adj) passable, mediocre, tortuous: (adj) indirect, intricate, trapezoid: (adj) trapezoidal,
bearable, fair, middling, reasonable, circuitous, complex, knotty, trapezohedral, trapeziform; (n)
adequate, respectable, endurable, winding, convoluted, sinuous, tetragon, quadrangle, carpal bone
sufferable; (adj, v) satisfactory. involved, devious, roundabout. trappings: (n) equipment, rigging,
ANTONYMS: (adj) intolerable, ANTONYMS: (adj) straightforward, caparison, embroidery, trapping,
exceptional, unbearable, straight, uncomplicated, untwisted, tackle, suit, skirt, accouterment,
unsatisfactory, bad, inadequate, easy, simple lappet, flap
appalling, inadmissible tortuously: (adv) complexly, traverse: (v) travel, walk, crisscross,
tolerably: (adv) well enough, convolutedly, involvedly, track, thwart, contradict, deny; (n, v)
passably, acceptably, reasonably, twistingly, sinuously, meanderingly, journey, range; (n) crossing,
enough, moderately, to a tolerable twistily, intricately, flexuously, traversal
degree, pretty, to an adequate indirectly, obliquely traversing: (n) traverse,
degree; (adj, adv) somewhat; (adj) torturer: (n) flogger, oppressor, perambulation, crossing; (adj)
pretty well. ANTONYMS: (adv) scourger moving
unbearably, intolerably, tossing: (n) cast; (adj) moving treble: (adj) threefold, ternary,
unacceptably, unreasonably, tottering: (adj) unsteady, ramshackle, triplex, thribble, double, dual, high,
insufficiently, inadequately easily shaken, tottery, sick, rocky, voce di testa, shrill; (adj, v) triple; (v)
tongs: (n) forceps, pincers, pliers, broken, trembling, cracked; (v) sing
nippers, poker, lifter, pair of tongs, drooping; (n) convulsion trefoil: (n) shamrock, tierce, medick,
trivet, vice, ice tongs; (v) clutches tout: (v) bluster, brag, advertise, lucerne, medic, alfalfa, sickle
tonsure: (n) pate, shaving boast, canvass, blow, gas, bespeak, medick, sickle Lucerne, red clover,
toothed: (adj) jagged, jaggy, serrate, gasconade, swash; (n) hotel runner. Dutch clover, purple clover
notched, erose, rough, dentate, ANTONYMS: (v) conceal, trellis: (n) lattice, grille, espalier,
cogged, uneven, dentated, understate treillage, train, grate, net, network,
palmated. ANTONYM: (adj) smooth trample: (v) oppress, stamp, squash, grill; (v) plait, wattle
toothless: (adj) powerless, crush, tread, flatten, defeat, tremble: (adj, n, v) shiver; (n, v)
immobilized, edentulous, dull. suppress, step, frustrate; (n) quiver, shudder, thrill, palpitate;
ANTONYM: (adj) effective trampling (adj, v) totter, quake; (n) throb; (v)
topmast: (n) topgallant, mast, royal trampled: (adj) crushed, damaged, flutter, quail, falter. ANTONYMS:
mast, topgallant mast flattened, compressed, packed down (v) steady, calm
topmost: (adj) highest, upmost, trampling: (n) trample; (adj) moving trembles: (n) animal disease,
upper, maximum, uppermost, head, tranquillizer: (n) tranquilliser, nervousness
supreme, utmost, crowning, apical, sedative, antianxiety agent, tremblingly: (adv) quiveringly,
uttermost. ANTONYM: (adj) bottom ataractic, ataractic drug, downer, tremulously, quakingly,
tormented: (adj) worried, tortured, hydroxyzine hydrochloride, shudderingly, shiveringly, shakily,
hagridden, troubled, beleaguered, ataractic agent, ataraxic, ataraxic quaveringly
beset, besieged, cruciate, cruciform, drug, benzodiazepine trespassing: (n) interference; (adj)
distraught, distressed. ANTONYM: tranquilly: (adv) serenely, calmly, invasive
(adj) calm peacefully, quietly, stilly, tresses: (n) locks, mop, head of hair
tormenting: (v) bothering, teasing, undisturbedly, untroubledly, trestle: (n) rack, table, bench,
pestering, harassing; (adj) restfully, placidly, coolly, pedestal, bridge, beam, tressel,
harrowing, perturbing, plaguy, unperturbedly. ANTONYMS: (adv) supporting tower; (v) fragment, bit,
raging, upsetting, vexatious; (adj, v) anxiously, noisily scantling
worrying transcribed: (adj) written, tinned tricot: (n) knit, made of tricot, of
tormentor: (n) pest, tormenter, transparency: (n) clearness, clarity, tricot, warp knitting
trifles: (n) jests, nonsense, nugae, acrobat, pen, coop grotesqueness, grotesquery,
trivia tumult: (adj, n, v) hubbub, repulsiveness, homeliness,
trimming: (n) decoration, dressing, disturbance; (n) stir, commotion, unsightliness; (adj, n)
adornment, ornament, fringe, bustle, din, fuss, excitement; (n, v) unpleasantness. ANTONYMS: (n)
border, clipping, cutting, frill, clamor, disorder, brawl. beauty, attractiveness, pleasantness
edging, lace ANTONYMS: (n) peace, push, unaccustomed: (adj) new, strange,
trinket: (n) trifle, novelty, charm, serenity, order, calm unusual, inexperienced,
gaud, jewel, fallal; (adj, n) bauble, tumultuous: (adj, n) boisterous, unseasoned, unacquainted,
gewgaw, gimcrack; (adj) toy, paper tempestuous; (adj) disorderly, uncustomary, rare, unfamiliar,
pellet riotous, turbulent, noisy, furious, unwonted; (adj, v) untrained.
tripe: (n) drivel, rubbish, trash, loud, troubled, disturbed; (adj, v) ANTONYMS: (adj) familiar, normal,
baloney, twaddle, applesauce, tumultuary. ANTONYMS: (adj) ready, usual, prepared,
claptrap, folderol, garbage, gut, peaceful, calm knowledgeable, customary
rigmarole. ANTONYM: (n) fact tumultuously: (adv) turbulently, unaided: (adj) naked, unassisted,
tripod: (n) triplopia, triangle, tempestuously, violently, defenseless, nude, bare,
