Part 14

No one could form any idea of his joy on days of great pealing. At the moment when the archdeacon had let him go and said to him: Go! he climbed the spiral stair of the bell tower faster than another would have descended it. He entered, quite out of breath, into the airy chamber of the great bell; he regarded it for a moment with reverence and love; then he gently spoke to it, he stroked it with his hand, like a good horse about to run a long course. He pitied it for the toil it was about to undergo. After these first caresses, he cried to his helpers, stationed on the lower floor of the tower, to begin. They hung upon the ropes, the windlass cried out, and the enormous metal capsule slowly stirred. Quasimodo, palpitating, followed it with his eyes. The first shock of the clapper and the brazen wall made the framework on which he stood tremble. Quasimodo vibrated with the bell. Whew! he cried with a burst of mad laughter. Meanwhile the motion of the bourdon accelerated, and as it swept a wider arc, Quasimodo's eye opened more and more, phosphoric and flaming. At last the great peal began, the whole tower trembled, timbers, lead, cut stone, all rumbled at once, from the foundation piles to the trefoils of the crowning. Then Quasimodo boiled with a heavy foam; he went, came, he trembled with the tower from head to foot. The bell, unchained and furious, alternately presented to the two walls of the tower its bronze maw from which escaped that storm-breath audible four leagues off.

Quasimodo placed himself before that open maw; he crouched, rose with the returns of the bell, inhaled that overwhelming breath, gazed by turns upon the deep square that swarmed two hundred feet below him and the enormous tongue of copper that came, second by second, to roar in his ear. It was the only word he heard, the only sound that troubled for him the universal silence. He dilated therein like a bird in the sun. Suddenly the frenzy of the bell seized him; his look became extraordinary; he awaited the bourdon in its passage, as the spider awaits the fly, and flung himself abruptly upon it with all his weight. Then, suspended over the abyss, launched into the formidable swinging of the bell, he seized the monster of brass by the ears, clasped it with both knees, spurred it with both heels, and redoubled with all the shock and all the weight of his body the fury of the peal. Meanwhile the tower wavered; he, cried and gnashed his teeth, his red hair bristled, his chest made the noise of a forge bellows, his eye shot flames, the monstrous bell neighed all panting beneath him, and then it was no longer either the bourdon of Notre-Dame or Quasimodo, it was a dream, a whirlwind, a tempest; vertigo astride upon the noise; a spirit clinging to a flying crupper; a strange centaur half man, half bell; a sort of horrible Astolpho borne upon a prodigious hippogriff of living bronze.

The presence of this extraordinary being made circulate through the whole cathedral I know not what breath of life. It seemed that 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 entrails of the old church palpitate. It sufficed that he was known to be there for one to believe they saw live and move the thousand statues of the galleries and portals. And in fact, the cathedral seemed a docile and obedient creature beneath his hand; it awaited his will to raise its great voice; it was possessed and filled with Quasimodo like a familiar genius. One would have said that he made the immense edifice breathe. He was everywhere in it indeed, he multiplied himself upon all points of the monument. Sometimes one caught sight with terror, at the top of one of the towers, of a bizarre dwarf who climbed, wound, crawled on all fours, descended outside over the abyss, leapt from projection to projection, and went to rummage in the belly of some sculptured gorgon; it was Quasimodo dislodging the crows. Sometimes one stumbled in an obscure corner of the church upon a sort of living chimera, crouched and scowling; it was Quasimodo thinking. Sometimes one noticed beneath a bell tower a huge 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, one saw a hideous shape wander upon the frail balustrade cut like lace which crowns the towers and borders the circuit of the apse; it was again the hunchback of Notre-Dame. Then, said the neighbors, the whole church took on something fantastic, supernatural, horrible; eyes and mouths opened here and there; one heard bark the stone dogs, the guivres, the tarascas that keep watch day and night, neck outstretched and mouth open, around the monstrous cathedral; and if it were a Christmas night, while the great bell which seemed to rattle called the faithful to the ardent midnight mass, there was such an air spread upon the dark facade that one would have said the great portal devoured the crowd and the rose window looked at it. And all that came from Quasimodo. Egypt would have taken him for the god of this temple; the middle ages believed him its demon; he was its soul.

