by Hugo, Victor
He dressed gloomily. A thought had occurred to him as he was lacing up his boots, but at first he rejected it; however, it came again, and he put his waistcoat on back to front, an obvious sign of violent inner struggle. Finally he threw his cap roughly to the ground and exclaimed: ‘Too bad! Come of it what may, I’ll go to my brother. I’ll get a sermon, but I’ll get an écu too.’
Then he hurried to put on his tabard with its padded shoulders, picked up his cap, and went out like a man in despair.
He went down the rue de la Harpe towards the Cité. As he passed by the rue de la Huchette, the smell from those wonderful spits ceaselessly turning there came to tickle his olfactory organs, and he looked lovingly at the Cyclopean roaster which one day wrung from the Franciscan Calatagirone the pathetic exclamation: ‘Veramente, queste rotisserie sono stupende!’ [Truly, these roasters are something amazing!] But Jehan did not have the price of a meal, and sighing deeply plunged beneath the porch of the Petit Châtelet, a huge double clover-leaf of massive towers guarding the entrance to the Cité.
He did not even take a moment as he passed by to throw a stone, as was customary, at the wretched statue of that Périnet Leclerc who had delivered up to the English the Paris of Charles VI, a crime which his effigy, the face crushed with stones and soiled with mud, expiated for three centuries at the corner of the rue de la Harpe and the rue de Bussy, as if on an eternal pillory.
Crossing the Petit-Pont, and striding over the rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, Jehan de Molendino found himself in front of Notre-Dame. Then he was seized again with indecision, and spent a few minutes walking round the statue of Monsieur Legris, repeating to himself in anguish: ‘The sermon is certain, the écu is doubtful.’
He stopped a beadle who was coming from the cloister: ‘Where is the archdeacon of Josas?’
‘I think he’s in his hiding-place in the tower,’ said the beadle, ‘and I don’t advise you to disturb him, unless you have come on behalf of someone like the Pope or the King.’
Jehan clapped his hands: ‘The devil! here’s a marvellous chance to see the famous little cubby-hole of sorcery!’
This reflection decided him, and he plunged resolutely under the little black doorway and began climbing the Saint-Gilles spiral staircase leading to the upper floors of the tower. ‘I’m going to see it!’ he said to himself on the way. ‘By the corbignolles of the Blessed Virgin! There must be something really curious about this cell that my reverend brother hides like his pudendum! They say that he lights up the fires of hell in there and cooks the philosophers’ stone on a high flame. Bédieul The philosophers’ stone means no more to me than a pebble, and I’d rather find an omelette of Easter egg and bacon on his furnace than the biggest philosophers’ stone in the world!’
When he reached the gallery of colonnettes, he stopped for a moment to get his breath, and cursed the interminable stairs by I don’t know how many millions of cartloads of devils; then went on climbing, through the narrow door in the north tower, nowadays closed to the public. A few moments after passing the bell cage, he came upon a little landing, inserted into a recess in the side wall, and under the vault a low, pointed door. A loophole pierced in the circular staircase wall opposite enabled him to see its huge lock and mighty iron frame. Anyone today curious to visit this door will recognize it from the following inscription, carved in white letters on the black wall: ‘I ADORE CORALIE 1823. SIGNED UGÉNE.’* The word ‘signed’ is in the text.
‘Whew!’ said the student; ‘this must be it.’
The key was in the lock. The door was right beside him. He gave it a gentle push and stuck his head through the opening.
The reader will surely be familiar with the admirable works of Rembrandt, that Shakespeare of painting. Among so many wonderful engravings, there is one etching in particular representing, so it is supposed, Doctor Faustus, which any viewer must find quite dazzling. It shows a gloomy cell. In the middle is a table laden with hideous objects—skulls, spheres, alembics, compasses, hieroglyphic parchments. The doctor is in front of this table, wearing his heavy greatcoat and his fur cap pulled down over his forehead. Only his upper half can be seen. He has half risen from his immense armchair, his clenched fists are resting on the table and he is gazing, curious and terrified, at a great luminous circle, composed of magic letters, shining on the far wall, like the solar spectrum in a camera obscura. This cabalistic sun seems to tremble as one looks and fills the pale cell with its mysterious rays. It is at once horrible and beautiful.
