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  • BOOK FOURTH. CHAPTER I.

  • GOOD SOULS.

  • Sixteen years previous to the epoch when this story takes place, one fine morning,

  • on Quasimodo Sunday, a living creature had been deposited, after mass, in the church

  • of Notre-Dame, on the wooden bed securely

  • fixed in the vestibule on the left, opposite that great image of Saint

  • Christopher, which the figure of Messire Antoine des Essarts, chevalier, carved in

  • stone, had been gazing at on his knees

  • since 1413, when they took it into their heads to overthrow the saint and the

  • faithful follower. Upon this bed of wood it was customary to

  • expose foundlings for public charity.

  • Whoever cared to take them did so. In front of the wooden bed was a copper

  • basin for alms.

  • The sort of living being which lay upon that plank on the morning of Quasimodo, in

  • the year of the Lord, 1467, appeared to excite to a high degree, the curiosity of

  • the numerous group which had congregated about the wooden bed.

  • The group was formed for the most part of the fair sex.

  • Hardly any one was there except old women.

  • In the first row, and among those who were most bent over the bed, four were

  • noticeable, who, from their gray cagoule, a sort of cassock, were recognizable as

  • attached to some devout sisterhood.

  • I do not see why history has not transmitted to posterity the names of these

  • four discreet and venerable damsels.

  • They were Agnes la Herme, Jehanne de la Tarme, Henriette la Gaultiere, Gauchere la

  • Violette, all four widows, all four dames of the Chapel Etienne Haudry, who had

  • quitted their house with the permission of

  • their mistress, and in conformity with the statutes of Pierre d'Ailly, in order to

  • come and hear the sermon.

  • However, if these good Haudriettes were, for the moment, complying with the statutes

  • of Pierre d'Ailly, they certainly violated with joy those of Michel de Brache, and the

  • Cardinal of Pisa, which so inhumanly enjoined silence upon them.

  • "What is this, sister?" said Agnes to Gauchere, gazing at the little creature

  • exposed, which was screaming and writhing on the wooden bed, terrified by so many

  • glances.

  • "What is to become of us," said Jehanne, "if that is the way children are made now?"

  • "I'm not learned in the matter of children," resumed Agnes, "but it must be a

  • sin to look at this one."

  • "'Tis not a child, Agnes." "'Tis an abortion of a monkey," remarked

  • Gauchere. "'Tis a miracle," interposed Henriette la

  • Gaultiere.

  • "Then," remarked Agnes, "it is the third since the Sunday of the Loetare: for, in

  • less than a week, we had the miracle of the mocker of pilgrims divinely punished by

  • Notre-Dame d'Aubervilliers, and that was the second miracle within a month."

  • "This pretended foundling is a real monster of abomination," resumed Jehanne.

  • "He yells loud enough to deafen a chanter," continued Gauchere.

  • "Hold your tongue, you little howler!"

  • "To think that Monsieur of Reims sent this enormity to Monsieur of Paris," added la

  • Gaultiere, clasping her hands.

  • "I imagine," said Agnes la Herme, "that it is a beast, an animal,--the fruit of--a Jew

  • and a sow; something not Christian, in short, which ought to be thrown into the

  • fire or into the water."

  • "I really hope," resumed la Gaultiere, "that nobody will apply for it."

  • "Ah, good heavens!" exclaimed Agnes; "those poor nurses yonder in the foundling asylum,

  • which forms the lower end of the lane as you go to the river, just beside

  • Monseigneur the bishop! what if this little

  • monster were to be carried to them to suckle?

  • I'd rather give suck to a vampire."

  • "How innocent that poor la Herme is!" resumed Jehanne; "don't you see, sister,

  • that this little monster is at least four years old, and that he would have less

  • appetite for your breast than for a turnspit."

  • The "little monster" we should find it difficult ourselves to describe him

  • otherwise, was, in fact, not a new-born child.

  • It was a very angular and very lively little mass, imprisoned in its linen sack,

  • stamped with the cipher of Messire Guillaume Chartier, then bishop of Paris,

  • with a head projecting.

  • That head was deformed enough; one beheld only a forest of red hair, one eye, a

  • mouth, and teeth.

  • The eye wept, the mouth cried, and the teeth seemed to ask only to be allowed to

  • bite.

