by Hugo, Victor
‘I adopt this child,’ said the priest.
He gathered him into his cassock and carried him off. They all watched him go with looks of alarm. A moment later he had disappeared through the Porte-Rouge, which then led from the church to the cloister.
Once the initial surprise had passed, Jehanne de la Tarme whispered in la Gaultière’s ear:
‘What did I tell you sister, that young cleric, Monsieur Claude Frollo, is a sorcerer.’
II
CLAUDE FROLLO
CLAUDE FROLLO was indeed not one of the common herd.
He belonged to one of those families of middle rank which, in the impertinent language of the last century, were called indifferently upper bourgeoisie or minor nobility. This family had inherited from the brothers Paclet the fief of Tirechappe, which came under the Bishop of Paris, and whose twenty-one houses had in the thirteenth century been the object of so many pleadings before the official. As possessor of this fief Claude Frollo was one of the ‘seven score and one’ lords claiming feudal dues in Paris and its suburbs, and his name could for a long time be seen inscribed in that capacity between the Hôtel de Tancarville, belonging to Maître François le Rez, and the Collège de Tours, in the cartulary deposited at Saint-Martin-des-Champs.
Claude Frollo had been destined by his parents since childhood for the Church. He had learned to read in Latin. He had been brought up to keep his eyes downcast and his voice low. While he was still only a child, his father had cloistered him in the Collège de Torchi* in the University. There he had grown up on the missal and the Lexicon.
He was besides a cheerless, solemn, serious boy, who studied with fervour and learned quickly. He did not make a lot of noise during recreation, took little part in the revelries of the rue du Fouarre, did not know what it was to dare alapas et capillos laniare [to hit people and tear out their hair] and played no part in the mutiny of 1463 which the annalists gravely record under the heading: ‘Sixth Disturbance at the University’. He seldom jeered at the poor scholars of Montaigu for the skimpy capes, capettes, for which they were nicknamed, or the scholarship boys of the Collège de Dormans for their shaven heads, and their tripartite surcoats of grey, blue, and purple, azurini colons et bruni, in the words of the charter of the Cardinal des Quatre-Couronnes.
On the other hand he was assiduous in attending the schools, major and minor, of the rue Jean-de-Beauvais. The first student whom the abbot of Saint-Pierre de Val always noticed as he was about to begin his reading of canon law, was Claude Frollo, pressed against a pillar, facing his pulpit in the school of Saint-Vendregesile, armed with his ink-horn, chewing his pen, scribbling on his well-worn knee, and in winter blowing on his fingers. The first member of the audience whom Messire Miles d’Isliers, Doctor of Decretals, saw arriving every Monday morning, quite out of breath, when the doors opened at the School of Chef-Saint-Denis, was Claude Frollo. Thus, at 16 the young clerk could have held his own in mystical theology with a Father of the Church, in canonical theology with a conciliar father, and in scholastic theology with a doctor of the Sorbonne.
Once past theology he had plunged into the study of decretals. From the ‘Master of the Sentences’* he had fallen on the Capitularies of Charlemagne. And in his thirst for knowledge he had successively devoured one set of decretals after another, those of Theodore [sc. Isidore] Bishop of Hispalis [Seville], of Burchard, Bishop of Worms, of Yves, Bishop of Chartres; then Gratian’s Decretum, which succeeded Charlemagne’s Capitularies: then the collection of Gregory IX; then Honorius Ill’s Epistle Super specula. He clarified and familiarized himself with that vast, turbulent period when civil and canon law were struggling and labouring in the chaos of the Middle Ages, a period beginning with Bishop Theodore [Isidore] in 618 and ending with Pope Gregory in 1227.
With decretals digested, he threw himself into medicine and the liberal arts. He studied the science of herbs, the science of unguents. He became an expert on fevers and contusions, wounds and abscesses. Jacques d’Espars* would have admitted him as a physician, Richard Hellain* as a surgeon. He likewise passed through all the degrees in arts, from bachelor to master to doctor. He studied languages, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, a threefold sanctuary at that time frequented by very few. He had a real fever for acquiring and hoarding knowledge. By the age of 18 he had gone through all four faculties.* It seemed to the young man that there was only one purpose in life: knowledge.