Something rather similar to Faust’s cell presented itself to Jehan’s eyes when he ventured to put his head round the half-open door. There was the same gloomy, dimly lit recess. There too was a big armchair and a big table, compasses, alembics, animal skeletons hanging from the ceiling, a sphere rolling on the floor, horse-heads all mixed up with jars containing quivering gold leaves, skulls lying on sheets of vellum, covered with a medley of figures and letters, thick manuscripts lying open, piled up, heedless of the brittle corners of the parchment, in short all the rubbish of science, and lying everywhere on this jumble a layer of dust and cobwebs; but there was no luminous circle of letters, no doctor in ecstasy gazing at the flaming vision as an eagle looks at the sun.
The cell was not, however, deserted. A man was sitting in the armchair, bent over the table. Jehan, on whom his back was turned, could see only his shoulders and the back of his skull; but he had no difficulty recognizing that bald head on which nature had imposed an eternal tonsure, as if wanting to mark by some outward symbol the archdeacon’s irresistible clerical vocation.
Jehan then recognized his brother. But the door had opened so quietly that nothing had made Dom Claude aware of his presence. The inquisitive student took advantage of this to spend a few minutes examining the cell at his leisure. A large furnace, which he had not noticed at first, stood on the left of the chair, under the window. The ray of light admitted by this aperture filtered through a circular spider’s web, which tastefully inscribed its delicate rose-tracery in the pointed window arch, and at its centre the insect architect sat motionless like the hub of this lacy wheel. On the furnace were heaped in disorder all kinds of vessels, stone flasks, glass retorts, charcoal matrasses. Jehan observed with a sigh that there was no saucepan. ‘The pots and pans aren’t too fresh!’ he thought.
For the rest there was no fire in the furnace, and indeed it looked as though none had been lit for a long time. A glass mask, which Jehan noticed among the alchemical utensils, and which served no doubt to protect the archdeacon’s face while he was concocting some fearsome substance, lay in a corner, covered in dust, as though forgotten. Beside it lay an equally dusty pair of bellows, its upper leaf bearing the legend, incrusted in brass letters: SPIRA, SPERA [breathe, hope].
There were a great many other legends written on the walls, according to the practice of the hermetics; some traced in ink, others incised with a metal point. For the rest, Gothic, Hebrew, Greek, and Roman letters all jumbled together, inscriptions overflowing haphazardly, some on top of others, the most recent obliterating the older ones, all tangled together like branches of undergrowth or pikes in a mêleé. It was, in fact, a rather confused mêleé of all the philosophies, daydreams, wisdoms of mankind. Here and there one shone out above the others like a flag among spearheads. Most of the time it was some brief Latin or Greek motto, such as the Middle Ages were so good at formulating: unde? inde? [whence? thence?]; Homo homini monstrum [man is a monster for man]; Astra, castra, nomen, numen [stars, camp, name, divinity]; μέγα βιβλίον, μέγα κακóν [great book, great evil]; sapere aude [dare to know]; Flat ubi vult [it bloweth where it listeth], etc.; sometimes a word devoid of any obvious sense: άναγνοϕαγία, perhaps concealing some bitter allusion to the regime of the cloister; sometimes a simple maxim of clerical discipline formulated as a regular hexameter: Cœlestium dominum, terrestrem dicito domnum [call the Lord of Heaven ‘dominus’, of earth ‘domnus’]. There were also, passim, Hebrew scribbles, of which J
ehan, who had very little Greek, understood nothing, and it was all crossed, here, there, and everywhere by stars, human or animal figures, and intersecting triangles, which went quite a long way to making the wall of the cell, covered in scrawls, look like a sheet of paper over which a monkey had been tracing a pen full of ink.
In any case, the chamber as a whole gave a general impression of neglect and decay; and the poor state of the utensils led one to suppose that its master had for quite some time been distracted from his work by other concerns.