  • The whole struggled in the sack, to the great consternation of the crowd, which

  • increased and was renewed incessantly around it.

  • Dame Aloise de Gondelaurier, a rich and noble woman, who held by the hand a pretty

  • girl about five or six years of age, and dragged a long veil about, suspended to the

  • golden horn of her headdress, halted as she

  • passed the wooden bed, and gazed for a moment at the wretched creature, while her

  • charming little daughter, Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier, spelled out with her tiny,

  • pretty finger, the permanent inscription attached to the wooden bed: "Foundlings."

  • "Really," said the dame, turning away in disgust, "I thought that they only exposed

  • children here."

  • She turned her back, throwing into the basin a silver florin, which rang among the

  • liards, and made the poor goodwives of the chapel of Etienne Haudry open their eyes.

  • A moment later, the grave and learned Robert Mistricolle, the king's protonotary,

  • passed, with an enormous missal under one arm and his wife on the other (Damoiselle

  • Guillemette la Mairesse), having thus by

  • his side his two regulators,--spiritual and temporal.

  • "Foundling!" he said, after examining the object; "found, apparently, on the banks of

  • the river Phlegethon."

  • "One can only see one eye," observed Damoiselle Guillemette; "there is a wart on

  • the other."

  • "It's not a wart," returned Master Robert Mistricolle, "it is an egg which contains

  • another demon exactly similar, who bears another little egg which contains another

  • devil, and so on."

  • "How do you know that?" asked Guillemette la Mairesse.

  • "I know it pertinently," replied the protonotary.

  • "Monsieur le protonotare," asked Gauchere, "what do you prognosticate of this

  • pretended foundling?" "The greatest misfortunes," replied

  • Mistricolle.

  • "Ah! good heavens!" said an old woman among the spectators, "and that besides our

  • having had a considerable pestilence last year, and that they say that the English

  • are going to disembark in a company at Harfleur."

  • "Perhaps that will prevent the queen from coming to Paris in the month of September,"

  • interposed another; "trade is so bad already."

  • "My opinion is," exclaimed Jehanne de la Tarme, "that it would be better for the

  • louts of Paris, if this little magician were put to bed on a fagot than on a

  • plank."

  • "A fine, flaming fagot," added the old woman.

  • "It would be more prudent," said Mistricolle.

  • For several minutes, a young priest had been listening to the reasoning of the

  • Haudriettes and the sentences of the notary.

  • He had a severe face, with a large brow, a profound glance.

  • He thrust the crowd silently aside, scrutinized the "little magician," and

  • stretched out his hand upon him.

  • It was high time, for all the devotees were already licking their chops over the "fine,

  • flaming fagot." "I adopt this child," said the priest.

  • He took it in his cassock and carried it off.

  • The spectators followed him with frightened glances.

  • A moment later, he had disappeared through the "Red Door," which then led from the

  • church to the cloister.

  • When the first surprise was over, Jehanne de la Tarme bent down to the ear of la

  • Gaultiere,-- "I told you so, sister,--that young clerk,

  • Monsieur Claude Frollo, is a sorcerer."

  • -BOOK FOURTH. CHAPTER II.

  • CLAUDE FROLLO.

  • In fact, Claude Frollo was no common person.

  • He belonged to one of those middle-class families which were called indifferently,

  • in the impertinent language of the last century, the high bourgeoise or the petty

  • nobility.

  • This family had inherited from the brothers Paclet the fief of Tirechappe, which was

  • dependent upon the Bishop of Paris, and whose twenty-one houses had been in the

  • thirteenth century the object of so many suits before the official.

  • As possessor of this fief, Claude Frollo was one of the twenty-seven seigneurs

  • keeping claim to a manor in fee in Paris and its suburbs; and for a long time, his

  • name was to be seen inscribed in this

  • quality, between the Hotel de Tancarville, belonging to Master Francois Le Rez, and

  • the college of Tours, in the records deposited at Saint Martin des Champs.

  • Claude Frollo had been destined from infancy, by his parents, to the

  • ecclesiastical profession.

  • He had been taught to read in Latin; he had been trained to keep his eyes on the ground

  • and to speak low.

  • While still a child, his father had cloistered him in the college of Torchi in

  • the University. There it was that he had grown up, on the

  • missal and the lexicon.

