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This mixture of learning and austerity, so rare at his age, had promptly acquired for him the respect and admiration of the monastery.
It was at the moment when he was returning, on Quasimodo day, from saying his mass at the Altar of the Lazy, 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. 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.
He baptized his adopted child, and gave him the name of Quasimodo.
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.
In the course of time there had been formed a certain bond which united the ringer to the church. Separated forever from the world, he grown used to seeing nothing in this world beyond these walls. Notre-Dame had been to him successively, as he grew up and developed, the egg, the nest, the house, the country, the universe.
Little by little, developing along with the cathedral, living there, sleeping there, hardly ever leaving it, he became an integral part of it. The rough and wrinkled cathedral was his shell.
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, possessed for him neither vertigo, nor terror. To see them so gentle under his hand, so easy to scale, was to tame them.
It was not his body alone which seemed fashioned after the Cathedral, but his mind also. Quasimodo had been born one-eyed, hunchbacked, lame. It was with great difficulty that Claude Frollo had succeeded in teaching him to talk. But, at the age of fourteen, the bells had broken the drums of his ears and Quasimodo had become deaf. The only gate which nature had left wide open for him had been abruptly closed, and forever.
It had cut off the only joy he had. His soul fell into profound night. The very moment that he found himself to be deaf, he resolved upon a silence which he only broke when he was alone.
He had trouble seeing, recieving hardly any immediate perception of things. The external world seemed much farther away to him than it does to us. He was malicious as well. That was because he was savage; and he was savage because he was ugly.
His strength, so extraordinarily developed, was a cause of still greater malevolence.
Malevolence was not, perhaps, i
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.
What he loved above all else were the bells. He loved 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.
The cathedral indeed seemed 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. He was everywhere about it; in fact, he multiplied himself on all points of the structure. Now one perceived 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; 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 the bells.
For those who know that Quasimodo has existed, Notre-Dame is today deserted, inanimate, dead. One feels that something has disappeared from it. That immense body is empty; it is a skeleton; 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 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. Quasimodo’s gratitude was profound, passionate; and although the visage of his adopted father was often clouded, 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. The archdeacon was the sole human being with whom Quasimodo had preserved communication.
There is nothing which can be compared with the effect of the archdeacon over the bellringer. A sign from Claude would have sufficed to make Quasimodo hurl himself from the summit of Notre-Dame. It was gratitude, so pushed to the limit, that we do not know to what to compare it with.
Chapter V
More about Claude Frollo
In 1482, Quasimodo was about twenty years of age; Claude Frollo, about thirty-six. One had grown up, the other had grown old.
Claude Frollo was no longer the simple scholar of the college of Torchi. He was a priest, austere, morose. He had never abandoned neither science nor the education of his young brother, but as time went on, some bitterness had been mingled with these things which were so sweet. Little Jehan Frollo, had not grown up in the direction which Claude would have liked him to. He was a regular devil, and a very disorderly one, who made Dom Claude scowl; but very droll and very subtle, which made the big brother smile.
Claude had confided him to that same college of Torchi where he had passed his early years in study and meditation. He sometimes preached Jehan very long and severe sermons, which the latter intrepidly endured. After all, the young scapegrace had a good heart. But, when the sermon was over, he nonetheless tranquilly resumed his course of debauchery.
Claude, saddened and discouraged by all this, had flung himself eagerly into the arms of learning. He became more and more rigid as a priest, more and more sad as a man. He had penetrated further, lower; he had, perhaps, risked his soul, and had seated himself in the cavern at that mysterious table of the alchemists, of the astrologers, of the hermetics, of which Averroès, Guillaume de Paris, and Nicolas Flamel hold the end in the Middle Ages.