trionym, easel, trident, triennium, uproariously, boisterously, independent, unaccompanied, open;
trigon, trisula, triskelion, triseme, tumultuarily, noisily, furiously, (adj, adv) alone, on your own; (adv)
trireme loudly, agitatedly; (adj, adv) madly single-handed. ANTONYM: (adv)
triumphantly: (adv) exultantly, tumulus: (n) burial mound, mound, jointly
winningly, jubilantly, elatedly, tope, grave mound, cromlech, hill, unanswerable: (adj) irrefutable, final,
proudly, successfully, triumphally, lawn cart, garden cart, barrowful, incontestable, irresponsible,
conqueringly, gleefully, delightedly, cairn incontrovertible, indisputable,
gloriously turin: (n) Torino decisive, ultimate, undeniable, not
trooper: (n) cavalryman, soldier, turk: (n) effendi, Ottoman refragable; (v) probative
officer, policeman, rank and file, turnkey: (n) jailer, gaoler, keeper, unattached: (adj) single,
police officer, peon, warrior, warder, jailor, guard, custodian, uncommitted, unconnected,
dragoon, Tommy Atkins, sepoy screw, ranger, prison guard, custos unmarried, separate, independent,
trots: (n) Aztec two-step, turnspit: (n) turnbroach loose, discrete, distinct,
Montezuma's revenge; (adj) ill turpitude: (n) depravity, evil, uninterested, individual.
troubling: (adj) worrying, corruption, degeneracy, ANTONYMS: (adj) married,
disquieting, distressing, distressful, depravation, wickedness, trimming, committed, involved, connected
disconcerting, alarming, perturbing, transgression, shuffling; (adj) unbound: (adj) uncontrolled,
bad, annoying, sad, worrisome. debasement, abjection unconstrained, open, untied,
ANTONYM: (adj) reassuring turret: (adj) steeple, spire, campanile, untrammeled, exempt, unchained,
trumpeter: (n) bugler, harper, obelisk, pillar, monument, minaret, released, unfettered, unobstructed;
marshal, crier, flag bearer, cornetist, column; (n) gun turret, gun (v) unencumbered. ANTONYMS:
fifer, fiddler, Cygnus buccinator, enclosure, garret (adj) bound, restricted
wader; (v) charlatan turreted: (adj) fortified unbridled: (adj) wild, unchecked,
trumpets: (n) Sarracenia flava, yellow tusk: (n) ivory, fang, torsk, dentine, licentious, reinless, ungoverned,
pitcher plant, pitcher plant, yellow dentin, bone, tush; (adj) nib; (v) violent, unmuzzled, ungovernable,
trumpet detusk, horn, take away rampant, rakish, disorderly
truss: (v) bandage, bind, fasten, twain: (n) pair, brace, dyad, deuce, unbuttoned: (adj) unobstructed,
bundle, tie up; (n, v) pack, prop; (n) twosome, duo, straddle, bitstock, untrammeled, unchecked,
frame, stay, fagot; (adj) pinion coupling, braces, yoke unconfined, unprevented,
trusting: (adj) credulous, twill: (adj, v) curl, wrinkle; (adj) unhindered, uncaught,
unsuspecting, naive, confident, corded, crisp; (v) braid, plexus, felt, unrestrained, unlaced, unfastened,
confiding, simple, innocent, gullible, plat, plait, mesh; (n) cloth unconstrained
reliant, give, easy to fool. twined: (adj) bent, coiled, contorted, unceasingly: (adv) incessantly,
ANTONYMS: (adj) distrustful, distorted, misrepresented, perverted endlessly, ceaselessly, continually,
suspicious, doubtful, hesitant, twinkling: (n) moment, jiffy, minute, unremittingly, unendingly,
protective, shrewd, disingenuous, second, flash, trice, twinkle, wink, constantly, always, perpetually,
smart, jaded split second, breath; (adj) sparkling. uninterruptedly, eternally.
tuft: (n) wisp, crest, cluster, truss, ANTONYM: (adj) dull ANTONYM: (adv) acutely
knot, fagot, tassel, strand, thicket, tyrant: (n) dictator, oppressor, unchangeable: (adj) invariable, firm,
curl; (adj, n) feather autocrat, disciplinarian, bully, immutable, permanent, irrevocable,
tufted: (adj) hairy, cespitose, authoritarian, sovereign, czar, irreversible, unalterable, immovable,
caespitose, topknotted, plumed, monarch, suzerain, stickler inflexible, determined, definite.
hirsute, rough, decorated, ubiquity: (n) ubiquitousness, ubiety, ANTONYMS: (adj) changing,
filamentous, fimbriated, bushy presence, infinity, ubiquitariness, inconstant, flexible, uncertain, fluid,
tuileries: (n) Tuileries gardens everywhereness, prevalence unconfirmed, impermanent
tumbrel: (n) limber, cart, trebucket, ugliness: (n) eyesore, offensiveness, unclean: (adj) foul, impure, nasty,
tumbler, pontoon, dumpcart, hideousness, garishness, gaudiness, dirty, grubby, muddy, squalid,
Victor Hugo 701
grimy, sordid, dingy, soiled. ANTONYMS: (n) peace, calm, unfashioned
ANTONYMS: (adj) clean, hygienic, confidence unicorn: (n) trap, dogcart, imaginary
pure, uncontaminated unendingly: (adv) continuously, being, imaginary creature,
unconcern: (n) apathy, nonchalance, unceasingly, incessantly, ceaselessly, monoceros, tandem, Whitechapel,
insouciance, coldness, detachment, perpetually, everlastingly, eternally, random
impassiveness, insensibility, unremittingly, infinitely, constantly, unintelligible: (adj) opaque,
disregard, phlegm, carelessness, continually. ANTONYM: (adv) inarticulate, unfathomable,
lethargy. ANTONYMS: (n) sporadically impenetrable, unaccountable,
responsiveness, worry, anxiety, unevenness: (n) irregularity, ambiguous, not clear, obscure,
interest disparity, roughness, diversity, indistinct, inconceivable, secret.
unconquerable: (adj) disproportion, jaggedness, ANTONYMS: (adj) understandable,
insurmountable, impregnable, variableness, asymmetry, clear, comprehensible, intelligible,
insuperable, irresistible, unbeatable, bumpiness, unsteadiness; (n, v) obvious
