“Quick, father!” added Gabriel, in alarm, using every effort to maintain the door, which was now vigorously assailed.  “Make haste!  In a few minutes it will be too late.  All alone!” continued the missionary, in despair, “alone, to arrest the progress of these madmen!”

He was indeed alone.  At the first outbreak of the attack, three or four sacristans and other members of the establishment were in the church; but, struck with terror, and remembering the sack of the archbishop’s palace, and of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, they had immediately taken flight.  Some of them had concealed themselves in the organ-loft and others fled into the vestry, the doors of which they locked after them, thus cutting off the retreat of Gabriel and Father d’Aigrigny.  The latter, bent double by pain, yet roused by the missionary’s portentive warning, helping himself on by means of the chairs he met with on his passage, made vain efforts to reach the choir railing.  After advancing a few steps, vanquished by his suffering, he staggered and fell upon the pavement, deprived of sense and motion.  At the same moment, Gabriel, in spite of the incredible energy with which the desire to save Father d’Aigrigny had inspired him, felt the door giving way beneath the formidable pressure from without.

Turning his head, to see if the Jesuit had at least quitted the church, Gabriel, to his great alarm, perceived that he was lying motionless at a few steps from the choir.  To abandon the half-broken door, to run to Father d’Aigrigny, to lift him in his arms, and drag him within the railing of the choir, was for the young priest an action rapid as thought; for he closed the gate of the choir just at the instant that the quarryman and his band, having finished breaking down the door, rushed in a body into the church.

Standing in front of the choir, with his arms crossed upon his breast, Gabriel waited calmly and intrepidly for this mob, still more exasperated by such unexpected resistance.

The door once forced, the assailants rushed in with great violence.  But hardly had they entered the church, than a strange scene took place.  It was nearly dark; only a few silver lamps shed their pale light round the sanctuary, whose far outlines disappeared in the shadow.  On suddenly entering the immense cathedral, dark, silent, and deserted, the most audacious were struck with awe, almost with fear in presence of the imposing grandeur of that stony solitude.  Outcries and threats died away on the lips of the most furious.  They seemed to dread awaking the echoes of those enormous arches, those black vaults, from which oozed a sepulchral dampness, which chilled their brows, inflamed with anger, and fell upon their shoulders like a mantle of ice.