Part 13

--I am of the opinion, cried Jehanne de la Tarme, that it would be better for the common folk of Paris if that little magician there were laid upon a faggot rather than upon a board.

--A fine blazing faggot! added the old woman.

--That would be more prudent, said Mistricolle.

For some moments a young priest had been listening to the reasoning of the haudriettes and the pronouncements of the protonotary. He had a severe countenance, a broad forehead, a deep gaze. He silently parted the crowd, examined the *little magician*, and laid his hand upon him. It was high time. For all the devout women were already licking their lips at the thought of the *fine blazing faggot*.

"I adopt this child," said the priest.

He took him into his cassock and carried him away. The onlookers followed him with astonished eyes. A moment later, he had disappeared through the Red Gate, which at that time led from the church to the cloister.

When the first surprise had passed, Jehanne de la Tarme leaned toward the Gaultière's ear:

"I told you, my sister, that this young clerk, monsieur Claude Frollo, is a sorcerer."

II

CLAUDE FROLLO

Indeed, Claude Frollo was no ordinary figure.

He belonged to one of those middle-class families which, in the impertinent language of the last century, were indifferently called high bourgeoisie or petty nobility. This family had inherited from the Paclet brothers the fief of Tirechappe, which was held from the bishop of Paris, and whose twenty-one houses had been, in the thirteenth century, the subject of so many lawsuits before the official. As possessor of this fief, Claude Frollo was one of the *seven times twenty-one* lords claiming censual rights in Paris and its suburbs; and one may long have seen his name inscribed in this capacity, between the hôtel of Tancarville, belonging to master François Le Rez, and the college of Tours, in the cartulary deposited at Saint-Martin-des-Champs.

Claude Frollo had been destined from childhood by his parents to the ecclesiastical state. He had been taught to read in Latin. He had been brought up to lower his eyes and speak softly. As a child, his father had cloistered him in the college of Torchi in the University. It was there that he grew up over the missal and the Lexicon.

Besides, he was a sad, grave, serious child, who studied ardently and learned quickly. He raised no great outcry in the recreations, mixed little in the bacchanals of the rue du Fouarre, knew not what it was to *dare alapas et capillos laniare* [41], and had played no part in that mutiny of 1463 which the annalists gravely register under the title: "Sixth disturbance of the University." It rarely befell him to mock the poor scholars of Montagu for the *cappettes* from which they took their name, or the bursars of the College of Dormans for their shaven tonsure and their three-part surcoat of perse, blue and violet cloth, *azurini coloris et bruni*, as says the charter of the cardinal of the Four Crowns.

On the other hand, he was diligent at the great and small schools of the rue Saint-Jean-de-Beauvais. The first scholar that the abbot of Saint-Pierre de Val, at the moment of beginning his lecture on canon law, always perceived glued opposite his chair to a pillar of the school of Saint-Vendregesile, was Claude Frollo, armed with his horn inkwell, chewing his pen, scribbling on his worn knee, and in winter blowing on his fingers. The first auditor that messire Miles d'Isliers, doctor of Decretals, saw arrive each Monday morning, quite out of breath, at the opening of the doors of the school of the Chef-Saint-Denis, was Claude Frollo. Thus, at sixteen, the young clerk could 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 the Sorbonne.

When theology was exhausted, he had flung himself into the Decretals. From the *Master of the Sentences*, he had fallen upon the *Capitularies of Charlemagne*. And successively he had devoured, in his appetite for knowledge, decretal upon decretal, those of Theodore, bishop of Hispalis, those of Bouchard, bishop of Worms, those of Yves, bishop of Chartres; then the Decretum of Gratian, which succeeded the Capitularies of Charlemagne; then the collection of Gregory IX; then the epistle *Super specula* of Honorius III. There became clear and familiar to him that vast and tumultuous period of civil and canon law in strife and travail within the chaos of the middle ages, a period which bishop Theodore opens in 618 and which pope Gregory closes in 1227.

The Decretals digested, he threw himself upon medicine, and upon the liberal arts. He studied the science of herbs, the science of ointments. He became expert in fevers and bruises, in wounds and abscesses. Jacques d'Espars would have received him as physician physic, Richard Hellain as surgeon physician. He likewise traversed all the degrees of licence, mastership and doctorate in arts. He studied languages, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, a triple sanctuary then but little frequented. It was a veritable fever of acquiring and hoarding in matters of science. At eighteen, the four faculties had passed through him. It seemed to the young man that life had a single aim: to know.