proof against, resistless, wave. ANTONYMS: (n) unjustly: (adv) wrongly, wrongfully,
indomitable, unquenchable, smoothness, excellence, symmetry, wickedly, iniquitously, inequitably,
impassable, inextinguishable. equality, predictability undeservedly, illegally, foully,
ANTONYMS: (adj) conquerable, unfastened: (adj) open, movable, injuriously, unrighteously,
feeble loose, unbuttoned, overt, opened, unjustifiedly. ANTONYMS: (adv)
uncovering: (n) breakthrough, opened out, slack, undecided, rightly, reasonably
detection, revelation, baring, find, undetermined, assailable. unlace: (v) loosen, untie, unbrace,
denudation, disforestation, espial, ANTONYMS: (adj) buttoned, fixed, unlash, unlashed, unloose
catching, husking, stripping shut, tied unlettered: (adj) uneducated,
undeceive: (v) unbeguile, unbefool, unfastening: (n) loosening, untying ignorant, unlearned, analphabetic,
disabuse, inform unfold: (v) spread, open, extend, unenlightened, uninformed, unread,
undecided: (adj) uncertain, doubtful, develop, stretch, spread out, reveal, nescient, uninstructed, uncultivated,
dubious, unresolved, pending, display, stretch out; (adj, v) untaught
indecisive, irresolute, hesitant, expound, explain. ANTONYMS: (v) unloose: (v) loosen, clear, liberate,
debatable, indefinite; (adj, v) fold, block, stagnate, stop, hide, loose, undo, unchain, free, extricate,
undetermined. ANTONYMS: (adj) withhold, check, wrap, conceal disengage, unloosen, unbind
certain, determined, sure, settled, unfolded: (adj) extended, stretched, unmercifully: (adv) pitilessly,
definite, decisive outspread, outstretched, widely remorselessly, unpityingly,
underhand: (adj) stealthy, furtive, spread, stretched out, explicate, unrelentingly, ruthlessly, cruelly,
clandestine, sly, underhanded, evolved, displayed, expanded, relentlessly, unsparingly, hardly,
sneaky, shifty, covert, crooked, detailed heartlessly, inclemently
indirect; (adj, adv) underarm. ungracefully: (adv) inelegantly, unpunished: (adj) impune
ANTONYMS: (adj) honest, clumsily, awkwardly, woodenly, unrelenting: (adj, n) harsh, hard,
overhand rigidly, uncouthly, meanly, severe; (adj) stern, relentless,
undisturbed: (adj) peaceful, quiet, ungraciously, without graciousness. implacable, austere, cruel, grim,
tranquil, serene, placid, still, easy, ANTONYM: (adv) elegantly unforgiving, persistent.
smooth, uninterrupted, untroubled, ungrateful: (adj) unmindful, ANTONYMS: (adj) feeble,
composed. ANTONYMS: (adj) unthankful, unappreciative, inexorable, sympathetic, temporary,
tense, anxious, agitated, bothered, unnatural, ingrate, unpleasant, merciful, compassionate, finite,
disordered, disturbed, noisy, scared distasteful, displeasing, unkind, gentle
undressed: (adj) naked, unclad, disagreeable, not kind. unrhymed: (adj) rimeless, not in
unclothed, bare, raw, stripped, ANTONYMS: (adj) grateful, verse, in prose, unrimed.
unattired, unappareled, crude, thankful, appreciative ANTONYM: (adj) rhymed
rough, disrobed. ANTONYMS: (adj) unguent: (n) balm, salve, cream, unrivalled: (adj) unmatched,
covered, decent unction, balsam, cerate, arnica, unrivaled, matchless, nonpareil,
undulated: (adj) undulatory chrisom, emollient, chrism, liniment unmatchable, incomparable, one,
undulating: (adj) sinuous, waved, unheard: (adj) aspirated, atonic, deaf, one and only, unequalled,
undulant, undulatory, curly, indistinct, involving surds, unequaled, unique
apprenticed, zigzag, crimped, curvy, nonvocal, radical, sharp, silent, surd, unseasonable: (adj) inopportune,
indented, intended. ANTONYMS: irrational inappropriate, premature, ill timed,
(adj) steep, straight unheard-of: (adj) extraordinary, improper, immature, inconvenient,
unearth: (v) disinter, locate, uncover, unknown, wonderful, unlikely, ill-timed, inept, unchancy; (v)
reveal, dig up, excavate, turn up, unimaginable, uncanny, outlandish, illtimed
discover, find, dig, expose. unaccountable, obscure, nameless, unshapely: (adj) unsightly,
ANTONYMS: (v) hide, conceal inconceivable deformed, misshapen, baggy
uneasiness: (n) disquiet, discomfort, unhewn: (adj) unwrought, unsheathed: (adj) denudate, stripped,
inquietude, anxiety, unease, malaise, unlabored, unpolished, rude, rough, bald, barren, bleak, completely
disquietude, apprehension, unrest, shapen, unblown, unboiled, unclothed, denuded, desolate,
impatience; (n, v) agitation. unconcocted, uncooked, marginal, naked, nude
unspeakable: (adj) ineffable, impracticableness, impracticability, nervously, timidly, fearfully
dreadful, awful, terrible, unusefulness, vanity, idleness, valor: (n) bravery, courage, heroism,
inexpressible, nasty, horrible, ineffectualness, senselessness; (adj) valiancy, daring, spirit, pluck,
atrocious, indefinable, shocking; useless. ANTONYMS: (n) value, audacity, boldness; (adj, n)
(adj, v) unutterable. ANTONYMS: competence, helpfulness, gallantry, prowess
(adj) nice, wonderful, pleasant, effectiveness, fruitfulness, skill, vampire: (n) lamia, leech, ghoul,
good, lovely, bearable utility, worthiness, worth, ability; vulture, extortioner, vampire bat,
untamed: (adj) unbroken, barbarous, (adj) purposeful exploiter, ghost, gorilla, mosquito,
fierce, feral, barbarian, wild, usher: (v) lead, escort, accompany, ogre
unpolished, uncivilised, uncivilized, marshal, show, conduct, bring, vanishing: (n) disappearance,
uncombed, ferocious. ANTONYMS: attend; (n) attendant, porter, vanishment, dissipation; (adj) dying,