  • Moreover, he was a sad, grave, serious child, who studied ardently, and learned

  • quickly; he never uttered a loud cry in recreation hour, mixed but little in the

  • bacchanals of the Rue du Fouarre, did not

  • know what it was to dare alapas et capillos laniare, and had cut no figure in that

  • revolt of 1463, which the annalists register gravely, under the title of "The

  • sixth trouble of the University."

  • He seldom rallied the poor students of Montaigu on the cappettes from which they

  • derived their name, or the bursars of the college of Dormans on their shaved tonsure,

  • and their surtout parti-colored of bluish-

  • green, blue, and violet cloth, azurini coloris et bruni, as says the charter of

  • the Cardinal des Quatre-Couronnes.

  • On the other hand, he was assiduous at the great and the small schools of the Rue

  • Saint Jean de Beauvais.

  • The first pupil whom the Abbe de Saint Pierre de Val, at the moment of beginning

  • his reading on canon law, always perceived, glued to a pillar of the school Saint-

  • Vendregesile, opposite his rostrum, was

  • Claude Frollo, armed with his horn ink- bottle, biting his pen, scribbling on his

  • threadbare knee, and, in winter, blowing on his fingers.

  • The first auditor whom Messire Miles d'Isliers, doctor in decretals, saw arrive

  • every Monday morning, all breathless, at the opening of the gates of the school of

  • the Chef-Saint-Denis, was Claude Frollo.

  • Thus, at sixteen years of age, the young clerk might have held his own, in mystical

  • theology, against a father of the church; in canonical theology, against a father of

  • the councils; in scholastic theology, against a doctor of Sorbonne.

  • Theology conquered, he had plunged into decretals.

  • From the "Master of Sentences," he had passed to the "Capitularies of

  • Charlemagne;" and he had devoured in succession, in his appetite for science,

  • decretals upon decretals, those of

  • Theodore, Bishop of Hispalus; those of Bouchard, Bishop of Worms; those of Yves,

  • Bishop of Chartres; next the decretal of Gratian, which succeeded the capitularies

  • of Charlemagne; then the collection of

  • Gregory IX.; then the Epistle of Superspecula, of Honorius III.

  • He rendered clear and familiar to himself that vast and tumultuous period of civil

  • law and canon law in conflict and at strife with each other, in the chaos of the Middle

  • Ages,--a period which Bishop Theodore opens

  • in 618, and which Pope Gregory closes in 1227.

  • Decretals digested, he flung himself upon medicine, on the liberal arts.

  • He studied the science of herbs, the science of unguents; he became an expert in

  • fevers and in contusions, in sprains and abcesses.

  • Jacques d' Espars would have received him as a physician; Richard Hellain, as a

  • surgeon. He also passed through all the degrees of

  • licentiate, master, and doctor of arts.

  • He studied the languages, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, a triple sanctuary then very little

  • frequented. His was a veritable fever for acquiring and

  • hoarding, in the matter of science.

  • At the age of eighteen, he had made his way through the four faculties; it seemed to

  • the young man that life had but one sole object: learning.

  • It was towards this epoch, that the excessive heat of the summer of 1466 caused

  • that grand outburst of the plague which carried off more than forty thousand souls

  • in the vicomty of Paris, and among others,

  • as Jean de Troyes states, "Master Arnoul, astrologer to the king, who was a very fine

  • man, both wise and pleasant."

  • The rumor spread in the University that the Rue Tirechappe was especially devastated by

  • the malady. It was there that Claude's parents resided,

  • in the midst of their fief.

  • The young scholar rushed in great alarm to the paternal mansion.

  • When he entered it, he found that both father and mother had died on the preceding

  • day.

  • A very young brother of his, who was in swaddling clothes, was still alive and

  • crying abandoned in his cradle.

  • This was all that remained to Claude of his family; the young man took the child under

  • his arm and went off in a pensive mood. Up to that moment, he had lived only in

  • science; he now began to live in life.

  • This catastrophe was a crisis in Claude's existence.

  • Orphaned, the eldest, head of the family at the age of nineteen, he felt himself rudely

  • recalled from the reveries of school to the realities of this world.

  • Then, moved with pity, he was seized with passion and devotion towards that child,

  • his brother; a sweet and strange thing was a human affection to him, who had hitherto

  • loved his books alone.

  • This affection developed to a singular point; in a soul so new, it was like a

  • first love.