It was about this time that the excessive summer of 1466 caused to burst forth that great plague which carried off more than forty thousand creatures in the viscounty of Paris, and among others, says Jean de Troyes, "master Arnoul, astrologer to the king, who was a very good man, wise and pleasant [42]." The rumor spread in the University that the rue Tirechappe was particularly devastated by the sickness. There resided, amid their fief, the parents of Claude. The young scholar ran much alarmed to the paternal house. When he entered, his father and mother had died the day before. A very young brother whom he had in swaddling clothes still lived and cried, abandoned in his cradle. That was all that remained to Claude of his family. The young man took the child under his arm, and went out thoughtful. Until then he had lived only in science; he began to live in life.

This catastrophe was a crisis in the existence of Claude. Orphaned, eldest, head of the family at nineteen, he felt himself roughly recalled from the reveries of the school to the realities of this world. Then, moved with pity, he conceived a passion and devotion for this child, his brother; a strange and sweet thing, that a human affection in him who had hitherto loved only books.

This affection developed to a singular degree. In a soul so fresh, it was like a first love. Separated since childhood from his parents, whom he had scarce known, cloistered and as it were walled up in his books, eager above all to study and learn, exclusively attentive until then to his intelligence which expanded in science, to his imagination which grew in letters, the poor scholar had not yet had time to feel the place of his heart. This younger brother without father or mother, this little child, who suddenly fell from heaven into his arms, made of him a new man. He perceived that there was something else in the world than the speculations of the Sorbonne and the verses of Homerus, that man had need of affections, that life without tenderness and without love was but a dry, creaking and rending mechanism; only he fancied, for he was at the age when illusions are not yet replaced save by illusions, that the affections of blood and family were the only necessary ones, and that a little brother to love sufficed to fill an entire existence.

He threw himself, then, into the love of his little Jehan with the passion of a character already profound, ardent, concentrated. This poor, frail creature, pretty, blonde, pink and curled, this orphan with no other support than an orphan, moved him to the very depths of his bowels; and, grave thinker that he was, he set about reflecting upon Jehan with infinite mercy. He took care and concern for him as for something very fragile and highly commended. He was to the child more than a brother, he became a mother to him.

Little Jehan had lost his mother, whom he was still nursing. Claude put him to a wet-nurse. Besides the fief of Tirechappe, he had inherited from his father the fief of the Moulin, which was held from the square tower of Gentilly. It was a mill upon a hill, near the castle of Winchestre (Bicêtre). There was the miller's wife who nursed a fine child; it was not far from the University. Claude carried his little Jehan thither himself.

Thenceforward, feeling a burden to drag, he took life very seriously. The thought of his little brother became not only the recreation, but yet the aim of his studies; he resolved to consecrate himself wholly to a future for which he answered before God, and to have never other wife, other child than the happiness and fortune of his brother. He attached himself therefore more than ever to his clerical vocation. His merit, his science, his quality of immediate vassal of the bishop of Paris, opened to him wide all the doors of the church. At twenty, by special dispensation of the holy see, he was priest, and served, as the youngest of the chaplains of Notre-Dame, the altar which is called, because of the late mass said there, *altare pigrorum* [43].

There, more than ever plunged into his dear books which he quitted only to run for an hour to the fief of the Moulin, this mixture of learning and austerity, so rare at his age, had promptly rendered him the respect and admiration of the cloister. From the cloister, his reputation as a learned man had passed to the people, where it had somewhat turned, a frequent thing then, to the renown of sorcerer.

It was at the moment when, on the day of Quasimodo, he was returning from saying his mass of the idle at their altar, which was beside the choir door opening toward the nave, on the right, near the image of the Virgin, that his attention had been awakened by the group of old women clamoring about the bed of the foundlings.

It was then that he had approached the unhappy little creature so hated and so threatened. That distress, that deformity, that abandonment, the thought of his young brother, the chimera which suddenly struck his mind that, if he were to die, his dear little Jehan might well also be miserably cast upon the board of the foundlings, all this had come to his heart at once; a great pity had moved within him, and he had carried off the child.

