Собор Парижской богоматери / Notre-Dame de Paris
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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, innate in him. From his very first steps among men, he had felt himself, later on he had seen himself, spewed out, blasted, rejected. As he grew up, he had found nothing but hatred around him. And he had picked up the weapon with which he had been wounded.
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 Averro`es, Guillaume de Paris, and Nicolas Flamel hold the end in the Middle Ages.
That is, at least, what was supposed, whether rightly or not. It is certain that the archdeacon often visited the cemetery of the Saints-Innocents, where, it is true, his father and mother had been buried; but that he appeared far less devout before the cross of their grave than before the strange figures with which the tomb of Nicolas Flamel and Claude Pernelle.
It is certain that he had frequently been seen to enter a little house which Nicolas Flamel had built, where he had died about 1417, and which, constantly deserted since that time, had already begun to fall in ruins. Some neighbors even affirm that they had once seen, through an air-hole, Archdeacon Claude excavating, turning over, digging up the earth in the two cellars. It was supposed that Flamel had buried the philosopher’s stone in the cellar.
Furthermore, it is certain that the archdeacon had established himself in that one of the two towers of Notre-Dame, just beside the frame for the bells, a very secret little cell, into which no one, not even the bishop, entered without his leave, it was said. What that cell contained, no one knew; but at night, there was often seen to appear, disappear, and reappear, a certain red light coming from the small window.
There were no great proofs of sorcery in that, after all, but there was still enough smoke to warrant a surmise of fire.
More than once a choir-boy had fled in terror at finding Frollo alone in the church, so strange and dazzling was his look. More than once, in the choir, at the hour of the offices, his neighbor in the stalls had heard him mingle with the plain song unintelligible parentheses.
However, he had never been more exemplary. By profession as well as by character, he had always held himself aloof from women; he seemed to hate them more than ever. It was also noticed that his horror for Bohemian women and gypsies had seemed to redouble for some time past. He had petitioned the bishop to forbade the Bohemian women to come and dance and beat their tambourines; and for about the same length of time, he had been collecting the cases of sorcerers and witches condemned to fire or the rope.