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’Tis a proud wasp, I can tell you!”
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.
“What concern is it of yours?”
“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.”
’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.”
The merry scholar had never dreamed that there was boiling lava, furious and profound, beneath the snowy brow of Ætna.
Cerberus did not bite at the honey cake.
There are some myths that mention Cerberus and honey cakes. For example, in the Aeneid, a Latin epic poem, the Sybil of Cumae threw a honey cake to Cerberus to make him fall asleep and let Aeneas pass1. In the story of Cupid and Psyche, Psyche was advised to carry honey cakes to distract Cerberus on her quest to the underworld. Honey cakes were also used as offerings for the dead in ancient Greek tradition3. So, it seems that honey cakes have a symbolic connection to Cerberus and the underworld in some myths.
“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.
“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!
Come on! Let us descend, take the big brother’s purse, and convert all these coins into bottles!”
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.
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,
“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!”
Every one knows that he who once mounts astride a bear is never after afraid;
Presumably because they are dead. As an aside, this reminds me of something from War and Peace.
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 his self-possession.
“Well, scholar of Antichrist, may you be strangled with the entrails of your mother!”
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.
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 Phœbus; the officer of my dream had a beautiful uniform like yours, a grand look, a sword; your name is Phœbus; ’tis a beautiful name. I love your name; I love your sword. Draw your sword, Phœbus, that I may see it.”
She actually means the sword. Don't have a dirty mind.
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 Phœbus 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.
A fine thing, truly! A dancer wed an officer! I was mad. No, Phœbus, no; I will be thy mistress, thy amusement, thy pleasure, when thou wilt; a girl who shall belong to thee.
This passage turns my stomach. Please tell me women don't actually do such things.
We gypsies need only air and love.”
This I might believe. Gypsies roamed without permanent residence or much tangible property. I believe, however, Gypsies valued their freedom and understood the concept of being exploited. Being 'loved' requires being valued, not used.
Phoebus is a jerk.
It was the face and hand of the priest; he had broken the door and he was there.
Soundlessly broken the door, it seems.
“Maledictions!”
Phoebus knows there was someone else in the room. He was stabbed in the back.
Esmeralda has a poinard hidden her person somewhere that undressing didn't reveal yet. Yet, when captured, the would have searched her, found her poinard, and seen it wasn't bloodied.
Granted on of the plot points in the book is the incompetence of the justice system but Phoebus, in add to being a scoundrel and a rake, seems also profoundly stupid.
“’Tis a sorceress who has stabbed a captain.”
Why assume magic when an obvious physical injury could be seen?
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.
Incorrectly, as it turns out.
On arriving at the upper chamber, and while my back is turned, the black man disappears.
No one considers he might have remained in the room, the simplest explanation. Further, if the want to suspect sorcery, why not the vanishing monk?
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 moonlit night. I saw him quite plainly. He was swimming in the direction of the city.
She even admits hearing the window open.
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 moonlit night. I saw him quite plainly. He was swimming in the direction of the city.
She even saw someone leave.
They carried off the officer, poor young man, and the wench with her bosom all bare.
Right, no one thinks self defense against rape either?
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.”
This can't be the only time the dirty child stole from her. It see like swapping something for what's been taken might be the child's habit.
“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.”
Of course, she's got a murderous monk accomplice who just left her there. To save her life, wouldn't she name him?
“I pray the gentlemen not to lose sight of the fact that a dagger was found on the person of the accused.
One without blood on it.
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.
“What an annoying and vexatious hussy,” said an aged judge, “to get herself put to the question when one has not supped!”
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.
Had the Archdeacon been present, he certainly would have recalled at that moment his symbol of the spider and the fly.
Apparently, he was there. I don't know which character.
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.
“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.”
When one does wrong, one must do it thoroughly. ’Tis madness to halt midway in the monstrous! The
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.
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.
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.
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?
Alas! Alas! here is the shoe; where is the foot?
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 window-pane, 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
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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 the king which he, the meanest of creatures, had just broken, with the
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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.
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.