(adj) cultivated, tame doorman fleeting, momentary, breaking up,
untied: (adj) unfastened, unchained, utensils: (n) gear, equipment, tackle, declining, diminishing, dissolving,
unshackled, unlaced, unbound, apparatus, hardware evanescent. ANTONYMS: (adj)
unfettered, free, unsewed, open, vacillating: (adj) indecisive, thriving, increasing
unconnected, rambling. changeable, undecided, wavering, vanquished: (adj) beaten,
ANTONYMS: (adj) tied, laced giddy, vacillant, hesitating, hesitant; overwhelmed, routed, overcome,
untoward: (adj) unlucky, (adj, v) infirm, debilitated, overpowered, overthrown, defeated,
unfortunate, inauspicious, enfeebled. ANTONYMS: (adj) crushed, tried, tired out, practiced
unbecoming, inopportune, indecent, stable, strong, consistent, decisive, vapor: (n) fog, cloud, steam, haze,
unfavorable, unseemly, improper, determined, resolute evaporation, vapour, fume; (adj, n)
clumsy, stubborn. ANTONYMS: vagabond: (n, v) tramp; (adj, n) gas, air; (adj, v) bluster; (v) boast
(adj) auspicious, suitable, lucky, vagrant; (v) roam, stray, wander, vapors: (n) megrims, mist, blues, blue
acceptable, happy, fortunate range, ramble; (n) outcast, bum, devils, fog, depression,
unuttered: (adj) implicit, unstated, wanderer, nomad. ANTONYMS: (n) hypochondriasis, pessimism, spleen,
unspoken, unexpressed, quiet, inhabitant, resident; (adj) settled brume, horrors
implied, inarticulate, mute, silent, vagabondage: (n) roving, vagrancy, variegated: (adj) mottled, dappled,
tongueless, unverbalized wandering, vagabondry, journey, varicolored, varicoloured, various,
unwieldy: (adj) clumsy, cumbersome, peregrination piebald, speckled, assorted,
unmanageable, heavy, bulky, vagaries: (n) whims, disposition, different, multicolored, pied.
ponderous, gawky, massive, facetiousness, freaks, humor, ill ANTONYM: (adj) uniform
ungainly, lumbering; (v) cumbrous. humor, mood, temper, caprices varlet: (n) rascal, knave, page,
ANTONYMS: (adj) convenient, vagrant: (adj, v) stray, roving, attendant, scoundrel, mean wretch,
manageable, wieldy, compact, itinerant, Peripatetic, rambling; (n) cullion, scalawag, scallywag,
handy, dainty, light tramp, hobo, drifter, wanderer; (v) rapscallion, scamp
unwinding: (adj) moving unsettled, erratic. ANTONYM: (n) vassal: (n) feudatory, liegeman, liege,
unwonted: (adj) unaccustomed, rare, resident serf, helot, dependent, subject, liege
unusual, unused, infrequent, vainly: (adv) uselessly, futilely, subject, follower, bondman,
uncustomary, singular, fruitlessly, conceitedly, in vain, homager
extraordinary, scarce, worthlessly, abortively, bootlessly, vaulted: (adj) domed, hollow,
unaccountable, remarkable arrogantly, unproductively; (adj, hooked, testudinated, rounded,
unyielding: (adj) obdurate, stubborn, adv) foolishly. ANTONYMS: (adv) arcuated, in the form of an arch,
unbending, uncompromising, fruitfully, successfully, effectively curved, concave, roofed
relentless, firm, obstinate, resolute, valence: (n) valance, valentia, vegetating: (n) idleness; (v)
hard, inexorable, inflexible. atomicity, quantivalence, vegetative
ANTONYMS: (adj) flexible, equivalence, potency, powerfulness, vehemence: (n) force, violence, fury,
compliant, soft, surrendering, covalency; (v) pi clouds, double passion, eagerness, strength,
yielding, bouncy, loose, limp, bond, unsaturation impetuosity, enthusiasm, fierceness,
unrelenting, gentle, fragile valet: (n) man, attendant, lackey, heat, fervor. ANTONYMS: (n)
uplifted: (adj) high, raised, noble, not butler, flunkey, manservant, waiter, indifference, meekness, serenity
inverted, not prone, proud, gentleman, livery servant, servant, vehement: (adj) fierce, intense,
undismayed, stately, lofty, sublime, retainer violent, strong, furious, passionate,
animated valiant: (adj) brave, courageous, ferocious, eager, hot, fervent, fervid.
uproar: (adj, n, v) hubbub, intrepid, fearless, heroic, audacious, ANTONYMS: (adj) impassionate,
disturbance, tumult; (n) din, noise, gallant, daring, dauntless, stout, indifferent, mild, calm
turmoil, commotion, disorder, stalwart. ANTONYMS: (adj) afraid, veiled: (adj) hidden, unseen, covert,
confusion; (adj, n) row; (n, v) brawl. despicable secret, masked, disguised, obscure,
ANTONYMS: (n) calm, peace, valiantly: (adv) bravely, valorously, cryptic, covered, indistinct, oblique.
serenity, order gallantly, intrepidly, heroically, ANTONYMS: (adj) overt, open,
urania: (n) genus Venus boldly, audaciously, fearlessly, unveiled, blatant
uselessness: (n) inutility, doughtily, pluckily, heroicly. vellum: (v) parchment, paper,
fruitlessness, pointlessness, ANTONYMS: (adv) execrably, foolscap; (n) skin, lambskin,
Victor Hugo 703
lambskin parchment, papyrus, vesper: (n) evening star, bell; (adj) strength, power, might, vim,
pillar, tablet, sheepskin, forel evening, vesperal stamina. ANTONYMS: (n)
venerable: (adj) ancient, reverend, vespers: (n) matins, mass, divine weakness, apathy, frailty, laziness,
estimable, August, respectable, service, canonical hour, early enervation, inactivity, indifference,
aged, distinguished, sacred, worthy, evening, Evening Prayer, placebo, illness, lifelessness, sluggishness,
of long standing, revered. religious service, service, nightfall, tardiness
ANTONYMS: (adj) unworthy, worship vilify: (adj, v) defame, slander,
unimpressive, undignified, vestibule: (n) lobby, hall, foyer, asperse, abuse, traduce; (v) libel,
