Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1899 edition. Excerpt: ... BOOK XI. CHAPTER I. THE LITTLE SHOE. At the moment when the Truands had assailed the church La Esmeralda was asleep. But soon the constantly increasing clamor about the edifice and the plaintive bleating of her goat -- which was awakened before herself -- had chased away her slumber. She had then sat up in bed, listened, and looked round her; and then, frightened at the light and the noise, she had hurried out of the cell and gone to see what was the matter. The aspect of the Place; the strange vision that was moving in it; the disorder of that nocturnal assault; that hideous crowd leaping about like a crowd of frogs, half distinguishable in the darkness; the croaking of that hoarse multitude; the few red torches running backwards and forwards, passing and repassing one another in the dark, like those meteors of the night that play over the misty surface of a marsh, -- all together seemed to her like some mysterious battle commenced between the phantoms of a witches' Sabbath and the stone monsters of the church. Imbued from her infancy with the super stitions which at that day possessed the minds of many of her tribe, the notion that first suggested itself to her was that she had come unawares upon the magic revels of the beings proper to the night. Then she ran back in terror to cower in her cell, and ask of her humble couch some less horrible vision. By degrees, however, the first fumes of her terror had dispersed from her brain; and by the constantly increasing noise, together with other signs of reality, she discovered that she was beset, not by spectres, but by human beings. Then her fear, though it had not increased, had changed its nature. She had thought of the possibility of a popular rising to drag her from her asylum. The idea...