That master, however, bent over an enormous manuscript, decorated with strange paintings, seemed tormented by some idea which constantly intruded on his meditations. At least that is how Jehan judged it as he heard him cry, with the reflective pauses of a visionary dreaming aloud:
‘Yes, Manou* said and Zoroaster taught, the sun is born of fire, the moon born of the sun. Fire is the soul of the great whole. Its elemental atoms pour and stream continuously over the world in infinite currents. At the points where the currents intersect in the heavens, they produce light; at their points of intersection within the earth they produce gold. Light, gold, the same thing. Fire in its concrete state—the difference between the visible and the palpable, the fluid and the solid, for the same substance, from steam to ice, that’s all. Those aren’t just dreams—it is the general law of nature. But how are we to extract from science the secret of that general law? Why! This light bathing my head is gold! These same atoms dilated according to a certain law only have to be condensed according to a certain other law! How can it be done? Some have had the idea of burying a sunbeam. Averroes—yes, it is Averroes—Averroes buried one beneath the first pillar on the left of the sanctuary of the Koran, in the Grand Mosque at Cordoba; but the vault can only be opened to see if the operation succeeded in eight thousand years’ time.’
‘Devil!’ said Jehan to himself, ‘that’s a long time to wait for a gold écu!’
‘Others have thought,’ the archdeacon continued pensively, ‘that it would be better to work with a beam from Sirius. But it’s very difficult to get this beam pure, because of the simultaneous presence of the other stars which get mixed up in it. Flamel considers that it is easier to work on terrestrial fire. Flamel! what a predestined name. Flamma! Yes, fire. That’s all. The diamond is in the coal, gold is in fire,—but how to extract it? Magistri asserts that there are certain women’s names so sweet and so mysterious that it is enough to pronounce them during the operation … Let’s read what Manou says about it: “Where women are honoured, the divinities are overjoyed; where they are despised, it is no use praying to God. … A woman’s mouth is constantly pure; it is running water, a sunbeam. … A woman’s name must be pleasing, sweet, imaginative; it must end in long vowels, and resemble words of benediction.”’
‘Yes, the sage is right indeed. Maria, Sophia, Esmer … Damnation! always that thought!’
And he closed the book violently.
He passed his hand over his brow as if to drive away the idea obsessing him. Then from the table he took a nail and a small hammer with cabalistic letters curiously painted on the shaft.
‘For some time now,’ he said with a bitter smile,’ all my experiments have failed! I am possessed by this fixed idea, and it is making my brain wither like dried clover. I haven’t even been able to discover the secret of Cassiodorus, whose lamp burned without wick or oil. Yet that’s simple enough!’
‘Plague on it!’ Jehan muttered in his beard.
‘… so a single wretched thought,’ the priest went on, ‘is enough to make a man feeble and mad! Oh! how Claude Pernelle would laugh at me, she who couldn’t divert Nicolas Flamel for a moment from pursuing the great work! Why! I hold in my hand Ezekiel’s* magic hammer! With every blow that the fearsome rabbi struck on this nail with this hammer, in the depths of his cell, one of his enemies whom he had condemned, even if he were two thousand leagues away, was driven down a cubit into the earth which swallowed him up. The King of France himself, for knocking thoughtlessly one evening on the thaumaturge’s door, sank up to his knees into his own Paris pavement—that happened less than three hundred years ago. Very well! I have the hammer and the nail, and those implements are no more fearsome in my hands than a mallet in the hands of a cutler—yet all that is needed is to find the magic word that Ezekiel pronounced when he hit the nail.’
‘Fiddlesticks!’ thought Jehan.
‘Come then, let’s try,’ the archdeacon went on eagerly. ‘If I succeed I’ll see the blue spark fly from the head of the nail. Emen-hetan! Emen-hetan!—that’s not it. Sigeani! Sigeani!—may this nail open the grave to anyone bearing the name Phoebus! Curse it! Always, again, endlessly the same idea!’
And he angrily threw away the hammer. Then he slumped so low over the chair and table that Jehan could not see him behind the huge chair-back. For a few minutes all he could see was his hand clenched convulsively on a book. Suddenly Dom Claude rose, took a compass and silently incised on the wall in capital letters the Greek word: ’ANÁΓKH.
‘My brother is off his head,’ Jehan said to himself, ‘it would have been much simpler to write Fatum. Everyone is not obliged to know Greek.’