disreputable antechamber, entrance hall, hallway, disparage, revile, blacken, smear,
venerated: (adj) reverenced, entry, porch, passage, anteroom, decry. ANTONYM: (v) compliment
reverend, sublime, venerable, threshold villanous: (adj) vile
honored, respected, admired, vestige: (n, v) trace, remains, track, violate: (v) contravene, break,
inspiring awe, acclaimed, August, token, footprint; (n) relic, shadow, transgress, ravish, desecrate,
beloved remnant, indication, evidence, dishonor, disobey, infringe, rape,
veneration: (n) respect, awe, honor, remainder profane, offend. ANTONYMS: (v)
devotion, esteem, adoration, vestiges: (n) leftovers, relics, ruins, obey, respect, consecrate, observe,
deference, estimation, worship, remnants, remainder honor, uphold
admiration, thaumatolatry. vestment: (n, v) dress, vesture, violated: (adj) profaned, seduced,
ANTONYMS: (n) contempt, clothing, apparel; (n) chasuble, dishonored; (v) strained, disunited,
disapproval garment, alb, cassock, surplice, garb, ruined financially, subjugated,
venomous: (adj) poisonous, toxic, attire rough, not continuous, humbled,
noxious, malicious, virulent, vestry: (n) nave, quire, convocation, fractured
spiteful, bitter, deadly, baneful, consistory, synod, choir, chapter, viper: (n) adder, snake, asp, cerastes,
caustic, vicious. ANTONYMS: (adj) chancel, transept, aisle, conclave reptile, horned viper, asp viper,
kind, praising, loving, gentle vesture: (n) clothing, raiment, dress, basilisk, beast, brute, cockatrice
venting: (n) discharge, run, release, clothes, apparel, garment, vestment, virginal: (adj) pure, chaste, vestal,
firing, sack, sacking, firing off, garb, attire, array, togs virtuous, innocent, intact, spotless,
electric arc, spark, expelling; (adj) vexatious: (adj) annoying, pesky, fresh, maidenly; (n) Ebenezer, pair
vocal troublesome, tiresome, galling, of virginals
veracious: (adj) truthful, true, irritating, untoward, thorny, virginity: (n) maidenhood, pucelage,
reliable, accurate, trustworthy, burdensome, pestiferous, vexing. chastity, purity, maidenhead,
faithful, veridical, frank, right, just, ANTONYMS: (adj) aiding, assisting, pudicity, virtue, freshness,
exact. ANTONYM: (adj) untrue helpful, soothing virginhood, innocence, spirit
verdure: (adj, n) greenness; (n) vexed: (adj) troubled, irritated, angry, virile: (adj) strong, manly, male,
greenery, foliage, verdancy, viridity, pestered, peeved, harassed, sore, potent, forceful, manful, vigorous,
green, leafage, flora, freshness, harried, uneasy, cross, offended. robust, mature, full grown, grown
strength, vegetable kingdom ANTONYMS: (adj) calm, up. ANTONYMS: (adj) unmanly,
verified: (adj) substantiated, uncomplicated effeminate
confirmed, hard, proven, viands: (n) provender, victuals, virtuous: (adj) upright, pure,
demonstrated, authoritative, actual, provisions, food, sustenance, righteous, good, moral, just,
established. ANTONYM: (adj) commissariat, larder, cates, diet, honorable, honest, respectable,
unproven nourishment, edible decent, pious. ANTONYMS: (adj)
verily: (adj, adv) really; (adv) indeed, vibrating: (adj) tremulous, vibratory, bad, sinful, corrupt, impure,
in reality, genuinely, quitely, vibrant, swinging, hollow, moving, unethical, decadent, degenerate,
actually, selfly, truely, identically, oscillating, that oscillates, resonant; irreverent
exactly; (adv, int) in truth (n) shaking system visage: (n) face, look, mug,
veritable: (adj, v) real, true, actual, vielle: (n) clavier, dulcimer, eolian physiognomy, expression, kisser,
very; (adj) genuine, authentic, bona harp, pianino, virginals appearance, aspect, brow, smiler,
fide, unquestionable, factual, vigil: (n) wake, lookout; (adj, n, v) forehead
truthful, right. ANTONYMS: (adj) watch; (adj, n) vigilance, vitals: (n) bowels, womb, viscera,
false, unreal surveillance; (v) wakefulness, guard; belly, entrails, organ, necessity, lap,
vermicelli: (n) alimentary paste (adj) vigilant, eyes of Argus, watch intestines, guts, chitterings
vernacular: (n) jargon, slang, patois, and ward; (n, v) sentry vitiated: (adj, v) tainted; (adj) corrupt,
language, dialect, cant, idiom, vigilant: (adj) alert, watchful, diminished, depraved, perverted,
tongue, argot; (adj) vulgar, native attentive, observant, cautious, corrupted, lessened, profligate,
vertebrae: (n) backbone, back, spinal guarded, circumspect, wakeful, adulterate, faded; (v) morbid
column, vertebral column careful, jealous; (adj, v) awake. vivacious: (adj) lively, animated,
vertigo: (n) giddiness, ANTONYMS: (adj) careless, sprightly, vibrant, spry, effervescent,
lightheadedness, swimming, negligent, reckless, oblivious, gay; (adj, v) cheerful, active,
symptom, wooziness, daze, dizzy, unprepared, asleep buoyant, brisk. ANTONYMS: (adj)
dizzy round, dizzy spell, faint, vigor: (n, v) energy; (adj, n) intensity; dull, lethargic, listless, compliment,
faintness (n) spirit, vitality, force, life, inactive, praise, languid, lifeless,
serious, sluggish waking up, arousal evade, hedge, pussyfoot, dodge
vocation: (n, v) calling, profession, wand: (n, v) stick, rod; (n) scepter, wedded: (adj, v) marital, connubial,
employment; (n) occupation, job, verge, mace, pole, baton, sceptre, matrimonial, conjugal, wed; (adj)
trade, business, career, line, mission, fasces, rod of empire; (v) staff nuptial, bridal. ANTONYMS: (adj)
line of work wanton: (adj) loose, dissolute, light, unmarried, unattached
