Victor Hugo: The Hunchback of Notre Dame

BOOK NINTH. CHAPTER 3. DEAF. (continued)

Then she crouched down gracefully on her couch, with her goat asleep at her feet. Both remained motionless for several moments, considering in silence, she so much grace, he so much ugliness. Every moment she discovered some fresh deformity in Quasimodo. Her glance travelled from his knock knees to his humped back, from his humped back to his only eye. She could not comprehend the existence of a being so awkwardly fashioned. Yet there was so much sadness and so much gentleness spread over all this, that she began to become reconciled to it.

He was the first to break the silence. "So you were telling me to return?"

She made an affirmative sign of the head, and said, "Yes."

He understood the motion of the head. "Alas!" he said, as though hesitating whether to finish, "I am--I am deaf."

"Poor man!" exclaimed the Bohemian, with an expression of kindly pity.

He began to smile sadly.

"You think that that was all that I lacked, do you not? Yes, I am deaf, that is the way I am made. 'Tis horrible, is it not? You are so beautiful!"

There lay in the accents of the wretched man so profound a consciousness of his misery, that she had not the strength to say a word. Besides, he would not have heard her. He went on,--

"Never have I seen my ugliness as at the present moment. When I compare myself to you, I feel a very great pity for myself, poor unhappy monster that I am! Tell me, I must look to you like a beast. You, you are a ray of sunshine, a drop of dew, the song of a bird! I am something frightful, neither man nor animal, I know not what, harder, more trampled under foot, and more unshapely than a pebble stone!"

Then he began to laugh, and that laugh was the most heartbreaking thing in the world. He continued,--