To such a point that for those who know Quasimodo existed, Notre-Dame is today deserted, inanimate, dead. One feels that something has disappeared. This immense body is empty; it is a skeleton; the spirit has left it, one sees its place, and that is all. It is like a skull where there are still holes for the eyes, but no longer any gaze.

IV

THE DOG AND HIS MASTER

There was yet a human creature whom Quasimodo excepted from his malice and his hatred for others, and whom he loved as much, perhaps more than his cathedral; it was Claude Frollo.

The thing was simple. Claude Frollo had taken him in, had adopted him, had fed him, had brought him up. When very small, it was in the legs of Claude Frollo that he was accustomed to take refuge when the dogs and children barked after him. Claude Frollo had taught him to speak, to read, to write. Claude Frollo finally had made him his bell-ringer. Now, to give the great bell in marriage to Quasimodo, was to give Juliet to Romeo.

Also Quasimodo's gratitude was profound, passionate, without bound; and although the face of his adoptive father was often misty and severe, although his word was habitually brief, hard, imperious, never had this gratitude belied itself a single instant. The archdeacon had in Quasimodo the most submissive slave, the most docile servant, the most vigilant dog. When the poor bell-ringer became deaf, there had established itself between him and Claude Frollo a language of signs, mysterious and understood by them alone. In this way the archdeacon was the only human being with whom Quasimodo had preserved communication. He was in relation in this world only with two things, Notre-Dame and Claude Frollo.

Nothing comparable to the archdeacon's empire over the ringer, to the ringer's attachment for the archdeacon. A single sign from Claude and the idea of pleasing him would have sufficed for Quasimodo to precipitate himself from the top of the towers of Notre-Dame. It was a remarkable thing that all this physical force, arrived in Quasimodo at so extraordinary a development, and blindly put by him at the disposition of another. There was doubtless in this filial devotion, domestic attachment; there was also fascination of one mind by another mind. It was a poor, awkward and clumsy organization which held its head low and its eyes supplicating before a high and deep intelligence, powerful and superior. Finally and above all, it was gratitude. Gratitude so pushed to its extreme limit that we could not to what to compare it. This virtue is not among those of which the finest examples are among men. We shall say then that Quasimodo loved the archdeacon as never dog, never horse, never elephant has loved its master.

V

SEQUEL OF CLAUDE FROLLO

In 1482, Quasimodo was about twenty years old, Claude Frollo about thirty-six: the one had grown, the other had aged.

Claude Frollo was no longer the simple scholar of the Torchi college, the tender protector of a little child, the young and dreamy philosopher who knew many things and was ignorant of many. He was an austere, grave, morose priest; a charged of souls; monsieur the archdeacon of Josas, the second acolyte of the bishop, having upon his shoulders the two deaneries of Montlhéry and Châteaufort and a hundred sixty-four rural curates. He was an imposing and dark personage before whom the children of the choir in surplice and jacket, the machicots, the brothers of Saint-Augustin, the matutinal clerks of Notre-Dame, trembled when he passed slowly under the high ogives of the choir, majestic, pensive, arms crossed and head so bent upon his chest that one saw of his face only his great bald forehead.

