Name: Book 04 - Chapter 5 - The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo - More about Claude Frollo
Uploaded: 2014-01-24T17:05:42.000Z
Duration: 17 min 43 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In 1482, Quasimodo was about twenty years of age; Claude Frollo, about thirty-six.

One had grown up, the other had grown old.

Claude Frollo was no longer the simple scholar of the college of Torch, the tender

protector of a little child, the young and dreamy philosopher who knew many things and

He was a priest, austere, grave, morose; one charged with souls; monsieur the

archdeacon of Josas, the bishop's second acolyte, having charge of the two deaneries

of Montlhery, and Chateaufort, and one hundred and seventy-four country curacies.

He was an imposing and sombre personage, before whom the choir boys in alb and in

jacket trembled, as well as the machicots, and the brothers of Saint-Augustine and the

passed slowly beneath the lofty arches of the choir, majestic, thoughtful, with arms

folded and his head so bent upon his breast that all one saw of his face was his large,

Dom Claude Frollo had, however, abandoned neither science nor the education of his

young brother, those two occupations of his life.

But as time went on, some bitterness had been mingled with these things which were

so sweet. In the long run, says Paul Diacre, the best

Little Jehan Frollo, surnamed (du Moulin) "of the Mill" because of the place where he

had been reared, had not grown up in the direction which Claude would have liked to

The big brother counted upon a pious, docile, learned, and honorable pupil.

But the little brother, like those young trees which deceive the gardener's hopes

and turn obstinately to the quarter whence they receive sun and air, the little

brother did not grow and did not multiply,

but only put forth fine bushy and luxuriant branches on the side of laziness,

He was a regular devil, and a very disorderly one, who made Dom Claude scowl;

but very droll and very subtle, which made the big brother smile.

Claude had confided him to that same college of Torchi where he had passed his

early years in study and meditation; and it was a grief to him that this sanctuary,

formerly edified by the name of Frollo, should to-day be scandalized by it.

He sometimes preached Jehan very long and severe sermons, which the latter intrepidly

After all, the young scapegrace had a good heart, as can be seen in all comedies.

But the sermon over, he none the less tranquilly resumed his course of seditions

Now it was a bejaune or yellow beak (as they called the new arrivals at the

university), whom he had been mauling by way of welcome; a precious tradition which

has been carefully preserved to our own day.

Again, he had set in movement a band of scholars, who had flung themselves upon a

wine-shop in classic fashion, quasi classico excitati, had then beaten the

tavern-keeper "with offensive cudgels," and

joyously pillaged the tavern, even to smashing in the hogsheads of wine in the

And then it was a fine report in Latin, which the sub-monitor of Torchi carried

piteously to Dom Claude with this dolorous marginal comment,--Rixa; prima causa vinum

Finally, it was said, a thing quite horrible in a boy of sixteen, that his

debauchery often extended as far as the Rue de Glatigny.

Claude, saddened and discouraged in his human affections, by all this, had flung

himself eagerly into the arms of learning, that sister which, at least does not laugh

though in money that is sometimes a little hollow, for the attention which you have

Hence, he became more and more learned, and, at the same time, as a natural

consequence, more and more rigid as a priest, more and more sad as a man.

There are for each of us several parallelisms between our intelligence, our

habits, and our character, which develop without a break, and break only in the

As Claude Frollo had passed through nearly the entire circle of human learning--

positive, exterior, and permissible--since his youth, he was obliged, unless he came

further and seek other aliments for the insatiable activity of his intelligence.

The antique symbol of the serpent biting its tail is, above all, applicable to

It would appear that Claude Frollo had experienced this.

Many grave persons affirm that, after having exhausted the fas of human learning,

he had dared to penetrate into the nefas.

He had, they said, tasted in succession all the apples of the tree of knowledge, and,

whether from hunger or disgust, had ended by tasting the forbidden fruit.

He had taken his place by turns, as the reader has seen, in the conferences of the

theologians in Sorbonne,--in the assemblies of the doctors of art, after the manner of

decretalists, after the manner of Saint- Martin,--in the congregations of physicians

at the holy water font of Notre-Dame, ad cupam Nostroe-Dominoe.

All the dishes permitted and approved, which those four great kitchens called the

four faculties could elaborate and serve to the understanding, he had devoured, and had

been satiated with them before his hunger was appeased.

Then he had penetrated further, lower, beneath all that finished, material,

limited knowledge; he had, perhaps, risked his soul, and had seated himself in the

alchemists, of the astrologers, of the hermetics, of which Averroes, Gillaume de

Paris, and Nicolas Flamel hold the end in the Middle Ages; and which extends in the

candlestick, to Solomon, Pythagoras, and Zoroaster.

That is, at least, what was supposed, whether rightly or not.

It is certain that the archdeacon often visited the cemetery of the Saints-

Innocents, where, it is true, his father and mother had been buried, with other

victims of the plague of 1466; but that he

appeared far less devout before the cross of their grave than before the strange

figures with which the tomb of Nicolas Flamel and Claude Pernelle, erected just

It is certain that he had frequently been seen to pass along the Rue des Lombards,

and furtively enter a little house which formed the corner of the Rue des Ecrivans

It was the house which Nicolas Flamel had built, where he had died about 1417, and

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Book 04 - Chapter 5 - The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo - More about Claude Frollo

brother

young

learn

book