  • Separated since infancy from his parents, whom he had hardly known; cloistered and

  • immured, as it were, in his books; eager above all things to study and to learn;

  • exclusively attentive up to that time, to

  • his intelligence which broadened in science, to his imagination, which expanded

  • in letters,--the poor scholar had not yet had time to feel the place of his heart.

  • This young brother, without mother or father, this little child which had fallen

  • abruptly from heaven into his arms, made a new man of him.

  • He perceived that there was something else in the world besides the speculations of

  • the Sorbonne, and the verses of Homer; that man needed affections; that life without

  • tenderness and without love was only a set of dry, shrieking, and rending wheels.

  • Only, he imagined, for he was at the age when illusions are as yet replaced only by

  • illusions, that the affections of blood and family were the sole ones necessary, and

  • that a little brother to love sufficed to fill an entire existence.

  • He threw himself, therefore, into the love for his little Jehan with the passion of a

  • character already profound, ardent, concentrated; that poor frail creature,

  • pretty, fair-haired, rosy, and curly,--that

  • orphan with another orphan for his only support, touched him to the bottom of his

  • heart; and grave thinker as he was, he set to meditating upon Jehan with an infinite

  • compassion.

  • He kept watch and ward over him as over something very fragile, and very worthy of

  • care. He was more than a brother to the child; he

  • became a mother to him.

  • Little Jehan had lost his mother while he was still at the breast; Claude gave him to

  • a nurse.

  • Besides the fief of Tirechappe, he had inherited from his father the fief of

  • Moulin, which was a dependency of the square tower of Gentilly; it was a mill on

  • a hill, near the chateau of Winchestre (Bicetre).

  • There was a miller's wife there who was nursing a fine child; it was not far from

  • the university, and Claude carried the little Jehan to her in his own arms.

  • From that time forth, feeling that he had a burden to bear, he took life very

  • seriously.

  • The thought of his little brother became not only his recreation, but the object of

  • his studies.

  • He resolved to consecrate himself entirely to a future for which he was responsible in

  • the sight of God, and never to have any other wife, any other child than the

  • happiness and fortune of his brother.

  • Therefore, he attached himself more closely than ever to the clerical profession.

  • His merits, his learning, his quality of immediate vassal of the Bishop of Paris,

  • threw the doors of the church wide open to him.

  • At the age of twenty, by special dispensation of the Holy See, he was a

  • priest, and served as the youngest of the chaplains of Notre-Dame the altar which is

  • called, because of the late mass which is said there, altare pigrorum.

  • There, plunged more deeply than ever in his dear books, which he quitted only to run

  • for an hour to the fief of Moulin, this mixture of learning and austerity, so rare

  • at his age, had promptly acquired for him

  • the respect and admiration of the monastery.

  • From the cloister, his reputation as a learned man had passed to the people, among

  • whom it had changed a little, a frequent occurrence at that time, into reputation as

  • a sorcerer.

  • It was at the moment when he was returning, on Quasimodo day, from saying his mass at

  • the Altar of the Lazy, which was by the side of the door leading to the nave on the

  • right, near the image of the Virgin, that

  • his attention had been attracted by the group of old women chattering around the

  • bed for foundlings.

  • Then it was that he approached the unhappy little creature, which was so hated and so

  • menaced.

  • That distress, that deformity, that abandonment, the thought of his young

  • brother, the idea which suddenly occurred to him, that if he were to die, his dear

  • little Jehan might also be flung miserably

  • on the plank for foundlings,--all this had gone to his heart simultaneously; a great

  • pity had moved in him, and he had carried off the child.

  • When he removed the child from the sack, he found it greatly deformed, in very sooth.

  • The poor little wretch had a wart on his left eye, his head placed directly on his

  • shoulders, his spinal column was crooked, his breast bone prominent, and his legs

  • bowed; but he appeared to be lively; and

  • although it was impossible to say in what language he lisped, his cry indicated

  • considerable force and health.

  • Claude's compassion increased at the sight of this ugliness; and he made a vow in his

  • heart to rear the child for the love of his brother, in order that, whatever might be

  • the future faults of the little Jehan, he

  • should have beside him that charity done for his sake.

  • It was a sort of investment of good works, which he was effecting in the name of his

  • young brother; it was a stock of good works which he wished to amass in advance for

  • him, in case the little rogue should some

  • day find himself short of that coin, the only sort which is received at the toll-bar

  • of paradise.

