Собор Парижской богоматери / Notre-Dame de Paris

Гюго Виктор

Many people stopped to see the child. Among them was a young priest. He had been listening for everyone who stopped for a while. He had a severe face, with a large brow, and a profound glance. Eventually, he thrust the crowd silently aside, and proclaimed that he would be the one to adopt the child.

He took it in his cassock and carried it off. The spectators followed him with frightened glances. A moment later, he had disappeared through the door, which led from the church to the cloister.

When the first surprise was over, one of the spectators bent down to the ear of another,—

“I told you so, sister,—that young clerk, Monsieur Claude Frollo, is a sorcerer.”

Chapter II

Claude Frollo

In fact, Claude Frollo was no common person.

He belonged to one of those middle-class families which were called the high bourgeoise or the petty nobility.

He had been destined from infancy, by his parents, to the ecclesiastical profession. He had been taught to read in Latin; he had been trained to keep his eyes on the ground and to speak low. While still a child, his father had cloistered him in the college of Torchi in the University.

Frollo was a sad, grave, serious child, who studied ardently, and learned quickly. Thus, at sixteen years of age, he might have held his own against a father of the church in mystical theology; in canonical theology, against a father of the councils; in scholastic theology, against a doctor of Sorbonne.

Theology conquered, he had plunged into decretals. Then he flung himself upon medicine, on the liberal arts. At the age of eighteen, he had made his way through the four faculties; it seemed to the young man that life had but one sole object: learning.

The excessive heat of the summer of 1466 caused that grand outburst of the plague which carried off more than forty thousand souls in Paris. The rumor spread in the University that the Rue Tirechappe was especially devastated by it. It was there that Claude’s parents resided. The young scholar rushed in great alarm to the paternal mansion. When he entered it, he found that both father and mother had died on the preceding day. A very young brother of his, was still alive and crying abandoned in his cradle. This was all that remained to Claude of his family. Up to that moment, he had lived only in science; he now began to live in life.

This catastrophe was a crisis in Claude’s existence. Orphaned, the eldest, head of the family at the age of nineteen, he felt himself rudely recalled from school to the realities of this world. Then, moved with pity, he was seized with passion and devotion towards the child, his brother.

This young brother, without mother or father, this little child which had fallen abruptly from heaven into his arms, made a new man of him. He threw himself into the love for his little Jehan with the passion of a character already profound, ardent, concentrated; that poor frail creature, pretty, fair-haired, rosy, and curly, touched him to the bottom of his heart. He was more than a brother to the child; he became a mother to him.

Little Jehan had lost his mother while he was still at the breast; Claude gave him to a nurse. There was a miller’s wife there who was nursing a fine child; it was not far from the university, and Claude carried the little Jehan to her in his own arms.

From that time forth, feeling that he had a burden to bear, he took life very seriously. The thought of his little brother became not only his recreation, but the object of his studies. He resolved to consecrate himself entirely to a future for which he was responsible in the sight of God, and never to have any other wife, any other child than the happiness and fortune of his brother. At the age of twenty, he was a priest, and served as the youngest of the chaplains of Notre-Dame.

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.