When he drew the child from the sack, he found him indeed deformed. The poor little devil had a wart upon the left eye, his head between his shoulders, his spine arched, his breastbone prominent, his legs bowed; but he seemed lively; and though it was impossible to know what language he babbled, his cry announced some strength and some health. Claude's compassion increased at this ugliness; and he vowed in his heart to rear this child for the love of his brother, so that, whatever faults little Jehan might commit in the future, he might have on his side this charity, done for his sake. It was a sort of investment of good works which he effected upon the head of his younger brother; it was a stock of good actions which he wished to amass for him in advance, against the day when the little rogue should find himself short of that coin, the only one accepted at the toll of paradise.

He baptized his adopted child, and named him *Quasimodo*, whether he wished to mark thereby the day on which he had found him, or whether he wished to characterize by this name to what point the poor little creature was incomplete and barely sketched. In truth, Quasimodo, one-eyed, hunchbacked, bandy-legged, was hardly more than an *approximate*.

III

"IMMANIS PECORIS CUSTOS IMMANIOR IPSE [44]"

Now, in 1482, Quasimodo had grown up. He had become, for several years, ringer of the bells of Notre-Dame, thanks to his adoptive father Claude Frollo, who had become archdeacon of Josas, thanks to his suzerain messire Louis de Beaumont, who had become bishop of Paris in 1472, at the death of Guillaume Chartier, thanks to his patron Olivier le Daim, barber of the king Louis XI by the grace of God.

Quasimodo was therefore carillonneur of Notre-Dame.

With time, there had formed I know not what intimate bond which united the ringer to the church. Separated forever from the world by the double fatality of his unknown birth and his deformed nature, imprisoned from childhood within this double unpassable circle, the poor unfortunate had grown accustomed to see nothing in this world beyond the religious walls which had received him in their shadow. Notre-Dame had been successively for him, as he grew and developed, the egg, the nest, the house, the native land, the universe.

And it is certain that there was a sort of mysterious and pre-existent harmony between this creature and this edifice. When, still very small, he dragged himself tortuously and by fits under the shadows of its vaults, he seemed, with his human face and his bestial limbs, the natural reptile of that damp and dark pavement upon which the shadow of the Romanesque capitals cast so many bizarre forms.

Later, the first time that he mechanically clung to the rope of the towers, and hung upon it, and set the bell in motion, it produced upon Claude, his adoptive father, the effect of a child whose tongue is loosed and who begins to speak.

Thus it was that, little by little, ever developing in the sense of the cathedral, living there, sleeping there, scarce ever going out, undergoing at every hour the mysterious pressure of it, he came to resemble it, to embed himself in it, so to speak, to form an integral part of it. His salient angles fitted into, allow us this figure, the re-entrant angles of the building, and he seemed thereby, not only its inhabitant, but yet its natural contents. One might almost say that he had taken its form, as the snail takes the form of its shell. It was his dwelling, his hole, his envelope. There was between the old church and him an instinctive sympathy so profound, so many magnetic affinities, so many material affinities, that he adhered to it in some sort as the tortoise to its shell. The rugged cathedral was his carapace.

It is needless to warn the reader not to take literally the figures which we are obliged to employ here to express this singular, symmetrical, immediate, almost co-substantial coupling of a man and an edifice. It is needless likewise to say with what familiarity the whole cathedral had become to him in so long and so intimate a cohabitation. This abode was his own. It had no depth that Quasimodo had not penetrated, no height that he had not climbed; it befell him many times to scale the facade at several elevations, aiding himself only by the asperities of the sculpture. The towers, upon whose outer surface he was often seen crawling like a lizard gliding on a sheer wall, those two giant twins, so high, so threatening, so dreadful, had for him neither vertigo, nor terror, nor reeling dizziness; to see them so gentle under his hand, so easy to climb, one would have said he had tamed them. By dint of leaping, of clambering, of disporting himself amid the abysses of the gigantic cathedral, he had become in some fashion ape and chamois, like the Calabrian child who swims before he walks, and plays, tiny, with the sea.

For the rest, not only did his body seem to have fashioned itself according to the cathedral, but yet his spirit. In what state was that soul, what fold had it contracted, what form had it taken under that knotted envelope, in that savage life, is what it would be difficult to determine. Quasimodo was born one-eyed, hunchbacked, lame. It was with great trouble and great patience that Claude Frollo had succeeded in teaching him to speak. But a fatality was attached to the poor foundling. Ringer of Notre-Dame at fourteen, a new infirmity had come to complete him; the bells had broken his eardrum; he had become deaf. The only door that nature had left wide open to him upon the world had suddenly closed forever.