  • He baptized his adopted child, and gave him the name of Quasimodo, either because he

  • desired thereby to mark the day, when he had found him, or because he wished to

  • designate by that name to what a degree the

  • poor little creature was incomplete, and hardly sketched out.

  • In fact, Quasimodo, blind, hunchbacked, knock-kneed, was only an "almost."

  • -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 IV.

  • THE DOG AND HIS MASTER.

  • Nevertheless, there was one human creature whom Quasimodo excepted from his malice and

  • from his hatred for others, and whom he loved even more, perhaps, than his

  • cathedral: this was Claude Frollo.

  • The matter was simple; Claude Frollo had taken him in, had adopted him, had

  • nourished him, had reared him.

  • When a little lad, it was between Claude Frollo's legs that he was accustomed to

  • seek refuge, when the dogs and the children barked after him.

  • Claude Frollo had taught him to talk, to read, to write.

  • Claude Frollo had finally made him the bellringer.

  • Now, to give the big bell in marriage to Quasimodo was to give Juliet to Romeo.

  • Hence Quasimodo's gratitude was profound, passionate, boundless; and although the

  • visage of his adopted father was often clouded or severe, although his speech was

  • habitually curt, harsh, imperious, that

  • gratitude never wavered for a single moment.

  • The archdeacon had in Quasimodo the most submissive slave, the most docile lackey,

  • the most vigilant of dogs.

  • When the poor bellringer became deaf, there had been established between him and Claude

  • Frollo, a language of signs, mysterious and understood by themselves alone.

  • In this manner the archdeacon was the sole human being with whom Quasimodo had

  • preserved communication. He was in sympathy with but two things in

  • this world: Notre-Dame and Claude Frollo.

  • There is nothing which can be compared with the empire of the archdeacon over the

  • bellringer; with the attachment of the bellringer for the archdeacon.

  • A sign from Claude and the idea of giving him pleasure would have sufficed to make

  • Quasimodo hurl himself headlong from the summit of Notre-Dame.

  • It was a remarkable thing--all that physical strength which had reached in

  • Quasimodo such an extraordinary development, and which was placed by him

  • blindly at the disposition of another.

  • There was in it, no doubt, filial devotion, domestic attachment; there was also the

  • fascination of one spirit by another spirit.

  • It was a poor, awkward, and clumsy organization, which stood with lowered head

  • and supplicating eyes before a lofty and profound, a powerful and superior

  • intellect.

  • Lastly, and above all, it was gratitude. Gratitude so pushed to its extremest limit,

  • that we do not know to what to compare it.

  • This virtue is not one of those of which the finest examples are to be met with

  • among men.

  • We will say then, that Quasimodo loved the archdeacon as never a dog, never a horse,

  • never an elephant loved his master.

  • -BOOK FOURTH. CHAPTER V.

  • MORE ABOUT CLAUDE FROLLO.

  • 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

  • was ignorant of many.

  • 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

  • matutinal clerks of Notre-Dame, when he

  • 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,

  • bald brow.

  • 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

  • lard turns rancid.

  • 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

  • impose upon him.

  • 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,

  • ignorance, and debauchery.

  • 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

  • endured.

  • 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

  • and enormities.

  • 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

  • cellar.

  • 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

  • optimum potatum.

  • 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

  • in your face, and which always pays you,

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

  • paid to her.

  • 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

  • great disturbances of life.

  • 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

  • to a halt, ubi defuit orbis, to proceed

  • 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

  • science.

  • 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

  • Saint-Hilaire,--in the disputes of the

  • 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

  • cavern at that mysterious table of 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

  • East, by the light of the seven-branched

  • 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

  • beside it, was loaded.

  • 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

  • and the Rue Marivault.

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

  • which, constantly deserted since that time, had already begun to fall in ruins,--so

  • greatly had the hermetics and the

  • alchemists of all countries wasted away the walls, merely by carving their names upon

  • them.

  • Some neighbors even affirm that they had once seen, through an air-hole, Archdeacon

  • Claude excavating, turning over, digging up the earth in the two cellars, whose

  • supports had been daubed with numberless

  • couplets and hieroglyphics by Nicolas Flamel himself.

