“He said to himself, that this child had a right to know life before renouncing it, that to deprive her in advance, and in some sort without consulting her, of all joys, under the pretext of saving her from all trials, to take advantage of her ignorance of her isolation, in order to make an artificial vocation germinate in her, was to rob a human creature of its nature and to lie to God.”

“Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance, and her sunlight from before human cruelty or suffering.”

“He left her. She was dissatisfied with him. He had preferred to incur her anger rather than cause her pain. He had kept all the pain for himself.”

“She had witnessed a conflict between two men who held her liberty in their hands, her very life and that of her child; one had sought to drag her deeper into darkness, the other to restore her to light. The two contestants, in the heightened vision of her terror, had seemed like giants, one speaking with the voice of a demon, the other in the tones of an angel. The angel had won, and what caused her to tremble from head to foot was the fact that this rescuing angel was the man she abhorred, the abominable mayor whom for so long she had regarded as the author of her troubles. He had saved her after she had most outrageously insulted him!”

“In a vast space left free between the crowd and the fire, a young girl was dancing.Whether this young girl was a human being, a fairy, or an angel, is what Gringoire, sceptical philosopher and ironical poet that he was, could not decide at the first moment, so fascinated was he by this dazzling vision.She was not tall, though she seemed so, so boldly did her slender form dart about. She was swarthy of complexion, but one divined that, by day, her skin must possess that beautiful golden tone of the Andalusians and the Roman women. Her little foot, too, was Andalusian, for it was both pinched and at ease in its graceful shoe. She danced, she turned, she whirled rapidly about on an old Persian rug, spread negligently under her feet; and each time that her radiant face passed before you, as she whirled, her great black eyes darted a flash of lightning at you.All around her, all glances were riveted, all mouths open; and, in fact, when she danced thus, to the humming of the Basque tambourine, which her two pure, rounded arms raised above her head, slender, frail and vivacious as a wasp, with her corsage of gold without a fold, her variegated gown puffing out, her bare shoulders, her delicate limbs, which her petticoat revealed at times, her black hair, her eyes of flame, she was a supernatural creature.”

“Nature sometimes joins her effects and her appearances to our acts with a sort of serious and intelligent appropriateness; as if she would compel us to reflect.”

“If she gives me all her time it is because I have all her heart.”