Dom Claude Frollo had not abandoned, moreover, either science, or the education of his young brother, those two occupations of his life. But with time there had mingled some bitterness into these things so sweet. In the long run, says Paul the Deacon, the best bacon turns rancid. The little Jehan Frollo, surnamed du Moulin because of the place where he had been nursed, had not grown in the direction Claude had wished to imprint upon him. The elder brother counted on a pious, docile, learned, honorable pupil. Now the little brother, like those young trees which deceive the effort of the gardener and turn obstinately toward the side from which come to them air and sun, the little brother grew and multiplied, put forth beautiful thick and luxuriant branches only on the side of laziness, ignorance and debauchery. He was a true devil, very disorderly, which made dom Claude frown, but very funny and very subtle, which made the elder brother smile. Claude had entrusted him to that same Torchi college where he had passed his first years in study and recollection; and it was a grief for him that this sanctuary formerly edified under the name of Frollo was scandalized today by it. He sometimes made to Jehan very severe and very long sermons, which the latter endured intrepidly. After all, the young good-for-nothing had a good heart, as is seen in all comedies. But, the sermon past, he resumed no less tranquilly the course of his seditions and enormities. Sometimes it was a becjaune (they called thus the new arrivals at the University) whom he had hazed for his welcome; a precious tradition which has been carefully perpetuated until our days. Sometimes he had given the impulse to a band of clerks, who were classically thrown upon a tavern, quasi classico excitati, then had beaten the taverner "with offensive sticks", and joyously pillaged the tavern even to caving in the wine vats in the cellar. And then, it was a fine report in Latin that the under-monitor of Torchi piteously brought to dom Claude with this dolorous marginal note: Rixa; prima causa vinum optimum potatum. Finally they said, horror in a child of sixteen years, that his excesses went often as far as the rue de Glatigny.

From all this, Claude, saddened and discouraged in his human affections, had thrown himself with more vehemence into the arms of science, that sister who at least does not laugh in your face and always pays you, although in somewhat hollow coin, the cares one has rendered her. He became therefore more and more learned, and at the same time, by a natural consequence, more and more rigid as priest, more and more sad as man. There are, for each of us, certain parallelisms between our intelligence, our morals and our character, which develop without discontinuity, and break only at the great perturbations of life.

As Claude Frollo had traversed since his youth the almost entire circle of positive, exterior and licit human knowledge, force was his, unless he stopped ubi defuit orbis, force was his to go further and seek other nourishment for the insatiable activity of his intelligence. The ancient symbol of the serpent biting its tail suits especially science. It appears that Claude Frollo had experienced it. The more several grave persons affirmed that, after having exhausted the fas of human knowledge, he had dared penetrate into the nefas. He had, they said, tasted successively all the apples of the tree of intelligence, and, hunger or disgust, he had ended by biting the forbidden fruit. He had taken his place in turn, as our readers have seen, at the conferences of the theologians in the Sorbonne, at the assemblies of the artists at the image Saint-Hilaire, at the disputes of the decretists at the image Saint-Martin, at the congregations of the physicians at the holy-water font of Notre-Dame, ad cupam Nostræ Dominæ; all the permitted and approved dishes that these four great kitchens, called the four faculties, could elaborate and serve to an intelligence, he had devoured them and satiety had come to him before his hunger was appeased; then he had dug deeper, lower, beneath all that finished, material, limited science; he had risked perhaps his soul, and had seated himself in the cavern at that mysterious table of the alchemists, the astrologers, the hermetics, of whom Averroes, Guillaume of Paris and Nicolas Flamel hold the end in the middle ages, and which prolongs itself in the Orient, in the lights of the seven-branched candlestick, as far as Solomon, Pythagoras and Zoroaster.

It was at least what was supposed, wrongly or rightly.

It is certain that the archdeacon often visited the cemetery of the Holy Innocents, where his father and mother had been buried, it is true, with the other victims of the plague of 1466; but that he appeared much less devout to the cross of their grave than to the strange figures with which was charged the tomb of Nicolas Flamel and Claude Pernelle, built right beside.

