Hunchback of Notre Dame (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Victor Hugo

  At least this is what people imagined, whether rightly or wrongly.

  Certain it is that the archdeacon often visited the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents, where, to be sure, his father and mother were buried, with the other victims of the pest in 1466; but he seemed far less interested in the cross over their grave than in the strange characters carved upon the tomb of Nicolas Flamel and Claude Pernelle, which stood close by.

  Certain it is that he was often seen walking slowly along the Rue des Lombards and furtively entering a small house at the corner of the Rue des Ecrivains and the Rue Marivault. This was the house which Nicolas Flamel built, where he died about 1417, and which, having remained empty ever since, was now beginning to fall into decay: so badly had the hermetics and alchemists of every nation injured the walls merely by writing their names upon them. Certain of the neighbors even declared that they had once seen, through a vent-hole, archdeacon Claude, digging, turning over, and spading the earth in those two cellars whose buttresses were scribbled all over with endless rhymes and hieroglyphics by Nicolas Flamel himself. It was supposed that Flamel had buried the philosopher’s stone in these cellars; and alchemists, for two centuries back, from Magistri down to Father Pacificus, never ceased delving at the soil, until the house, so severely rummaged and ransacked, ended by crumbling into dust beneath their feet.

  Certain it is also that the archdeacon was seized with a singular passion for the symbolical doorway of Notre-Dame, that page of conjury written in stone by Bishop Guillaume de Paris, who was undoubtedly damned for having added so infernal a frontispiece to the holy poem perpetually sung by the rest of the structure. Archdeacon Claude also passed for having fathomed the mystery of the colossal figure of Saint Christopher, and that tall enigmatical statue then standing at the entrance to the square in front of the cathedral, which people called in derision, “Monsieur Legris.” But what every one might have observed, was the interminable hours which he often passed, sitting on the parapet of this same square, gazing at the carvings of the porch, sometimes studying the foolish virgins with their lamps turned upside down, sometimes the wise virgins with their lamps upright; at other times calculating the angle of vision of the crow to the left of the porch and gazing at a mysterious point inside the church where the philosopher’s stone must assuredly be hidden, if it be not in the cellar of Nicolas Flamel. It was, let us say in passing, a singular fate for the Church of Notre-Dame at this period to be so loved, in different degrees and with such devotion, by two beings so 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 that proceeded from its magnificent mass; loved by the other, a man of scholarly and impassioned fancy, for its significance, for its myth, for its hidden meaning, for the symbolism scattered throughout the sculptures of its front, like the first text under the second in a palimpsest—in short, for the riddle which it forever puts to the intellect.

  Certain it is, lastly, that the archdeacon had arranged for himself, in that one of the two towers which looks upon the Place de Grève, close beside the belfry a very secret little cell, where none might enter without his leave, not even the bishop, it was said. This cell, contrived in old times, had been almost at the very summit of the tower, among the crows’ nests, by Bishop Hugh of Besançon,bm who practiced sorcery there in his time. What this cell contained, no one knew; but from the shore of the Terrain there was often seen at night, through a small dormer-window at the back of the tower, a strange, red, intermittent light, appearing, disappearing, and reappearing at brief and regular intervals, and seeming to follow the blasts of a bellows, and to proceed rather from the flame of a fire than from the light of a candle. In the. darkness, at that height, it produced a singular effect; and the gossips would say, “There’s the archdeacon blowing again! Hell is sparkling up there!”

  After all, there was no great proof of sorcery in all this; but still there was so much smoke that it might well be supposed there was a fire, and the archdeacon had quite a formidable fame. And yet we must say that Egyptian arts, necromancy, and magic, even of the whitest and most innocent kind, had no more relentless enemy, no more pitiless accuser than himself, before the officials of Notre-Dame. Whether this were genuine horror, or the game played by the robber who shouts, “Stop, thief!” it did not prevent the arch deacon from being considered by the wise heads of the chapter as a soul which had ventured into the outskirts of hell, as one lost in the dark caves of the Cabala,—groping in the obscurity of the occult sciences. Nor were the people deceived: with every one who had a grain of sense, Quasimodo passed for the devil, Claude Frollo for the sorcerer. It was plain that the bell-ringer was bound to serve the archdeacon for a given time, at the end of which he would carry off his soul by way of payment. The archdeacon was therefore, in spite of the extreme austerity of his life, in very bad repute with pious people; and there was no devout nose so inexperienced as not to smell in him the magician.

  And if, as he grew old, there were voids in his science, there were others in his heart. At least, so one was led to believe on looking at that face in which his soul never shone forth save through a dark cloud. Whence came that broad bald brow, that head forever bowed, that breast forever heaved by sighs? What secret thought made his lips smile so bitterly at the very moment that his frowning brows met like two bulls about to tussle? Why were his few remaining hairs already grey? What was that inward fire which sometimes broke forth in his eye to such a degree that it looked like a hole pierced in the wall of a furnace?

