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  • -BOOK FOURTH. CHAPTER III.

  • IMMANIS PECORIS CUSTOS, IMMANIOR IPSE.

  • Now, in 1482, Quasimodo had grown up.

  • He had become a few years previously the bellringer of Notre-Dame, thanks to his

  • father by adoption, Claude Frollo,--who had become archdeacon of Josas, thanks to his

  • suzerain, Messire Louis de Beaumont,--who

  • had become Bishop of Paris, at the death of Guillaume Chartier in 1472, thanks to his

  • patron, Olivier Le Daim, barber to Louis XI., king by the grace of God.

  • So Quasimodo was the ringer of the chimes of Notre-Dame.

  • In the course of time there had been formed a certain peculiarly intimate bond which

  • united the ringer to the church.

  • Separated forever from the world, by the double fatality of his unknown birth and

  • his natural deformity, imprisoned from his infancy in that impassable double circle,

  • the poor wretch had grown used to seeing

  • nothing in this world beyond the religious walls which had received him under their

  • shadow.

  • Notre-Dame had been to him successively, as he grew up and developed, the egg, the

  • nest, the house, the country, the universe.

  • There was certainly a sort of mysterious and pre-existing harmony between this

  • creature and this church.

  • When, still a little fellow, he had dragged himself tortuously and by jerks beneath the

  • shadows of its vaults, he seemed, with his human face and his bestial limbs, the

  • natural reptile of that humid and sombre

  • pavement, upon which the shadow of the Romanesque capitals cast so many strange

  • forms.

  • Later on, the first time that he caught hold, mechanically, of the ropes to the

  • towers, and hung suspended from them, and set the bell to clanging, it produced upon

  • his adopted father, Claude, the effect of a

  • child whose tongue is unloosed and who begins to speak.

  • It is thus that, little by little, developing always in sympathy with the

  • cathedral, living there, sleeping there, hardly ever leaving it, subject every hour

  • to the mysterious impress, he came to

  • resemble it, he incrusted himself in it, so to speak, and became an integral part of

  • it.

  • His salient angles fitted into the retreating angles of the cathedral (if we

  • may be allowed this figure of speech), and he seemed not only its inhabitant but more

  • than that, its natural tenant.

  • One might almost say that he had assumed its form, as the snail takes on the form of

  • its shell. It was his dwelling, his hole, his

  • envelope.

  • There existed between him and the old church so profound an instinctive sympathy,

  • so many magnetic affinities, so many material affinities, that he adhered to it

  • somewhat as a tortoise adheres to its shell.

  • The rough and wrinkled cathedral was his shell.

  • It is useless to warn the reader not to take literally all the similes which we are

  • obliged to employ here to express the singular, symmetrical, direct, almost

  • consubstantial union of a man and an edifice.

  • It is equally unnecessary to state to what a degree that whole cathedral was familiar

  • to him, after so long and so intimate a cohabitation.

  • That dwelling was peculiar to him.

  • It had no depths to which Quasimodo had not penetrated, no height which he had not

  • scaled.

  • He often climbed many stones up the front, aided solely by the uneven points of the

  • carving.

  • The towers, on whose exterior surface he was frequently seen clambering, like a

  • lizard gliding along a perpendicular wall, those two gigantic twins, so lofty, so

  • menacing, so formidable, possessed for him

  • neither vertigo, nor terror, nor shocks of amazement.

  • To see them so gentle under his hand, so easy to scale, one would have said that he

  • had tamed them.

  • By dint of leaping, climbing, gambolling amid the abysses of the gigantic cathedral

  • he had become, in some sort, a monkey and a goat, like the Calabrian child who swims

  • before he walks, and plays with the sea while still a babe.

  • Moreover, it was not his body alone which seemed fashioned after the Cathedral, but

  • his mind also.

  • In what condition was that mind? What bent had it contracted, what form had

  • it assumed beneath that knotted envelope, in that savage life?

  • This it would be hard to determine.

  • Quasimodo had been born one-eyed, hunchbacked, lame.

  • It was with great difficulty, and by dint of great patience that Claude Frollo had

  • succeeded in teaching him to talk.

  • But a fatality was attached to the poor foundling.

  • Bellringer of Notre-Dame at the age of fourteen, a new infirmity had come to

  • complete his misfortunes: the bells had broken the drums of his ears; he had become

  • deaf.

  • The only gate which nature had left wide open for him had been abruptly closed, and

  • forever.

  • In closing, it had cut off the only ray of joy and of light which still made its way

  • into the soul of Quasimodo. His soul fell into profound night.

  • The wretched being's misery became as incurable and as complete as his deformity.

  • Let us add that his deafness rendered him to some extent dumb.

  • For, in order not to make others laugh, the very moment that he found himself to be

  • deaf, he resolved upon a silence which he only broke when he was alone.

  • He voluntarily tied that tongue which Claude Frollo had taken so much pains to

  • unloose.

  • Hence, it came about, that when necessity constrained him to speak, his tongue was

  • torpid, awkward, and like a door whose hinges have grown rusty.

