Notre-Dame de Paris
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.”
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