It was about this time that the excessively hot summer of 1466 caused an outbreak of the great plague which carried off more than forty thousand souls in the viscounty of Paris, among others, says Jean de Troyes,* ‘Maître Arnoul, astrologer to the king, a most honest man, wise and pleasant’. The rumour went round the University that the rue Tirechappe had been especially devastated by the sickness. It was there, in the middle of their fief, that Claude’s parents resided. The young student hurried in great alarm to the paternal home. When he entered, his father and mother had been dead since the day before. An infant brother, still in swaddling clothes, was still alive and crying, abandoned in his cradle. It was all that was left of Claude’s family. The young man tucked the child under his arm and went away pensive. Up to then he had lived only in science, now he was beginning to live in life.
This catastrophe came as a crisis in Claude’s existence. An orphan, an elder brother, head of the family at 19, he felt rudely recalled from his academic dreams to the realities of the world. So, moved to pity, he became passionately devoted to this child, his brother; human affection came as something strange and sweet to him, whose only love before had been his books.
This affection developed to an exceptional degree. In a soul so new it was like a first love. Separated since childhood from his parents, whom he had hardly known, cloistered and immured, as it were, in his books, eager above all to study and to learn, up till then concerned exclusively with his intellect, which expanded with knowledge, and his imagination, which grew with reading, the poor student had not yet had time to feel where his heart came in. This younger brother, with no father or mother, this little child, suddenly dropped from the heavens into his charge, made a new man of him. He realized that there were other things in the world besides the speculations of the Sorbonne and Homer’s poetry, that man has a need for affection, that life without tenderness and love is just a dry, creaking, destructive piece of machinery; only he imagined, for he was at an age when illusions are still replaced only by other illusions, that the affections of blood and family were the only ones necessary, and that having a little brother to love was enough to fill up his whole existence.
He threw himself, then, into loving his little Jehan with all the passion of a character already profound, ardent, and single-minded. This poor, frail creature, pretty, fair, pink, and curly-haired, this orphan with no support but another orphan, moved him to the depths of his being; and, serious thinker that he was, he began to reflect about Jehan with infinite pity. He treated him with care and concern as something most fragile, especially entrusted to him. He was more than a brother to the child, he became a mother to it.
Little Jehan had lost his mother while he was still at the breast. Claude put him out to nurse. As well as the fief of Tirechappe, he had inherited from his father the fief of the Mill, Moulin, which was a dependency of the square tower of Gentilly. This mill stood on a hill, near the castle of Winchestre (Bicêtre). The miller’s wife there was suckling a fine boy; it was not far from the University. Claude carried little Jehan to her himself.
From then on, feeling he had a burden to bear, he took life very seriously. The thought of his little brother became not merely a recreation from his studies, but their very goal. He resolved to devote himself entirely to a future, for which he would answer before God, and never to have any other spouse, any other child than the happiness and prosperity of his brother. He therefore became more than ever committed to his clerical vocation. His merit, his learning, his position as immediate vassal of the Bishop of Paris, opened wide for him the gates of the
Church. At the age of 20,* by special dispensation of the Holy See, he was a priest, serving, as the junior chaplain of Notre-Dame, the altar known from the late mass celebrated there as the altare pigrorum [altar of the slothful].
There, absorbed more than ever in his beloved books, which he only left to hurry for an hour to the fief of the Mill, this blend of learning and austerity, so rare at his age, had soon won him the respect and admiration of the cloister. From the cloister his reputation for learning had reached the people, where it had become slightly distorted, as frequently happened at the time, into renown as a sorcerer.
He was just returning, on Quasimodo Sunday, from saying his mass for the lazy at their altar, which was beside the door in the choir leading to the nave, on the right, near the image of the Virgin, when his attention had been aroused by the group of old women yapping round the foundlings’ bed.