It is certain that he had been seen often skirting the rue des Lombards and entering furtively a little house which made the corner of the rue des Écrivains and the rue Marivault. It was the house that Nicolas Flamel had built, where he had died toward 1417, and which, always deserted since then, was beginning already to fall in ruin, so much had the hermetics and the blowers of all countries worn its walls merely by engraving their names there. Some neighbors even affirmed having once seen through an air-hole the archdeacon Claude digging, moving and hoeing the earth in those two cellars whose strutted legs had been smeared with countless verses and hieroglyphs by Nicolas Flamel himself. They supposed that Flamel had buried the philosopher's stone in those cellars, and the alchemists, for two centuries, from Magistri to father Pacifique, have not ceased to torment the soil until the house, so cruelly searched and turned over, has ended by going into dust beneath their feet.

It is certain again that the archdeacon had conceived a singular passion for the symbolic portal of Notre-Dame, that page of grimoire written in stone by bishop Guillaume of Paris, who has doubtless been damned for having attached so infernal a frontispiece to the holy poem that the rest of the edifice eternally sings. The archdeacon Claude passed also for having fathomed the colossus of saint Christopher and that long enigmatic statue which then rose at the entrance of the parvis and which the people called in its derisions Monsieur Legris. But, what everyone had been able to remark, were the interminable hours that he often employed, seated on the parapet of the parvis, to contemplate the sculptures of the portal, examining now the foolish virgins with their overturned lamps, now the wise virgins with their upright lamps; other times calculating the angle of the gaze of that crow which holds at the left portal and which looks into the church a mysterious point where is certainly hidden the philosopher's stone, if it is not in the cellar of Nicolas Flamel. It was, let us say in passing, a singular destiny for the church Notre-Dame at that epoch to be thus loved at two different degrees and with so much devotion by two beings as dissimilar as Claude and Quasimodo; loved by the one, a sort of instinctive and savage half-man, for its beauty, for its stature, for the harmonies which detach themselves from its magnificent ensemble; loved by the other, a learned and passionate imagination, for its signification, for its myth, for the sense it encloses, for the symbol scattered beneath the sculptures of its facade like the first text beneath the second in a palimpsest; in a word, for the enigma it eternally proposes to intelligence.

It is certain finally that the archdeacon had accommodated himself, in that one of the two towers which looks upon the Grève, right beside the bell cage, a little very secret cell where no one entered, not even the bishop, they said, without his leave. This cell had been formerly made almost at the summit of the tower, among the crow's nests, by bishop Hugo of Besançon, who had maleficed therein in his time. What this cell enclosed, no one knew; but one had often seen, from the shores of the Terrain, at night, at a little dormer window which it had on the back of the tower, appear, disappear and reappear at short and equal intervals a red light, intermittent, bizarre, which seemed to follow the panting aspirations of a bellows and to come rather from a flame than from a light. In the shadow, at that height, that made a singular effect and the good women said: There is the archdeacon blowing, hell crackles up there.

There was not in all that after all great proof of sorcery; but it was still always as much smoke as was needed to suppose fire; and the archdeacon had a rather formidable reputation. We must say however that the sciences of Egypt, that necromancy, that magic, even the whitest and most innocent, had not a more hardened enemy, not a more pitiless denouncer before the gentlemen of the officiality of Notre-Dame. That it were sincere horror or play acted by the thief who cries: thief! that did not prevent the archdeacon from being considered by the learned heads of the chapter as a soul ventured in the vestibule of hell, lost in the caverns of the cabala, groping in the darkness of occult sciences. The people were not mistaken there either; among whoever had a little sagacity, Quasimodo passed for the demon, Claude Frollo for the sorcerer. It was evident that the ringer must serve the archdeacon for a given time at the end of which he would carry off his soul by way of payment. Also the archdeacon was, despite the excessive austerity of his life, in bad odor among the good souls; and there was no nose of a devotee so inexperienced that did not smell him a magician.

