Notes

Meanwhile, Gringoire and the archdeacon went up to look for the Esmeralda.

'Fear not,' said the poet, 'I am Pierre Gringoire.'

'Who is there with you?' asks the bohemian in a low voice. She did not recognize the priest, dressed in black.

'Rest easy,' replied Gringoire. 'He is a friend of mine. Your life is in danger and we come to save you. Follow us.'

They quickly descend the staircase of the towers, cross the church, and exit into the courtyard of the cloister. Then they head towards the Seine. They get in a small boat and walk away.

'Can you hear, master?' said Gringoire.

“To death the bohemian!”

Arriving on the quay, the bohemian finds herself alone with the unknown. Suddenly she feels the hand of man on hers. It is a cold and strong hand. It lets itself be dragged to the Place de Greve and sees in the middle a black cross. It is the gibbet. The man stops and shows his face.

“Oh, the priest!”

"Listen," he said, "I will decide your life and you, my soul. There is a judgment of the parliament that condemns you to death. I have just saved you. But here they are chasing you. Look.”

The rumours are getting closer. We see soldiers running on the opposite quay, with torches and shouting, “Death to the bohemian!”

'You can see they’re after you, and I’m not lying to you. I love you. I can save you if you want. Choose between me and the gibbet!

She tears herself from her hands and falls at the foot of the gallows.

“I hate him less than you!”

'But I love you,' he said, kneeling before her. 'Oh, I suffer too much. Do not tell me that you love me, just tell me that you will, that will be enough, I will save you!”

“You are a murderer!”

The priest takes her in his arms.

'You don’t want me to be a slave, you will have me as your master. You must die, beautiful, or be mine! From this night!'

The girl struggles in her arms. He covers her with kisses.

“It is Phoebus I love! Go away!”

He makes a violent scream.

'Die!' he said.

He drags her behind him and walks towards the Rolland Tower.

“One last time, will you be mine?”

“No.”

So he shouts out, "Bag! Bag! Here comes the bohemian! Avenge yourself!"

A skinny arm comes out of a skylight in the wall and takes the bohemian by the arm.

'Don’t let go of her!' said the priest. 'I’ll get the soldiers and you’ll see her die.'

The girl recognized the recluse. She hears the gloomy laughter of the strange woman who whispers to her,

'Hah! Hah! You will be hanged!'

“What have I done to you?”

“What did you do to me? I had a beautiful little girl. My Agnes. Well! My child was stolen from me. That’s what you did to me.”

“Have mercy on me. I didn’t do anything to you. I don’t want to die!”

'Give me back my child!' said the recluse. 'Give me back my little Agnes! When your mother comes to claim you, I will tell her: do you know where my little daughter is? All I have left of my little girl is this shoe.”

And she shows the bohemian the little embroidered shoe. At the same time, the bohemian opens the green bag she wears around her neck and shows a small shoe absolutely identical to the other.

'My daughter! My daughter!' cries the recluse.

The girl passes her arm through the skylight and the recluse embraces this hand. But at that moment, the soldiers arrive and take the girl to the gallows.

“Save me, my mother! They want to kill me. This gibbet is for me! Save me!”

They put the rope around his neck.

“No! No! I don’t want to!”

When Quasimodo sees that the bohemian is no longer in his cell, that while he was defending her she had been kidnapped, he starts looking for her everywhere, screaming. He thinks of the archdeacon, of his way of acting with the bohemian, and he looks for him in the cathedral. He finds it at the top of a tower, leaning against a balustrade, watching what is happening on the Place de Greve.

Quasimodo walks behind him and goes to see what he is looking at. He sees the Esmeralda swinging at the end of the rope. And at the same moment, he sees the priest laughing in a horrible way. The ringer throws himself on him, and with his two big hands, he pushes him into the void and watches him fall.

Unfortunately, this version does not have all the details of the story and there are two that I would like to note here.

1 - Phoebus married Fleur de Lys and did not try to save the Esmeralda. This was not too clear in this version of the book.

2 - After killing Frollo, Quasimodo disappeared, but in the real book we find his body later. Here is one of the last paragraphs of the book:

“About two years or eighteen months after the events that ended this story, when the corpse of Olivier the Deer was searched in the cellar of Montfaucon, …. One of these two skeletons, which belonged to a woman, still had a few shreds of a cloth that had been white, and one could see around her neck a necklace of adrézarach grains with a small bag of silk, adorned with green glassware, which was open and empty. The other, who held this one tightly embraced, was a man’s skeleton. It was noted that he had a deviated spine, head in the shoulder blades, and one leg shorter than the other. He also had no vertebral rupture in his neck, and it was obvious that he had not been hanged. The man to whom he had belonged had therefore come there, and he had died there. When they wanted to detach him from the skeleton he was kissing, he fell to dust.”