  • If now we were to try to penetrate to the soul of Quasimodo through that thick, hard

  • rind; if we could sound the depths of that badly constructed organism; if it were

  • granted to us to look with a torch behind

  • those non-transparent organs to explore the shadowy interior of that opaque creature,

  • to elucidate his obscure corners, his absurd no-thoroughfares, and suddenly to

  • cast a vivid light upon the soul enchained

  • at the extremity of that cave, we should, no doubt, find the unhappy Psyche in some

  • poor, cramped, and ricketty attitude, like those prisoners beneath the Leads of

  • Venice, who grew old bent double in a stone

  • box which was both too low and too short for them.

  • It is certain that the mind becomes atrophied in a defective body.

  • Quasimodo was barely conscious of a soul cast in his own image, moving blindly

  • within him.

  • The impressions of objects underwent a considerable refraction before reaching his

  • mind.

  • His brain was a peculiar medium; the ideas which passed through it issued forth

  • completely distorted.

  • The reflection which resulted from this refraction was, necessarily, divergent and

  • perverted.

  • Hence a thousand optical illusions, a thousand aberrations of judgment, a

  • thousand deviations, in which his thought strayed, now mad, now idiotic.

  • The first effect of this fatal organization was to trouble the glance which he cast

  • upon things. He received hardly any immediate perception

  • of them.

  • The external world seemed much farther away to him than it does to us.

  • The second effect of his misfortune was to render him malicious.

  • He was malicious, in fact, because he was savage; he was savage because he was ugly.

  • There was logic in his nature, as there is in ours.

  • His strength, so extraordinarily developed, was a cause of still greater malevolence:

  • "Malus puer robustus," says Hobbes. This justice must, however be rendered to

  • him.

  • Malevolence was not, perhaps, innate in him.

  • From his very first steps among men, he had felt himself, later on he had seen himself,

  • spewed out, blasted, rejected.

  • Human words were, for him, always a raillery or a malediction.

  • As he grew up, he had found nothing but hatred around him.

  • He had caught the general malevolence.

  • He had picked up the weapon with which he had been wounded.

  • After all, he turned his face towards men only with reluctance; his cathedral was

  • sufficient for him.

  • It was peopled with marble figures,--kings, saints, bishops,--who at least did not

  • burst out laughing in his face, and who gazed upon him only with tranquillity and

  • kindliness.

  • The other statues, those of the monsters and demons, cherished no hatred for him,

  • Quasimodo. He resembled them too much for that.

  • They seemed rather, to be scoffing at other men.

  • The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends and

  • guarded him.

  • So he held long communion with them. He sometimes passed whole hours crouching

  • before one of these statues, in solitary conversation with it.

  • If any one came, he fled like a lover surprised in his serenade.

  • And the cathedral was not only society for him, but the universe, and all nature

  • beside.

  • He dreamed of no other hedgerows than the painted windows, always in flower; no other

  • shade than that of the foliage of stone which spread out, loaded with birds, in the

  • tufts of the Saxon capitals; of no other

  • mountains than the colossal towers of the church; of no other ocean than Paris,

  • roaring at their bases.

  • What he loved above all else in the maternal edifice, that which aroused his

  • soul, and made it open its poor wings, which it kept so miserably folded in its

  • cavern, that which sometimes rendered him even happy, was the bells.

  • He loved them, fondled them, talked to them, understood them.

  • From the chime in the spire, over the intersection of the aisles and nave, to the

  • great bell of the front, he cherished a tenderness for them all.

  • The central spire and the two towers were to him as three great cages, whose birds,

  • reared by himself, sang for him alone.

  • Yet it was these very bells which had made him deaf; but mothers often love best that

  • child which has caused them the most suffering.

  • It is true that their voice was the only one which he could still hear.

  • On this score, the big bell was his beloved.

  • It was she whom he preferred out of all that family of noisy girls which bustled

  • above him, on festival days. This bell was named Marie.

  • She was alone in the southern tower, with her sister Jacqueline, a bell of lesser

  • size, shut up in a smaller cage beside hers.

  • This Jacqueline was so called from the name of the wife of Jean Montagu, who had given

  • it to the church, which had not prevented his going and figuring without his head at

  • Montfaucon.

  • In the second tower there were six other bells, and, finally, six smaller ones

  • inhabited the belfry over the crossing, with the wooden bell, which rang only

  • between after dinner on Good Friday and the morning of the day before Easter.

  • So Quasimodo had fifteen bells in his seraglio; but big Marie was his favorite.

  • No idea can be formed of his delight on days when the grand peal was sounded.

  • At the moment when the archdeacon dismissed him, and said, "Go!" he mounted the spiral

  • staircase of the clock tower faster than any one else could have descended it.

  • He entered perfectly breathless into the aerial chamber of the great bell; he gazed

  • at her a moment, devoutly and lovingly; then he gently addressed her and patted her

  • with his hand, like a good horse, which is about to set out on a long journey.

  • He pitied her for the trouble that she was about to suffer.

  • After these first caresses, he shouted to his assistants, placed in the lower story

  • of the tower, to begin.