And if, in aging, there had formed abysses in his science, there had also formed some in his heart. It is at least what one was founded to believe in examining that face upon which one saw his soul shine only through a dark cloud. Whence came to him that bald forehead, that always bent head, that chest always lifted with sighs? What secret thought made smile his mouth with so much bitterness at the same moment when his frowning brows drew near like two bulls about to struggle? Why his remainder of hair was already gray? What was that inward fire which sometimes burst forth in his gaze, to the point that his eye resembled a hole pierced in the wall of a furnace?

These symptoms of a violent moral preoccupation had above all acquired a high degree of intensity at the epoch when this history passes. More than once a child of the choir had fled frightened to find him alone in the church, so strange and flashing was his gaze. More than once, in the choir, at the hour of the offices, his neighbor in the stall had heard him mingle to the plainchant ad omnem tonum unintelligible parentheses. More than once the washerwoman of the Terrain, charged with "washing the chapter", had observed, not without fright, marks of nails and of cramped fingers in the surplice of monsieur the archdeacon of Josas.

Besides, he redoubled in severity and had never been more exemplary. By state as by character he had always kept himself aloof from women; he seemed to hate them more than ever. The single shiver of a silk cotte-hardie made his hood fall over his eyes. He was on this point so jealous of austerity and reserve that when the lady of Beaujeu, daughter of the king, came in the month of December 1481 to visit the cloister of Notre-Dame, he gravely opposed her entry, recalling to the bishop the statute of the Black Book, dated the vigil of Saint-Bartholomew 1334, which forbids access to the cloister to any woman "whatever, old or young, mistress or chambermaid". Whereupon the bishop had been constrained to cite him the ordinance of the legate Odo which excepts certain great ladies, aliquæ magnates mulieres, quæ sine scandalo evitari non possunt. And still the archdeacon protested, objecting that the ordinance of the legate, which went back to 1207, was anterior by a hundred twenty-seven years to the Black Book, and consequently abrogated in fact by it. And he had refused to appear before the princess.

One remarked besides that his horror for the Egyptians and the zingari seemed to redouble for some time. He had solicited from the bishop an edict which made express defense to the Bohemians to come dance and tambourine upon the place of the parvis, and he was compiling since the same time the mouldy archives of the official, in order to gather the cases of sorcerers and sorceresses condemned to the fire or to the rope for complicity of malefices with he-goats, sows or she-goats.

VI

UNPOPULARITY

The archdeacon and the ringer, we have already said it, were mediocrely loved by the great and small people of the environs of the cathedral. When Claude and Quasimodo went out together, which happened many a time, and one saw them cross in company, the valet following the master, the fresh, narrow and dark streets of the Notre-Dame block, more than one bad word, more than one ironic hum, more than one insulting quip harassed them in passing, unless Claude Frollo, which happened rarely, did not march head straight and raised, showing his severe and almost august forehead to the interdicted mockers.

Both were in their quarter like the "poets" of whom Régnier speaks.

_All sorts of people go after the poets._ _As after the owls go crying the warblers._

Sometimes it was a sly brat who risked his skin and bones to have the ineffable pleasure of thrusting a pin into Quasimodo's hump. Sometimes a pretty young girl, gay and more shameless than had been needful, brushed the black robe of the priest while singing under his nose the sardonic song: niche, niche, the devil is caught. Sometimes a squalid group of old women, staggered and crouched in the shadow upon the steps of a porch, grumbled noisily at the passage of the archdeacon and the bell-ringer, and threw them in grumbling this encouraging welcome: Humph! here is one whose soul is made like the other's body! Or else it was a band of clerks and stone-throwers playing at merelles who rose en masse and saluted them classically with some hooting in Latin: Eia! eia! Claudius cum claudo!

But most often, the insult passed unnoticed by the priest and the ringer. To hear all these gracious things, Quasimodo was too deaf and Claude too dreamy.

BOOK FIFTH

I

"ABBAS BEATI MARTINI"

The renown of dom Claude had extended afar. It won him, about the epoch when he refused to see madame de Beaujeu, a visit of which he kept the memory long.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”