In closing, it intercepted the sole ray of joy and light that still pierced into the soul of Quasimodo. That soul fell into a profound night. The melancholy of the wretch became incurable and complete as his deformity. Let us add that his deafness rendered him in some sort mute. For, not to give others occasion to laugh, from the moment he saw himself deaf, he resolved firmly upon a silence which he broke scarce but when alone. He voluntarily bound that tongue which Claude Frollo had had such pains to unloose. Thence it came about that, when necessity constrained him to speak, his tongue was numb, clumsy, like a door whose hinges are rusty.

If now we should try to penetrate to the soul of Quasimodo through that thick and hard bark; if we could sound the depths of that ill-made organization; if it were given us to look with a torch behind those non-transparent organs, to explore the tenebrous interior of that opaque creature, to elucidate its obscure corners, its absurd blind alleys, and to cast suddenly a vivid light upon the psyche chained at the bottom of that den, we should find, no doubt, the unhappy one in some poor, stunted and rickety posture, like those prisoners of the leads of Venice who grew old bent double in a stone box too low and too short.

It is certain that the mind atrophies in a botched body. Quasimodo barely felt blindly moving within him a soul made in his image. The impressions of objects underwent a considerable refraction before reaching his thought. His brain was a peculiar medium: the ideas that traversed it came out all twisted. The reflection proceeding from that refraction was necessarily divergent and deflected.

Hence a thousand optical illusions, a thousand aberrations of judgment, a thousand vagaries wherein his thought wandered, now mad, now idiotic.

The first effect of that fatal organization was to trouble the gaze he cast upon things. He received of them scarce any immediate perception. The outer world seemed to him much farther than to us.

The second effect of his misfortune was to render him wicked.

He was wicked indeed, because he was savage; he was savage because he was ugly; there was a logic in his nature as in ours.

His strength, so extraordinarily developed, was one more cause of wickedness. *Malus puer robustus* [45], says Hobbes.

Besides, justice must be rendered him, wickedness was perhaps not innate in him. From his first steps among men, he had felt, then he had seen himself, hooted, branded, repelled. Human speech for him was always a jest or a curse. In growing up he had found only hatred around him. He had taken it. He had won the general malice. He had picked up the weapon with which he had been wounded.

After all, he turned but reluctantly his face toward men. His cathedral sufficed him. It was peopled with figures of marble, kings, saints, bishops, who at least did not burst out laughing in his face and had for him but a tranquil and benevolent gaze. The other statues, those of monsters and demons, had no hatred for him. Quasimodo resembled them too much for that. They rather mocked the other men. The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him. Thus he had long outpourings with them. Thus he sometimes passed whole hours, crouched before one of those statues, conversing solitarily with it. If anyone came upon him, he fled like a lover surprised in his serenade.

And the cathedral was not for him merely society, but yet the universe, but yet all nature. He dreamed of no other espaliers than the stained-glass windows ever in flower, of no other shade than that of those stone leaves which unfold charged with birds in the tuft of the Saxon capitals, of no other mountains than the colossal towers of the church, of no other ocean than Paris which murmured at their feet.

What he loved above all in the maternal edifice, what awakened his soul and made him open his poor wings which he held so miserably folded in his cavern, what sometimes rendered him happy, were the bells. He loved them, caressed them, spoke to them, understood them. From the chime of the needle of the transept to the great bell of the portal, he had them all in tenderness. The transept belfry, the two towers, were for him like three great cages whose birds, reared by him, sang only for him. Yet it was these same bells that had made him deaf, but mothers often love best the child that has made them suffer most.

It is true that their voice was the only one he could still hear. By that title, the great bell was his beloved. It was she he preferred in that family of noisy girls who wriggled around him on feast days. This great bell was called Marie. She was alone in the southern tower with her sister Jacqueline, a bell of lesser size, enclosed in a smaller cage beside hers. This Jacqueline was so named from the wife of Jean de Montagu, who had given her to the church, which had not prevented him from going to figure headless at Montfaucon. In the second tower there were six other bells, and finally the six smaller ones inhabited the belfry upon the transept with the wooden bell which was sounded only from the afternoon of Maundy Thursday until the morning of the vigil of Easter. Quasimodo had therefore fifteen bells in his seraglio, but the great Marie was the favorite.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”