  These signs of intense moral preoccupation had acquired a high pitch of intensity at the very time of this story. More than once a choir-boy had taken to his heels in alarm on finding him alone in the church, so strange and wild was his look. More than once, in the choir, during divine service, his neighbor in the stalls had heard him mingle unintelligible parentheses with the church music. More than once the laundress of the Terrain, employed “to wash the chapter,” had remarked, not without terror, marks of nails and clinched fingers in the surplice of the archdeacon of Josas.

  In other respects he redoubled his severity, and had never been more exemplary. From disposition as well as by profession he had always held himself aloof from women; he seemed now to hate them more than ever. The mere rustle of a silk petticoat made him pull his hood over his eyes. He was so jealous of his austerity and reserve upon this point that when Madame de Beaujeu, daughter of the king, came, in the month of December, 1481, to visit the convent of Notre-Dame, he gravely opposed her entrance, reminding the bishop of that statute in the Black Book, dated on the eve of St. Bartholomew, 1334, which forbids all access to the cloister to every woman “whatsoever, old or young, mistress or maid;” upon which the bishop was constrained to quote to him the ordinance of the legate Odo, which excepts certain great ladies, “aliquœ magnates mulieres, quœ sine scandalo vitari non possunt.”bn And the archdeacon still protested, objecting that the legate’s decree, which went back to 1207, antedated the Black Book by one hundred and twenty-seven years, and was consequently annulled by it; and he refused to appear before the princess.

  It was moreover remarked that his horror of the gipsies seemed to have increased for some time past. He had solicited from the bishop an edict expressly forbidding the tribe from coming to dance and play the tambourine in the square before the cathedral; and he had also searched the musty official papers, to collect all cases of witches and wizards condemned to be burned or hanged for complicity in witchcraft with goats, swine, or rams.

  CHAPTER VI

  Unpopularity

  The archdeacon and the bell-ringer, as we have already observed, were not held in much favor by the great and little folk about the cathedral. When Claude and Quasimodo went forth together, as they frequently did, and were seen in company, the man behind the master, traversing the cool, narrow, shady streets about Notre-Dame, more than one malicious speech, more than one satirical exclamation and insulting jest, stung them as th
ey passed, unless Claude Frollo, though this was rare, walked with head erect, displaying his stern and almost majestic brow to the abashed scoffers.

  Both were in their district like the “poets” of whom Régnier speaks:—

  “All sorts of folks will after poets run,

  As after owls song-birds shriek and fly.”

  Now a sly brat would risk his bones for the ineffable delight of burying a pin in Quasimodo’s hump: and now a lovely young girl, full of fun, and bolder than need be, would brush against the priest’s black gown, singing in his ear the sarcastic song,—

  “Hide, hide, for the devil is caught.”

  Sometimes a squalid group of old women, squatting in a row in the shade upon the steps of some porch, scolded roundly as the archdeacon and the bell-ringer went by, and flung after them with curses this encouraging greeting: “Well, one of them has a soul as misshapen as the other one’s body!” Or else it would be a band of students and beetle-crushersbo playing at hop-scotch, who jumped up in a body and hailed them in classic fashion with some Latin whoop and hoot: “Eia! eia! Claudius cum Claudo!”bp

  But usually all insults were unheeded by both priest and ringer. Quasimodo was too deaf and Claude too great a dreamer to hear them.

  BOOK V

  CHAPTER I

  Abbas Beati Martini bq

  Dom Claude’s renown had spread far and wide. It procured him, at about the period when he refused to see Madame de Beaujeu, the honor of a visit which he long remembered.

  It was on a certain evening. He had just retired after divine service to his canonic cell in the convent of Notre-Dame. This apartment, aside from a few glass phials banished to a corner, and full of somewhat suspicious powder, which looked vastly like gunpowder, contained nothing strange or mysterious. There were inscriptions here and there upon the walls, but they were merely scientific statements, or pious extracts from well-known authors. The archdeacon had just seated himself, by the light of a three-beaked copper lamp, before a huge chest covered with manuscripts. His elbow rested on a wide-open book by Honorius d‘Autun, “De Prædestinatione et libero arbitrio,”br and he was very meditatively turning the leaves of a printed folio which he had brought upstairs with him,—the only product of the press which his cell contained. In the midst of his reverie there was a knock at the door. “Who is there?” cried the sage in the gracious tone of a hungry dog disturbed while eating his bone.

  A voice answered from without: “Your friend, Jacques Coictier.” He at once opened the door.

  It was indeed the king’s physician,—a person of some fifty years of age, whose harsh expression was only corrected by a crafty look. Another man was with him. Both wore long slate-colored robes furred with minever, belted and clasped, with caps of the same stuff and color. Their hands were hidden in their sleeves, their feet under their gowns, their eyes beneath their bonnets.

  “God help me, gentlemen!” said the archdeacon, showing them in; “I did not expect so honorable a visit at such an hour.” And while speaking in this courteous fashion, he cast an anxious and searching glance from the physician to his companion.

  “It is never too late to visit so distinguished a scholar as Dom Claude Frollo de Tirechappe,” replied Doctor Coictier, who being a native of Franche-Comté, drawled all his sentences until they dragged as majestically as the long train of a lady’s dress.

