The Inconveniences of Following a Pretty Woman through the Streets in the Evening — The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

Gringoire follows the gypsy and her goat into the Rue de la Coutellerie, with nowhere to sleep and a liking for walking behind a pretty woman. She hurries as the doors shut. He hears of a hard winter, and of a notary's horse, scared by the Flemings, which threw a lay monk. After curfew she leads him through the tangled lanes by the Saints-Innocents. She looks back, studies him by a bakery light, and answers with a small pout.

At a corner, under a burning twist of tow at a Holy Virgin's feet, two men seize her. One is Quasimodo. Gringoire calls the watch. Quasimodo throws him four paces and carries her off. A captain of the king's archers, with fifteen or sixteen men of Robert d'Estouteville's rounds, pulls her onto his saddle and binds Quasimodo, who roars and bites. His companion vanishes. She asks the officer's name: Captain Phœbus de Châteaupers. She thanks him, slips from the horse, and is gone. Phœbus says he would rather have kept her. A gendarme answers that the warbler has fled and the bat remains.