Notre Dame de Paris, Volume 1

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1902 edition. Excerpt: ...of it but a shock of red hair, an eye, a mouth, and teeth. The eye wept, the mouth shrieked, and the teeth seemed only waiting a chance to bite. The whole body kicked and struggled in the bag, to the amazement of the crowd, which grew larger and changed continually around it. Dame Aloise de Gondelaurier, a rich and noble lady, leading a pretty girl of some six years by the hand, and trailing a long veil from the golden horn of her headdress, stopped as she passed the bed, and glanced for an instant at the miserable creature, while her lovely little daughter Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier, arrayed in silk and velvet, spelled out with her pretty little finger the permanent inscription fastened to the bedstead: "For Foundlings." "Really," said the lady, turning away in disgust, I thought they only put children here!" She turned her back, throwing into the basin a silver coin which jingled loudly among the copper pence, and made the four good women from the Etienne Haudry Home stare. A moment later, the grave and learned Robert Mistricolle, prothonotary to the king, passed with a huge missal under one arm and his wife under the other (Damoiselle Guillemette la Mairesse), being thus armed on either hand with his spiritual and his temporal advisers. "A foundling," said he, after examination, "found apparently on the shores of the river Phlegethon!" "It sees with but one eye," remarked Damoiselle Guillemette; "there is a wart over the other." "That is no wart," replied Master Eobert Mistricolle; "that is an egg which holds just such another demon, who also bears another little egg containing another demon, and so on ad infinitum." "How do you know?" asked Guillemette la Mairesse. I know it for very good reasons," answered the prothonotary. "Mr....