  • It was supposed that Flamel had buried the philosopher's stone in the cellar; and the

  • alchemists, for the space of two centuries, from Magistri to Father Pacifique, never

  • ceased to worry the soil until the house,

  • so cruelly ransacked and turned over, ended by falling into dust beneath their feet.

  • Again, it is certain that the archdeacon had been seized with a singular passion for

  • the symbolical door of Notre-Dame, that page of a conjuring book written in stone,

  • by Bishop Guillaume de Paris, who has, no

  • doubt, been damned for having affixed so infernal a frontispiece to the sacred poem

  • chanted by the rest of the edifice.

  • Archdeacon Claude had the credit also of having fathomed the mystery of the colossus

  • of Saint Christopher, and of that lofty, enigmatical statue which then stood at the

  • entrance of the vestibule, and which the

  • people, in derision, called "Monsieur Legris."

  • But, what every one might have noticed was the interminable hours which he often

  • employed, seated upon the parapet of the area in front of the church, in

  • contemplating the sculptures of the front;

  • examining now the foolish virgins with their lamps reversed, now the wise virgins

  • with their lamps upright; again, calculating the angle of vision of that

  • raven which belongs to the left front, and

  • which is looking at a mysterious point inside the church, where is concealed the

  • philosopher's stone, if it be not in the cellar of Nicolas Flamel.

  • It was, let us remark in passing, a singular fate for the Church of Notre-Dame

  • at that epoch to be so beloved, in two different degrees, and with so much

  • devotion, by two beings so dissimilar as Claude and Quasimodo.

  • Beloved by one, a sort of instinctive and savage half-man, for its beauty, for its

  • stature, for the harmonies which emanated from its magnificent ensemble; beloved by

  • the other, a learned and passionate

  • imagination, for its myth, for the sense which it contains, for the symbolism

  • scattered beneath the sculptures of its front,--like the first text underneath the

  • second in a palimpsest,--in a word, for the

  • enigma which it is eternally propounding to the understanding.

  • Furthermore, it is certain that the archdeacon had established himself in that

  • one of the two towers which looks upon the Greve, just beside the frame for the bells,

  • a very secret little cell, into which no

  • one, not even the bishop, entered without his leave, it was said.

  • This tiny cell had formerly been made almost at the summit of the tower, among

  • the ravens' nests, by Bishop Hugo de Besancon who had wrought sorcery there in

  • his day.

  • What that cell contained, no one knew; but from the strand of the Terrain, at night,

  • there was often seen to appear, disappear, and reappear at brief and regular

  • intervals, at a little dormer window

  • opening upon the back of the tower, a certain red, intermittent, singular light

  • which seemed to follow the panting breaths of a bellows, and to proceed from a flame,

  • rather than from a light.

  • In the darkness, at that height, it produced a singular effect; and the

  • goodwives said: "There's the archdeacon blowing! hell is sparkling up yonder!"

  • .

  • There were no great proofs of sorcery in that, after all, but there was still enough

  • smoke to warrant a surmise of fire, and the archdeacon bore a tolerably formidable

  • reputation.

  • We ought to mention however, that the sciences of Egypt, that necromancy and

  • magic, even the whitest, even the most innocent, had no more envenomed enemy, no

  • more pitiless denunciator before the gentlemen of the officialty of Notre-Dame.

  • Whether this was sincere horror, or the game played by the thief who shouts, "stop

  • thief!" at all events, it did not prevent the archdeacon from being considered by the

  • learned heads of the chapter, as a soul who

  • had ventured into the vestibule of hell, who was lost in the caves of the cabal,

  • groping amid the shadows of the occult sciences.

  • Neither were the people deceived thereby; with any one who possessed any sagacity,

  • Quasimodo passed for the demon; Claude Frollo, for the sorcerer.

  • It was evident that the bellringer was to serve the archdeacon for a given time, at

  • the end of which he would carry away the latter's soul, by way of payment.

  • Thus the archdeacon, in spite of the excessive austerity of his life, was in bad

  • odor among all pious souls; and there was no devout nose so inexperienced that it

  • could not smell him out to be a magician.

  • And if, as he grew older, abysses had formed in his science, they had also formed

  • in his heart.

  • That at least, is what one had grounds for believing on scrutinizing that face upon

  • which the soul was only seen to shine through a sombre cloud.

  • Whence that large, bald brow? that head forever bent? that breast always heaving

  • with sighs?