voiceless: (adj) silent, unvoiced, surd, licentious, unchaste, lewd, well-made: (adj) strong, fine, sturdy,
breathed, mute, speechless, debauched, unprovoked; (v) dally; buxom, dainty
inarticulate, tacit, dumb, tongueless, (n, v) sport; (adj, v) flirt. wench: (n) miss, damsel, strumpet,
unspoken. ANTONYMS: (adj) ANTONYMS: (adj) moral, wise, trollop, Trull, missy, quean, slut,
sonant, voiced nice, kind, gentle, decent, clean, nymph, dame; (n, v) drab
volatilized: (adj) gasified, vaporized, careful, observant, justifiable, wharf: (n) quay, harbor, port, pier,
gaseous, vaporised involuntary waterfront, jetty, nailery, bindery,
vole: (n) woodrat, pine mouse, warbler: (n) White-throated blue beehive, basin; (n, v) berth
grasshopper mouse, meadow warbler, White-throated warbler, whelp: (n, v) pup; (n) chrysalis,
mouse, fieldmouse, phenacomys, canary, kinglet, songster, tadpole, nestling, larva, cur, chicken,
redback vole, pine vole, prairie vole, gnatcatcher, greater whitethroat, hound, tendril; (v) lay, bear
meadow vole lesser whitethroat, oscine, oscine whence: (adv) wherefrom, hence,
voluptuous: (adj) luscious, bird, quaverer because, for, why, wherefore, how,
voluptuary, sensual, carnal, warblers: (n) rooks, robins, then, then thence so, how comes it,
sybaritic, epicurean, buxom, sexy, Phylloscopus, Passeriformes, order how happens it
sensuous, lascivious, erotic. Passeriformes, swallows, finches, whereat: (adv) upon which
ANTONYM: (adj) underdeveloped tits, genus Phylloscopus, sparrows wherein: (adv) in what, in which,
voluptuousness: (n) shapeliness, warlike: (adj) military, belligerent, where
lewdness, lasciviousness, bellicose, pugnacious, combative, wherewith: (adv) therewith, herewith
curvaceousness, lust, prurience, aggressive, armigerous, hostile, wherewithal: (n) resources, funds,
delicacy, lechery, gratification, unfriendly, unpacific, militant. cash, capital, ways and means,
luxury, fullness ANTONYMS: (adj) harmonizing, money, potential, supplies, purse,
vomiting: (n) emesis, vomit, friendly faculty; (adv) wherewith
disgorgement, regurgitation, warp: (v) distort, deform, contort, whimsical: (adj, n) fanciful, eccentric;
puking, nausea, puke, spewing, falsify, garble, misrepresent; (n, v) (adj) capricious, freakish, humorous,
sickness, sick, rumination bend, buckle, turn, bias; (n) changeable, fickle, erratic, wayward,
voracity: (n) rapacity, greed, distortion. ANTONYM: (v) clarify odd, arbitrary. ANTONYMS: (adj)
gluttony, ravenousness, wart: (n) verruca, condyloma reasonable, behaving, normal,
rapaciousness, esurience, acuminatum, bulge, tit, growth, serious, predictable
greediness, eagerness, hunger, lump, swelling, exostosis, bump, whine: (n, v) groan, cry, whimper,
voraciousness, covetousness. protuberance, venereal wart grumble, sigh, wail, squeal, screech;
ANTONYM: (n) moderation wasp: (adj) stricture, neck, middle (v) complain, howl; (n) complaint.
vulcan: (n) Wright, smith, constriction, isthmus; (n) gallfly, ANTONYMS: (n) happiness; (v)
manufacturer, forger, builder, hornet, vespid, vespid wasp, praise, compliment
bricklayer, artist, artificer, architect, cynipid gall wasp, cynipid wasp; (v) whipping: (n) flagellation, beating,
mason bee thrashing, licking, lashing, flogging,
vulgarly: (adv) crudely, commonly, wavering: (adj, v) vacillating; (n) overcasting, debacle, slaughter,
plebeianly, grossly, smuttily, fluctuation, hesitation, vacillation; overlocking; (adj) snappy
uncouthly, boorishly, cheaply, (adj) irresolute, indecisive, whirling: (adj) rotary, revolving,
rudely, vilely, tastelessly. undecided, hesitant, uncertain, dizzy, giddy, lightheaded, rotating,
ANTONYM: (adv) decently variable, changeable. ANTONYMS: vortical; (n) rotation, gyration,
vying: (adj) rival, comparative; (n) (adj) decided, constant, resolute, revolution; (adj, n) swirling
rivalry stable, decisive; (n) resolution, whirlwind: (n) tornado, hurricane,
wager: (n, v) stake, hazard, risk, stability twister, gale, tempest, cyclone,
venture, gamble, chance; (v) lay, weariness: (n) exhaustion, tiredness, typhoon, waterspout, windstorm,
pledge, pawn, play; (n) stakes lassitude, languor, asthenopia, flurry, dust devil
wagtail: (n) oscine, oscine bird, defatigation, grogginess, listlessness, whiskered: (adj) barbate,
quaketail boredom, ennui, prostration bewhiskered, fleecy, hairy,
wailing: (n, v) lamentation, lament, wearisome: (adj, v) tiresome, unshaven, whiskery
moaning; (adj) lamenting, weeping, irksome, troublesome; (adj) tedious, whiteness: (n) paleness, ivory, chalk,
crying, wailful, howling, sobbing; dull, monotonous, boring, laborious, pearl, bone, bleach, alabaster,
(adj, n) bawling; (n) cry trying, slow, annoying. frostiness, hoariness, pallor,
waistcoat: (n) CHUDDER, barbe, ANTONYMS: (adj) satisfying, innocence. ANTONYM: (n) black
garment, jerkin, jubbah, oilskins, soothing, exciting, refreshing, easy whitening: (n) lightening, bleaching,
pilot jacket, pajamas, cardigan, weasel: (n) muishond, informer, whiting, change of color, dealbation,
singlet, talma jacket whittret, vare, troublemaker, etiolation, white dyeing, white
wakening: (n) rousing, reveille, shorttail weasel; (v) equivocate, specks
Victor Hugo 705
whitewashed: (adj) overpowered, admiration, amazement, (adj) unwrinkled, ironed, straight
overcome, crushed, conquered, astonishment, surprise, awe, wrinkles: (n) crow's feet