Then it was that he had approached the unfortunate little creature, object of so much hatred and menaces. Such distress, such deformity, such abandonment, the thought of his young brother, the wild fancy that suddenly struck him that, were he to die, his dear little Jehan might well be cast wretchedly upon the foundlings’ bed, this had all filled his heart at the same time; a great feeling of pity had stirred within him and he had carried the child away.
When he pulled the child out of the bag he found that it was indeed badly deformed. The poor little devil had a wart over his left eye, his head down between his shoulders, his spine all bent, his breastbone sticking out, his legs crooked; but he looked lively; and although it was impossible to tell what language he was mouthing, his cry betokened a certain health and strength. Claude’s compassion was increased by such ugliness; and he vowed inwardly to bring up this child for love of his brother, so that, whatever faults Jehan might commit in the future, there should stand to his credit this act of charity, performed for his sake. It was a sort of investment of good works made on his young brother’s account; a parcel of good deeds which he wanted to put together for him in advance, in case the young rascal might one day find himself short of such currency, the only one accepted at the toll gate of paradise.
He baptized his adopted child, and named him Quasimodo, either because he wanted thereby to indicate the day on which he had found him, or because he wanted to signify by that name the degree to which the poor little creature was unfinished and incomplete. Indeed, Quasimodo, one-eyed, hunchbacked, bow-legged was hardly more than a ‘more or less’.*
III
IMMANIS PECORIS CUSTOS IMMANIOR IPSE*
[OF A MONSTROUS FLOCK A STILL MORE MONSTROUS KEEPER]
NOW, in 1482, Quasimodo had grown up. Several years before he had become bell-ringer of Notre-Dame, thanks to his adoptive father Claude Frollo, who himself had become archdeacon of Josas,* thanks to his suzerain, Messire Louis de Beaumont, who had become Bishop of Paris in 1472, on the death of Guillaume Chartier, thanks to his patron Olivier le Daim, barber of Louis XI, King by the grace of God.
So Quasimodo was in charge of the peal at Notre-Dame.
With time an indefinable close bond had been formed uniting the bell-ringer and the church. Cut off for ever from the world by the double fatality of his unknown birth and his natural deformity, imprisoned since infancy within this double circle from which there was no escape, the poor unfortunate had become accustomed to seeing nothing of the world beyond the religious walls which had received him into their shadow. Notre-Dame had been successively, as he grew and developed, his egg, his nest, his home, his country, his universe.
And assuredly there was some sort of mysterious pre-existent harmony between that creature and the building. When, while still only small, he dragged himself tortuously and jerkily beneath the gloom of its vaults he seemed with his human face and animal’s limbs to be the native reptile of the damp and sombre paving over which the shadows of the Romanesque capitals cast so many strange shapes.
Later, the first time he clung automatically to the rope in the towers, hung on it, and set the bell swinging, the effect it produced on Claude, his adoptive father, was of a child whose tongue is loosened and who begins to talk.
Thus it was that little by little, always developing in tune with the cathedral, living, sleeping there, almost never leaving it, subject at every moment to its mysterious pressures, he came to resemble it, to be encrusted on it, so to speak, to become an integral part of it. His protruding angles fitted, if we may be allowed the comparison, the concave angles of the building, and he seemed to be not just its denizen but its natural contents. You could almost say that he had taken its shape, as the snail takes the shape of its shell. It was his abode, his hole, his envelope. Between the old church and him there was an instinctive sympathy so profound and magnetic, and material affinities so numerous, that he somehow adhered to it like the tortoise to its shell. The rugged cathedral was his carapace.
