Notre-Dame de Paris
stock-brokers and the courtiers of commerce can be developed so
majestically.
These are very superb structures. Let us add a quantity of fine,
amusing, and varied streets, like the Rue de Rivoli, and I do not
despair of Paris presenting to the eye, when viewed from a
balloon, that richness of line, that opulence of detail, that
diversity of aspect, that grandiose something in the simple, and
unexpected in the beautiful, which characterizes a checker-board.
However, admirable as the Paris of to-day may seem to you,
reconstruct the Paris of the fifteenth century, call it up before
you in thought; look at the sky athwart that surprising forest of
spires, towers, and belfries; spread out in the centre of the
city, tear away at the point of the islands, fold at the arches
of the bridges, the Seine, with its broad green and yellow
expanses, more variable than the skin of a serpent; project
clearly against an azure horizon the Gothic profile of this
ancient Paris. Make its contour float in a winter’s mist which
clings to its numerous chimneys; drown it in profound night and
watch the odd play of lights and shadows in that sombre labyrinth
of edifices; cast upon it a ray of light which shall vaguely
outline it and cause to emerge from the fog the great heads of
the towers; or take that black silhouette again, enliven with
shadow the thousand acute angles of the spires and gables, and
make it start out more toothed than a shark’s jaw against a
copper-colored western sky,—and then compare.
And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression with
which the modern one can no longer furnish you, climb—on the
morning of some grand festival, beneath the rising sun of Easter
or of Pentecost—climb upon some elevated point, whence you
command the entire capital; and be present at the wakening of the
chimes. Behold, at a signal given from heaven, for it is the sun
which gives it, all those churches quiver simultaneously. First
come scattered strokes, running from one church to another, as
when musicians give warning that they are about to begin. Then,
all at once, behold!—for it seems at times, as though the ear
also possessed a sight of its own,—behold, rising from each bell
tower, something like a column of sound, a cloud of harmony.
First, the vibration of each bell mounts straight upwards, pure
and, so to speak, isolated from the others, into the splendid
morning sky; then, little by little, as they swell they melt
together, mingle, are lost in each other, and amalgamate in a
magnificent concert. It is no longer anything but a mass of
sonorous vibrations incessantly sent forth from the numerous
belfries; floats, undulates, bounds, whirls over the city, and
prolongs far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of its
oscillations.
Nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and
profound as it is, it has not lost its transparency; you behold
the windings of each group of notes which escapes from the
belfries. You can follow the dialogue, by turns grave and shrill,
of the treble and the bass; you can see the octaves leap from one
tower to another; you watch them spring forth, winged, light, and
whistling, from the silver bell, to fall, broken and limping from
the bell of wood; you admire in their midst the rich gamut which
incessantly ascends and re-ascends the seven bells of
Saint-Eustache; you see light and rapid notes running across it,
executing three or four luminous zigzags, and vanishing like
flashes of lightning. Yonder is the Abbey of Saint-Martin, a
shrill, cracked singer; here the gruff and gloomy voice of the
Bastille; at the other end, the great tower of the Louvre, with
its bass. The royal chime of the palace scatters on all sides,
and without relaxation, resplendent trills, upon which fall, at
regular intervals, the heavy strokes from the belfry of
Notre-Dame, which makes them sparkle like the anvil under the
hammer. At intervals you behold the passage of sounds of all
forms which come from the triple peal of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
Then, again, from time to time, this mass of sublime noises opens
and gives passage to the beats of the Ave Maria, which bursts
forth and sparkles like an aigrette of stars. Below, in the very
depths of the concert, you confusedly distinguish the interior
chanting of the churches, which exhales through the vibrating
pores of their vaulted roofs.
Assuredly, this is an opera which it is worth the trouble of
listening to. Ordinarily, the noise which escapes from Paris by
day is the city speaking; by night, it is the city breathing; in
this case, it is the city singing. Lend an ear, then, to this
concert of bell towers; spread over all the murmur of half a
million men, the eternal plaint of the river, the infinite
breathings of the wind, the grave and distant quartette of the
four forests arranged upon the hills, on the horizon, like
immense stacks of organ pipes; extinguish, as in a half shade,
all that is too hoarse and too shrill about the central chime,
and say whether you know anything in the world more rich and
joyful, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and
chimes;—than this furnace of music,—than these ten thousand
brazen voices chanting simultaneously in the flutes of stone,
three hundred feet high,—than this city which is no longer
anything but an orchestra,—than this symphony which produces the
noise of a tempest.
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 Agnès la Herme, Jehanne de la Tarme, Henriette la
Gaultière, Gauchère la Violette, all four widows, all four dames
of the Chapel Étienne 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 Agnès to Gauchère, 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 Agnès, “but
it must be a sin to look at this one.”
“’Tis not a child, Agnès.”
“’Tis an abortion of a monkey,” remarked Gauchère.
“’Tis a miracle,” interposed Henriette la Gaultière.
“Then,” remarked Agnès, “it is the third since the Sunday of the
_Lætare_: 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 Gauchère.
“Hold your tongue, you little howler!”
“To think that Monsieur of Reims sent this enormity to Monsieur
of Paris,” added la Gaultière, clasping her hands.
“I imagine,” said Agnès 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 Gaultière, “that nobody will apply
for it.”
“Ah, good heavens!” exclaimed Agnès; “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 Aloïse 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 Étienne 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),