beaten, routed, painted bewilderment, marvel, curiosity, writhe: (adj, v) distort, wrest; (v)
whither: (adv) hither, thither, annus Mirabilis, esteem contort, wriggle, squirm, wrench,
whereunto, whereto, for wondrous: (adj) marvelous, worm, coil, wiggle, thrash, warp
whitish: (adj) pale, milklike, fair, miraculous, marvellous, writhed: (adj) crooked, writhen,
milk, creamy, light, colorless, not astonishing, tremendous, fantastic, distorted, twisted
clear, achromatic, opaque, blond. phenomenal, extraordinary, rattling; writhing: (adj, n) twisting; (adj)
ANTONYMS: (adj) rosy, dark (adv) wonderfully, marvellously wriggly, squirming, wiggling,
wick: (n) taper, candlewick, wax wont: (adj, n) use, custom, usage; (n) wiggly, twisty, tortuous, snaky,
light, cord, candle, sleeve bearing practice, tradition, cleanliness, winding, sinuous; (n) twist
wick, burner assuetude, assuefaction, convention, wrought: (adj) shaped, done, worked,
wide-awake: (adj) vigilant, wakeful, rut; (v) practise worked up, formed
alert, observant, bright, wary, woodcutter: (n) farmer, cultivator, xiii: (n) long dozen, large integer
prompt, nimble; (adv) on the ball lumberjack, lumberman, Bushman, yawn: (v) open, ope, yaw, look
wield: (v) ply, wave, exercise, forester, hunter, laborer, labourer, stupidly, breathe; (n) yawning, nod,
brandish, hold, manipulate, flourish, backwoodsman, sportsman get sleep, tedium, bore, boredom
exert, manage, use, swing woolen: (adj, n) woollen; (n) fleece, yawning: (adj, v) gaping, oscitant; (n)
willed: (adj) voluntary, hereditary tweed, fabric, cloth, woolen goods; yawn, hiation, pandiculation,
wilt: (v) flag, shrivel, sag, weaken, (adj) woolly oscitancy; (adj) cavernous, open,
fade, languish, dry, wither, collapse, workman: (n) laborer, working man, drowsy, profound, sleepy.
tire; (n) wilting. ANTONYMS: (v) worker, employee, hand, operative, ANTONYMS: (adj) cramped,
flourish, rise, rally artisan, working person, lather, narrow
wince: (v) shrink, cringe, quail, mechanic, artificer yelping: (n) cry, wapping
cower, jump, contract; (n, v) flinch, worsted: (adj) disappointed; (n) yielding: (adj, v) flexible, pliable,
start, winch; (adj) bear ill; (n) sit on fabric, knitting worsted, cloth supple, tractable, pliant; (adj)
thorns wrathful: (adj) furious, irate, wroth, compliant, submissive, soft,
windmill: (n) wind generator, ireful, indignant, incensed, mad, obedient, docile; (n) submission.
whirligig, aerogenerator, screw, raging, resentful, infuriated, ANTONYMS: (adj) hard, firm,
Rollingstone, wind turbine, wheel, choleric. ANTONYM: (adj) pleased inflexible, solid, rigid, obstinate,
wind engine, grinder, wind wreak: (v) bring, work, avenge, stiff, stubborn, unyielding,
machine, pinwheel impose, make, make for, play, cause, rebellious
winged: (adj) swift, rapid, speedy, fetch; (n) wretch; (adj) tyrannize yoke: (adj, n, v) couple, link; (n, v)
quick, flying, alate, sublime, lofty, wrenched: (adj) strained, weakened pair, tie; (adj, n) brace; (v) connect,
alated, aligerous, composed wrenching: (n) extraction; (adj) join, bind, attach; (n) coupling, team.
winking: (n) twinkling, wink, blink, painful ANTONYMS: (v) disconnect, disjoin
New York minute, jiffy, instant, wrestling: (n) grapple, grappling, yolk: (n) food, nutrient, vitellus,
nictation, nictitation, trice, blink of rassling, bout, event, clamshell, deutoplasm, suint
an eye; (adj) pink ribbons athletics, boxing, braving, pugilism; yonder: (adv) beyond, further,
witchcraft: (n) incantation, sorcery, (adj) fighting farther, abroad, thither, further
witchery, enchantment, spell, black wretch: (n) victim, villain, scoundrel, away, at that place; (adj) distant,
magic, necromancy, fascination, reprobate, reptile, miscreant, martyr, yond, furious, fierce
charm, black art, glamour object of compassion, poor devil, youthfulness: (n) juvenility,
wither: (v) shrink, wilt, contract, prey, wreak adolescence, younker, youngness,
shrivel, languish, droop, dry, waste, wretchedness: (n) unhappiness, grief, young person, young, spring
wane, atrophy, decay. ANTONYMS: distress, desolation, woe, sorrow, chicken, puberty, jejuneness,
(v) swell, strengthen, grow, blossom, anguish, infelicity, tribulation, immaturity, callowness
flourish affliction, misfortune zenith: (n) apex, peak, top, height,
withered: (adj) wizened, sear, wringing: (adj) saturated, soaked, acme, pinnacle, summit, climax,
shriveled, thin, shrunken, dry, dried soaked to the skin, soaking wet, vertex, culmination, prime.
up, wilted, faded, wizen; (v) lame. sodden, sopping, sopping wet, wet, ANTONYMS: (n) base, bottom,
ANTONYM: (adj) plump wet through, wringing wet, soaking. trough
withering: (adj) devastating, ANTONYM: (adj) dry zigzag: (v) wind, meander, twist; (n,
extortionate, grinding; (v) dry, wrinkle: (n, v) crease, crinkle, fold, v) bend; (adj) furcated, winding,
sarcastic, sharp, severe, satirical, rumple, crumple, furrow, pucker; meandering, bifurcate; (adj, v)
sardonic, cutting; (n) shrinkage. (v) ruffle; (n) gather, line; (adj, v) indirect; (n) groin, crane
ANTONYM: (adj) hopeful curl. ANTONYMS: (v) unfold, zoroaster: (n) Mohammed,
withers: (n) flange, lip, sensibility straighten; (n) smoothness Zarathustra, Confucius
withheld: (adj) hidden, wrinkled: (adj, n) rough, rugged;
uncommitted. ANTONYM: (adj) (adj) puckered, creased, wrinkly,
ongoing wizened, crumpled, lined, gnarled,
wonderment: (n) wonder, unironed, crinkled. ANTONYMS:

Victor Hugo The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

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Victor Hugo The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

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THE HUNCHBACK OF

Webster’s Thesaurus Edition for PSAT®, SAT®, GRE®, LSAT®,

Published by ICON Group International, Inc.

This edition published by ICON Classics in 2005

Copyright ©2005 by ICON Group International, Inc.

CHAPTER II PIERRE GRINGOIRE........................................................................................................ 23

CHAPTER II THE PLACE DE GREVE .................................................................................................. 71

CHAPTER IV THE INCONVENIENCES OF FOLLOWING A PRETTY WOMAN THROUGH

CHAPTER V RESULT OF THE DANGERS.......................................................................................... 93

CHAPTER II CLAUDE FROLLO.......................................................................................................... 173

CHAPTER V MORE ABOUT CLAUDE FROLLO............................................................................. 189

CHAPTER IV A TEAR FOR A DROP OF WATER............................................................................ 271

CHAPTER IV ANArKH ......................................................................................................................... 319

CHAPTER V THE MOTHER................................................................................................................. 409

CHAPTER III DEAF................................................................................................................................ 453

CHAPTER II TURN VAGABOND ....................................................................................................... 493

CHAPTER III LONG LIVE MIRTH...................................................................................................... 497

CHAPTER V THE RETREAT IN WHICH MONSIEUR LOUIS OF FRANCE SAYS HIS

CHAPTER VI LITTLE SWORD IN POCKET...................................................................................... 563

PREFACE FROM THE EDITOR

Definitions of remaining terms as well as translations can be found at www.websters-online-

THE GRAND HALL

necessity,--I of making, and he of reading, a description of it, such as it is. Which

"Sure, 'twas but a sorry game

Whatever may be thought of this triple explanation, political, physical, and

The whole band burst into laughter.%

"My cap to you, Chancellor of Sainte-Geneviève! You have done me a wrong.

"Courage, Master Simon!"

succeeded to impatience. Irritated words circulated in a low tone, still, it is true.

In the meanwhile, tranquillity had gradually been restored. A1l that

Nevertheless, as be harangued them, the satisfaction and admiration

"You mean the part of Jupiter?" replied the stranger.%

"Truly?" said the young girls, quite taken aback.%

MONSIEUR THE CARDINAL

Nevertheless, he was a fine man; he led a joyous cardinal's life, liked to

Marseilles (Alaudet, if my memory serves me right);-- this one, the primicier of

MASTER JACQUES COPPENOLE

"Jehan de Harlay, equerry guardian of the office of chevalier of the night

of Mesopotamia; but through so many interruptions, it was difficult to make out

In the twinkling of an eye, all was ready to execute Coppenole's idea.

An instant later, a symphony which had been intended to produce the

FROM CHARYBDIS TO SCYLLA

THE PLACE DE GREVE

KISSES FOR BLOWS

When Pierre Gringoire arrived on the Place de Grève, he was paralyzed. He

"Djali," she continued, "what month is this?"

And the crowd applauded louder than ever.%

Un cofre de gran riqueza

THE INCONVENIENCES OF FOLLOWING A

Further on there were two female neighbors at their windows, holding

"Halt, rascals, and yield me that wench!" suddenly shouted in a voice of

"Nombrill of the Pope!" said the captain, causing Quasimodo's straps to be

RESULT OF THE DANGERS

Gringoire, thoroughly stunned by his fall, remained on the pavement in front

"S'death!" growled Gringoire, "am I going to be too warm now?"

THE BROKEN JUG

"To the king! to the king!" repeated all voices.%

In the meantime, Clopin Trouillefou appeared to hold a momentary

"I don't understand at all," replied Gringoire.%

"And if there should come a gust of wind?"

"What!" resumed Gringoire, growing warmer and warmer, and supposing

"Mademoiselle Esmeralda," said the poet, "let us come to terms. I am not a

"I do not know."