  Then began between the doctor and the archdeacon one of those congratulatory prefaces with which it was at this period customary to precede every conversation between learned men, and which did not hinder them from hating each other most cordially. However, it is just so today: the lips of every learned man who compliments another scholar are like a cup of honeyed poison.

  Claude Frollo’s congratulations to Jacques Coictier dwelt particularly on the numerous worldly advantages which that worthy physician in the course of his much-envied career had contrived to extract from every royal malady,—the result of a better and surer alchemy than the search for the philosopher’s stone.

  “Truly, Doctor Coictier, I was delighted to hear of the promotion of your nephew, my reverend lord Pierre Versé. Has he not been made Bishop of Amiens?”

  “Yes, archdeacon; by the favor and mercy of God.”

  “Do you know that you cut a very fine figure on Christmas Day, at the head of your associates of the Court of Exchequer, Mr. President?”

  “Vice-president, Dom Claude. Nothing more, alas!”

  “How is your superb house in the Rue Saint-André des Arcs getting on? It’s another Louvre. I particularly admire the apricot-tree carved over the door, and the pleasing pun in the motto, ‘A L’Abri Cotier.”‘bs

  “Alas! Master Claude, all that stone-work costs me dear. I am being ruined as fast as the house grows.”

  “Pooh! Haven’t you your revenues from the jail and the palace bailiwick, and the rent of all the houses, butchers’ stalls, booths, and shops within the boundary wall? That’s a fine milch-cow for you.”

  “My Poissy castellany brought me in nothing this year.”

  “But your toll-gates at Triel, Saint-James, and Saint-Germain-en-Laye are still good.”

  “A hundred and twenty pounds, and not even Paris pounds at that.”

  “But you have your place as Councillor to the King. That’s a permanent thing.”

  “Yes, Brother Claude; but that confounded manor of Poligny, which people make such a talk about, doesn’t bring me in sixty crowns, take it one year with another.”

  In the compliments paid to Jacques Coictier by Dom Claude there was the sarcastic, sour, slightly mocking tone, the cruel, acid smile of an unfortunate and superior person sporting for a moment, by way of amusement, with the fat prosperity of a vulgar fellow. The other did not observe this.

  “By my soul,” said Claude at last, pressing his hand, “I am glad to see you in such robust health!”

  “Thank you, Master Claude.”

  “By the way,” cried Dom Claude, “how goes it with your royal patient?”

  “He does not pay his doctor enough,” answered the physician, casting a side glance at his comrade.

  “Do you think so, friend Coictier?” said his comrade.

  These words, uttered in tones of surprise and reproach, drew the archdeacon’s attention to the stranger, although, to tell the truth, he had not been wholly unobservant of him for a single instant since he had crossed his threshold. Had there not been a thousand reasons for his conciliating Doctor Jacques Coictier, the all-powerful physician of King Louis XI, he would never have admitted him in such company. Therefore his expression was anything but cordial when Jacques Coictier said,—

  “By the way, Dom Claude, I bring you a brother worker, who was anxious to see you, being familiar with your fame.”

  “A gentleman of science?” inquired the archdeacon, fixing his piercing eye upon Coictier’s companion. The stranger returned his gaze with an equally searching and defiant look.

  As well as the feeble light of the lamp allowed one to judge, he was an elderly man of some sixty years, and of medium height, apparently quite ill and broken. His profile, although not at all aristocratic, was still strong and severe; his eye flashed from beneath a very prominent brow, like a light from the depths of a cave; and under the flat cap which drooped over his face, the broad forehead of a man of genius was visible.

  He took upon himself to answer the archdeacon’s question.

  “Reverend sir,” he said in grave tones, “your renown has reached me, and I desired to consult you. I am only a poor country gentleman, who takes off his shoes before venturing into the presence of learned men. You must know my name. I am Comperebt Tourangeau.”

  “An odd name for a gentleman!” thought the archdeacon. Still, he felt that he had before him a strong and serious character. The instinct of his lofty intellect led him to guess that a spirit no less lofty lurked beneath the furred cap of Compere Tourangeau; and as he studied his grave face, the ironical smile which the presence of Jacques Coictier h
ad forced to his sullen lips faded slowly, as twilight fades from the sky at night. He reseated himself silently and moodily in his great arm-chair, his elbow resumed its wonted place upon the table, and his head on his hand. After a few moments of meditation he signed to the two visitors to be seated, and addressed Compere Tourangeau:—

  “You came to consult me, sir; and upon what branch of science?”

  “Your reverence,” replied Tourangeau, “I am ill; very ill. You are said to be a great doctor, and I come to you for medical advice.”

  “Medical advice!” said the archdeacon, shaking his head. He seemed communing with himself an instant, then added: “Compere Tourangeau, if that be your name, turn your head. You will find my answer ready written on the wall.”

  Tourangeau obeyed, and read this inscription on the wall above his head: “Medicine is the daughter of dreams.—JAMBLIQUE.”