Notre-Dame de Paris
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 façade 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.
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.
CHAPTER V. MORE ABOUT CLAUDE FROLLO.
In 1482, Quasimodo was about twenty years of age; Claude Frollo,