The archdeacon came back to sit in his chair, and laid his head in his hands like a sick man whose brow feels heavy and burning.
The student observed his brother in surprise. He did not know, he who wore his heart on his sleeve, who observed no other law in the world than the good law of nature, who let his passions flow according to his inclinations, and in whom the lake of violent emotions was always dry, from the many new ways he drained it every morning, he did not know how furiously the sea of human passions seethes and boils when it is denied any outlet, how it piles up, swells, overflows, how it scours the heart, bursts out in inward sobs and silent convulsions, until it has breached its dykes and burst its bed. The austere, icy exterior of Claude Frollo, that chill surface of rugged, inaccessible virtue, had always deceived Jehan. The merry student had never thought that there is boiling lava raging deep beneath the snow-capped peak of Etna.
We do not know if he suddenly realized all these ideas, but featherbrained as he was, he understood that he had seen what he ought not to have seen, that he had just surprised his elder brother’s soul in one of its most secret attitudes, and that Claude must never suspect this. Seeing that the archdeacon had relapsed into his former immobility, he withdrew his head very quietly and made a noise as of footsteps behind the door, like someone coming and announcing his arrival.
‘Come in!’ cried the archdeacon from inside the cell, ‘I was expecting you. I left the key in the door on purpose. Come in, Maître Jacques.’
The student boldly entered. The archdeacon, very embarrassed by such a visit in such a place, started in his chair.
‘What! It’s you, Jehan?’
‘It’s still a J,’ said the cheeky, red-faced, cheerful student.
Dom Claude’s face had assumed its stern expression again. ‘What have you come here for?’
‘Brother,’ answered the student, striving to achieve a decent, piteous, and modest demeanour, turning his cap round in his hands with an air of innocence,’ I was coming to ask you …’
‘What?’
‘For a much-needed moral lesson.’ Jehan did not dare add aloud: ‘And a little money which I need even more.’ That last part of his sentence remained unspoken.
‘Sir,’ said the archdeacon coldly,’ I am much displeased with you.’
‘Alas!’ sighed the student.
Dom Claude turned his chair through a quarter of a circle, and stared hard at Jehan: ‘I am very glad to see you.’
It was a daunting exordium. Jehan prepared for a rude clash.
‘Jehan, every day people bring me complaints about you. What is this fight you had which left a young Vicomte Albert de Ramonchamp all bruised from your drubbing?’
‘Oh!’ said Jehan, ‘that was nothing much! A nasty little page amusing himself spattering students by riding his horse thr
ough the mire!’
‘What about this Mahiet Fargel,’ went on the archdeacon, ‘whose gown you tore? Tunicam dechiraverunt says the complaint.’
‘Oh that! a rotten little Montaigu cappette,* wasn’t it?’
‘The complaint says tunicam not cappettam. Don’t you know Latin?’
Jehan did not answer.
‘Yes!’ the priest went on, shaking his head, ‘that’s what learning and letters have come to now. The Latin tongue is scarcely understood, Syriac unknown, Greek so detested that it’s not accounted ignorance when the most learned scholars skip a Greek word without reading it, and people say: “Graecum est, non legitur [It is Greek, it is not to be read].”’
The student resolutely raised his eyes: ‘Brother, would you like me to explain to you in good French parlance that Greek word written on the wall over there?’
‘Which word?’
‘’ANÁΓKH.’
The archdeacon’s sallow cheeks flushed slightly, like a puff of smoke outwardly proclaiming the secret commotions of a volcano. The student hardly noticed,
‘All right, Jehan,’ the elder brother managed with difficulty to stammer, ‘what does that word mean?’
‘Fatality.’
Dom Claude paled again, and the student casually went on: ‘And that word underneath, incised with the same hand, ’Aναγνεία means “impurity”. You see, we know our Greek.’
The archdeacon remained silent. This Greek lesson had made him thoughtful. Young Jehan, who had all the acuteness of a spoilt child, judged this a favourable moment for venturing his request. So he adopted an extremely gentle tone, and began: ‘Good brother, do you dislike me so much that you scowl at me for a few slaps and punches dealt out in fair fight to some boys and brats, quibusdam marmosetis? You see, good brother Claude, we know our Latin.’