  • They grasped the ropes, the wheel creaked, the enormous capsule of metal started

  • slowly into motion. Quasimodo followed it with his glance and

  • trembled.

  • The first shock of the clapper and the brazen wall made the framework upon which

  • it was mounted quiver. Quasimodo vibrated with the bell.

  • "Vah!" he cried, with a senseless burst of laughter.

  • However, the movement of the bass was accelerated, and, in proportion as it

  • described a wider angle, Quasimodo's eye opened also more and more widely,

  • phosphoric and flaming.

  • At length the grand peal began; the whole tower trembled; woodwork, leads, cut

  • stones, all groaned at once, from the piles of the foundation to the trefoils of its

  • summit.

  • Then Quasimodo boiled and frothed; he went and came; he trembled from head to foot

  • with the tower.

  • The bell, furious, running riot, presented to the two walls of the tower alternately

  • its brazen throat, whence escaped that tempestuous breath, which is audible

  • leagues away.

  • Quasimodo stationed himself in front of this open throat; he crouched and rose with

  • the oscillations of the bell, breathed in this overwhelming breath, gazed by turns at

  • the deep place, which swarmed with people,

  • two hundred feet below him, and at that enormous, brazen tongue which came, second

  • after second, to howl in his ear.

  • It was the only speech which he understood, the only sound which broke for him the

  • universal silence. He swelled out in it as a bird does in the

  • sun.

  • All of a sudden, the frenzy of the bell seized upon him; his look became

  • extraordinary; he lay in wait for the great bell as it passed, as a spider lies in wait

  • for a fly, and flung himself abruptly upon it, with might and main.

  • Then, suspended above the abyss, borne to and fro by the formidable swinging of the

  • bell, he seized the brazen monster by the ear-laps, pressed it between both knees,

  • spurred it on with his heels, and redoubled

  • the fury of the peal with the whole shock and weight of his body.

  • Meanwhile, the tower trembled; he shrieked and gnashed his teeth, his red hair rose

  • erect, his breast heaving like a bellows, his eye flashed flames, the monstrous bell

  • neighed, panting, beneath him; and then it

  • was no longer the great bell of Notre-Dame nor Quasimodo: it was a dream, a whirlwind,

  • a tempest, dizziness mounted astride of noise; a spirit clinging to a flying

  • crupper, a strange centaur, half man, half

  • bell; a sort of horrible Astolphus, borne away upon a prodigious hippogriff of living

  • bronze.

  • The presence of this extraordinary being caused, as it were, a breath of life to

  • circulate throughout the entire cathedral.

  • It seemed as though there escaped from him, at least according to the growing

  • superstitions of the crowd, a mysterious emanation which animated all the stones of

  • Notre-Dame, and made the deep bowels of the ancient church to palpitate.

  • It sufficed for people to know that he was there, to make them believe that they

  • beheld the thousand statues of the galleries and the fronts in motion.

  • And the cathedral did indeed seem a docile and obedient creature beneath his hand; it

  • waited on his will to raise its great voice; it was possessed and filled with

  • Quasimodo, as with a familiar spirit.

  • One would have said that he made the immense edifice breathe.

  • He was everywhere about it; in fact, he multiplied himself on all points of the

  • structure.

  • Now one perceived with affright at the very top of one of the towers, a fantastic dwarf

  • climbing, writhing, crawling on all fours, descending outside above the abyss, leaping

  • from projection to projection, and going to

  • ransack the belly of some sculptured gorgon; it was Quasimodo dislodging the

  • crows.

  • Again, in some obscure corner of the church one came in contact with a sort of living

  • chimera, crouching and scowling; it was Quasimodo engaged in thought.

  • Sometimes one caught sight, upon a bell tower, of an enormous head and a bundle of

  • disordered limbs swinging furiously at the end of a rope; it was Quasimodo ringing

  • vespers or the Angelus.

  • Often at night a hideous form was seen wandering along the frail balustrade of

  • carved lacework, which crowns the towers and borders the circumference of the apse;

  • again it was the hunchback of Notre-Dame.

  • Then, said the women of the neighborhood, the whole church took on something

  • fantastic, supernatural, horrible; eyes and mouths were opened, here and there; one

  • heard the dogs, the monsters, and the

  • gargoyles of stone, which keep watch night and day, with outstretched neck and open

  • jaws, around the monstrous cathedral, barking.

  • And, if it was a Christmas Eve, while the great bell, which seemed to emit the death

  • rattle, summoned the faithful to the midnight mass, such an air was spread over

  • the sombre facade that one would have

  • declared that the grand portal was devouring the throng, and that the rose

  • window was watching it. And all this came from Quasimodo.

  • Egypt would have taken him for the god of this temple; the Middle Ages believed him

  • to be its demon: he was in fact its soul.

  • To such an extent was this disease that for those who know that Quasimodo has existed,

  • Notre-Dame is to-day deserted, inanimate, dead.

  • One feels that something has disappeared from it.

  • That immense body is empty; it is a skeleton; the spirit has quitted it, one

  • sees its place and that is all.

  • It is like a skull which still has holes for the eyes, but no longer sight.

-BOOK FOURTH. CHAPTER III.

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