Page 272 (1/1)

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 h the private door of the cloister, had ordered a boatman of the Terrain to transport hied into the hilly streets of the University, not knohither he was going, encountering at every step groups ofjoyously towards the Pont Saint-Michel, in the hope of still arriving in ti there,--pale, wild, ht bird let loose and pursued by a troop of children in broad daylight He no longer knehere he hat he thought, or whether he were drea any street at haphazard, ed ever onward away from the Grève, the horrible Grève, which he felt confusedly, to be behind him

In this ed froht as long as he could see, when he turned round, the turreted enclosure of the University, and the rare houses of the suburb; but, when, at length, a rise of ground had completely concealed from him that odious Paris, when he could believe hiues distant from it, in the fields, in the desert, he halted, and it seehtful 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 hiard eye over the double, tortuous hich fate had caused their two destinies to pursue up to their point of intersection, where it had dashed theainst 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 bottoe 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 lance of a physician who exanized the fact that thisbut vitiated love; that love, that source of every virtue in s in the heart of a priest, and that ahihtfully, and suddenly becaain, when he considered the most sinister side of his fatal passion, of that corrosive, venoibbet for one of them and in hell for the other; condemnation for her, damnation for him