There is no need to warn the reader not to take literally the metaphors we are obliged to use here to express the peculiar, symmetrical, immediate, almost consubstantial conjunction of a man and a building. It is equally needless to say how familiar the whole cathedral had become to him during so long and intimate a cohabitation. This dwelling place was his. It had no depth which Quasimodo had not penetrated, no height he had not scaled. Many times he had climbed up several elevations of the façade with no help other than the projections of the stone carving. The towers, on whose outer surfaces he could often be seen crawling like a lizard gliding over a perpendicular wall, those two twin giants, so tall, so threatening, so fearsome, never caused him vertigo, terror, or fits of giddiness; seeing them so docile to his hand, so easily scaled, you would have said he had tamed them. By dint of leaping, climbing, frolicking amid the abysses of the gigantic cathedral, he had become some kind of monkey and chamois, like the Calabrian child who swims before it can walk and from infancy plays with the sea.
Moreover, it was not only his body which seemed to have been fashioned to fit the cathedral, but his mind too. The state of that soul, the habits it had contracted, the shape it had taken beneath that constricting envelope, leading so unsociable a life, such questions would be hard to determine. Quasimodo had been born one-eyed, hunchbacked, lame. It took much trouble and much patience before Claude Frollo managed to teach him to talk. But a fatality dogged the poor foundling. Bell-ringer of Notre-Dame at 14, a new disability had come to make him complete: the bells had ruptured his eardrums; he had become deaf. The only door that nature had left open for him on to the outer world had suddenly been closed for ever.
In closing it had cut off the one ray of light and joy which still penetrated Quasimodo’s soul. That soul fell into darkest night. The poor wretch’s melancholy became as incurable and complete as his deformity. We should add that his deafness to some extent made him also dumb. For, so that others should have no occasion to laugh at him, from the moment that he realized he was deaf he firmly resolved to keep a silence which he hardly ever broke except when he was alone. He deliberately tied the tongue which Claude Frollo had taken such pains to loosen. As a result, when compelled by necessity to speak, his tongue was stiff, clumsy, like a door with rusty hinges.
Were we now to try to penetrate as far as Quasimodo’s soul through that hard, thick crust; were we to plumb the depths of that misshapen organism; were it given to us to inspect with a torch behind those organs impermeable to light, to explore the dark interior of that opaque creature, to elucidate its obscure corners and absurd impasses, and suddenly to cast a bright light on the psyche chained up in the depths of that cavern, we should no doubt find the wretch in some pathetic, stunted, rachitic posture like those prisoners kept below the roof in Venice, growing old bent double in a stone box too low and too short for movement.
It is certain that the spirit atrophies in a defective body. Quasimodo was scarcely aware of the blind movements within him of a soul made in his own image. The impressions made on him by objects underwent considerable refraction before reaching his mind. His brain was a peculi
ar medium; the ideas which passed through it merged all twisted. The reflections resulting from such refraction were inevitably divergent and deviant.
Hence innumerable optical illusions, innumerable aberrations of judgement, innumerable diversions for his errant thoughts, now wild, now idiotic.
The first effect of this fatal organism was to disturb the way he looked at things. He had almost no direct perception of them. The outside world seemed much further away to him than to us.
The second effect of his misfortune was to make him vicious.
He was in fact vicious because he avoided people; he avoided people because he was ugly. There was a logic in his nature as there is in ours.
His strength, so extraordinarily developed, was a further cause of viciousness. ‘Mains puer robustus’, says Hobbes.* ‘The strong boy is vicious.’
Besides, to be fair to him, his viciousness was perhaps not innate. From his earliest steps among men he had felt, then seen himself the object of jeers, condemnation, rejection. Human speech for him always meant mockery or curses. As he grew older he had found nothing but hatred around him. He had caught it. He had acquired the general viciousness. He had picked up the weapon with which he had been wounded.
After all this he turned towards mankind only with reluctance. His cathedral was sufficient for him. It was peopled by marble figures, kings, saints, bishops, who at least did not burst out laughing in his face and looked on him only with serenity and benevolence. The other statues, of monsters and demons, showed no hatred for Quasimodo. He resembled them too closely for that. They kept their mockery rather for other men. The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and protected him. So he would pour out his heart to them at length. So he would sometimes spend hours at a time squatting in front of one of these statues, in solitary conversation with it. If anyone happened to appear, he would flee like a lover surprised while serenading.