  • What secret thought caused his mouth to smile with so much bitterness, at the same

  • moment that his scowling brows approached each other like two bulls on the point of

  • fighting?

  • Why was what hair he had left already gray? What was that internal fire which sometimes

  • broke forth in his glance, to such a degree that his eye resembled a hole pierced in

  • the wall of a furnace?

  • These symptoms of a violent moral preoccupation, had acquired an especially

  • high degree of intensity at the epoch when this story takes place.

  • More than once a choir-boy had fled in terror at finding him alone in the church,

  • so strange and dazzling was his look.

  • More than once, in the choir, at the hour of the offices, his neighbor in the stalls

  • had heard him mingle with the plain song, ad omnem tonum, unintelligible parentheses.

  • More than once the laundress of the Terrain charged "with washing the chapter" had

  • observed, not without affright, the marks of nails and clenched fingers on the

  • surplice of monsieur the archdeacon of Josas.

  • However, he redoubled his severity, and had never been more exemplary.

  • By profession as well as by character, he had always held himself aloof from women;

  • he seemed to hate them more than ever. The mere rustling of a silken petticoat

  • caused his hood to fall over his eyes.

  • Upon this score he was so jealous of austerity and reserve, that when the Dame

  • de Beaujeu, the king's daughter, came to visit the cloister of Notre-Dame, in the

  • month of December, 1481, he gravely opposed

  • her entrance, reminding the bishop of the statute of the Black Book, dating from the

  • vigil of Saint-Barthelemy, 1334, which interdicts access to the cloister to "any

  • woman whatever, old or young, mistress or maid."

  • Upon which the bishop had been constrained to recite to him the ordinance of Legate

  • Odo, which excepts certain great dames, aliquoe magnates mulieres, quoe sine

  • scandalo vitari non possunt.

  • And again the archdeacon had protested, objecting that the ordinance of the legate,

  • which dated back to 1207, was anterior by a hundred and twenty-seven years to the Black

  • Book, and consequently was abrogated in fact by it.

  • And he had refused to appear before the princess.

  • It was also noticed that his horror for Bohemian women and gypsies had seemed to

  • redouble for some time past.

  • He had petitioned the bishop for an edict which expressly forbade the Bohemian women

  • to come and dance and beat their tambourines on the place of the Parvis; and

  • for about the same length of time, he had

  • been ransacking the mouldy placards of the officialty, in order to collect the cases

  • of sorcerers and witches condemned to fire or the rope, for complicity in crimes with

  • rams, sows, or goats.

  • -BOOK FOURTH. CHAPTER VI.

  • UNPOPULARITY.

  • The archdeacon and the bellringer, as we have already said, were but little loved by

  • the populace great and small, in the vicinity of the cathedral.

  • When Claude and Quasimodo went out together, which frequently happened, and

  • when they were seen traversing in company, the valet behind the master, the cold,

  • narrow, and gloomy streets of the block of

  • Notre-Dame, more than one evil word, more than one ironical quaver, more than one

  • insulting jest greeted them on their way, unless Claude Frollo, which was rarely the

  • case, walked with head upright and raised,

  • showing his severe and almost august brow to the dumbfounded jeerers.

  • Both were in their quarter like "the poets" of whom Regnier speaks,--

  • "All sorts of persons run after poets, As warblers fly shrieking after owls."

  • Sometimes a mischievous child risked his skin and bones for the ineffable pleasure

  • of driving a pin into Quasimodo's hump.

  • Again, a young girl, more bold and saucy than was fitting, brushed the priest's

  • black robe, singing in his face the sardonic ditty, "niche, niche, the devil is

  • caught."

  • Sometimes a group of squalid old crones, squatting in a file under the shadow of the

  • steps to a porch, scolded noisily as the archdeacon and the bellringer passed, and

  • tossed them this encouraging welcome, with

  • a curse: "Hum! there's a fellow whose soul is made like the other one's body!"

  • Or a band of schoolboys and street urchins, playing hop-scotch, rose in a body and

  • saluted him classically, with some cry in Latin: "Eia! eia!

  • Claudius cum claudo!"

  • But the insult generally passed unnoticed both by the priest and the bellringer.

  • Quasimodo was too deaf to hear all these gracious things, and Claude was too dreamy.

BOOK FOURTH. CHAPTER I.

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