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_ 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 Torch, the tender protector of a little child, the
young and dreamy philosopher who knew many things and
was ignorant of many. He was a priest, austere, grave,
morose; one charged with souls; monsieur the archdeacon of
Josas, the bishop's second acolyte, having charge of the
two deaneries of Montlhéry, and Châteaufort, and one hundred
and seventy-four country curacies. He was an imposing and
sombre personage, before whom the choir boys in alb and
in jacket trembled, as well as the machicots*, and the brothers
of Saint-Augustine and the matutinal clerks of Notre-Dame,
when he passed slowly beneath the lofty arches of the choir,
majestic, thoughtful, with arms folded and his head so bent
upon his breast that all one saw of his face was his large,
bald brow.
* An official of Notre-Dame, lower than a beneficed clergyman,
higher than simple paid chanters.
Dom Claude Frollo had, however, abandoned neither science
nor the education of his young brother, those two occupations
of his life. But as time went on, some bitterness had
been mingled with these things which were so sweet. In the
long run, says Paul Diacre, the best lard turns rancid. Little
Jehan Frollo, surnamed (~du Moulin~) "of the Mill" because of
the place where he had been reared, had not grown up in the
direction which Claude would have liked to impose upon him.
The big brother counted upon a pious, docile, learned, and
honorable pupil. But the little brother, like those young trees
which deceive the gardener's hopes and turn obstinately to the
quarter whence they receive sun and air, the little brother did
not grow and did not multiply, but only put forth fine bushy
and luxuriant branches on the side of laziness, ignorance, and
debauchery. 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;
and it was a grief to him that this sanctuary, formerly edified
by the name of Frollo, should to-day be scandalized by it.
He sometimes preached Jehan very long and severe sermons,
which the latter intrepidly endured. After all, the young
scapegrace had a good heart, as can be seen in all comedies.
But the sermon over, he none the less tranquilly resumed his
course of seditions and enormities. Now it was a ~bejaune~ or
yellow beak (as they called the new arrivals at the university),
whom he had been mauling by way of welcome; a precious
tradition which has been carefully preserved to our own day.
Again, he had set in movement a band of scholars, who had
flung themselves upon a wine-shop in classic fashion, quasi
~classico excitati~, had then beaten the tavern-keeper "with
offensive cudgels," and joyously pillaged the tavern, even to
smashing in the hogsheads of wine in the cellar. And then
it was a fine report in Latin, which the sub-monitor of Torchi
carried piteously to Dom Claude with this dolorous marginal
comment,--~Rixa; prima causa vinum optimum potatum~. Finally,
it was said, a thing quite horrible in a boy of sixteen, that
his debauchery often extended as far as the Rue de Glatigny.
Claude, saddened and discouraged in his human affections,
by all this, had flung himself eagerly into the arms of learning,
that sister which, at least does not laugh in your face, and
which always pays you, though in money that is sometimes a
little hollow, for the attention which you have paid to her.
Hence, he became more and more learned, and, at the same
time, as a natural consequence, more and more rigid as a
priest, more and more sad as a man. There are for each of
us several parallelisms between our intelligence, our habits,
and our character, which develop without a break, and break
only in the great disturbances of life.
As Claude Frollo had passed through nearly the entire
circle of human learning--positive, exterior, and
permissible--since his youth, he was obliged, unless he came
to a halt, ~ubi defuit orbis~, to proceed further and seek other
aliments for the insatiable activity of his intelligence. The
antique symbol of the serpent biting its tail is, above all,
applicable to science. It would appear that Claude Frollo had
experienced this. Many grave persons affirm that, after having
exhausted the ~fas~ of human learning, he had dared to penetrate
into the ~nefas~. He had, they said, tasted in succession all
the apples of the tree of knowledge, and, whether from hunger or
disgust, had ended by tasting the forbidden fruit. He had taken
his place by turns, as the reader has seen, in the conferences of
the theologians in Sorbonne,--in the assemblies of the doctors of
art, after the manner of Saint-Hilaire,--in the disputes of the
decretalists, after the manner of Saint-Martin,--in the
congregations of physicians at the holy water font of Notre-
Dame, ~ad cupam Nostroe-Dominoe~. All the dishes permitted
and approved, which those four great kitchens called
the four faculties could elaborate and serve to the understanding,
he had devoured, and had been satiated with them before
his hunger was appeased. Then he had penetrated further,
lower, beneath all that finished, material, limited knowledge;
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 Averroès, Gillaume de
Paris, and Nicolas Flamel hold the end in the Middle Ages;
and which extends in the East, by the light of the seven-
branched candlestick, to Solomon, Pythagoras, and Zoroaster.
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, with other victims of the plague of
1466; 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, erected just beside
it, was loaded.
It is certain that he had frequently been seen to pass along
the Rue des Lombards, and furtively enter a little house
which formed the corner of the Rue des Ecrivans and the Rue
Marivault. It was the 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,--so greatly had the hermetics and the alchemists of all
countries wasted away the walls, merely by carving their names
upon them. 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, whose supports had been
daubed with numberless couplets and hieroglyphics by Nicolas
Flamel himself. It was supposed that Flamel had buried the
philosopher's stone in the cellar; and the alchemists, for the
space of two centuries, from Magistri to Father Pacifique, never
ceased to worry the soil until the house, so cruelly ransacked
and turned over, ended by falling into dust beneath their feet.
Again, it is certain that the archdeacon had been seized
with a singular passion for the symbolical door of Notre-
Dame, that page of a conjuring book written in stone, by
Bishop Guillaume de Paris, who has, no doubt, been damned
for having affixed so infernal a frontispiece to the sacred poem
chanted by the rest of the edifice. Archdeacon Claude had
the credit also of having fathomed the mystery of the colossus
of Saint Christopher, and of that lofty, enigmatical statue
which then stood at the entrance of the vestibule, and which
the people, in derision, called "Monsieur Legris." But, what
every one might have noticed was the interminable hours
which he often employed, seated upon the parapet of the area
in front of the church, in contemplating the sculptures of the
front; examining now the foolish virgins with their lamps
reversed, now the wise virgins with their lamps upright; again,
calculating the angle of vision of that raven which belongs to
the left front, and which is looking at a mysterious point inside
the church, where is concealed the philosopher's stone, if it be
not in the cellar of Nicolas Flamel.
It was, let us remark in passing, a singular fate for the
Church of Notre-Dame at that epoch to be so beloved, in two
different degrees, and with so much devotion, by two beings so
dissimilar as Claude and Quasimodo. Beloved by one, a sort
of instinctive and savage half-man, for its beauty, for its
stature, for the harmonies which emanated from its magnificent
ensemble; beloved by the other, a learned and passionate
imagination, for its myth, for the sense which it contains,
for the symbolism scattered beneath the sculptures of its
front,--like the first text underneath the second in a
palimpsest,--in a word, for the enigma which it is eternally
propounding to the understanding.
Furthermore, it is certain that the archdeacon had
established himself in that one of the two towers which looks
upon the Grève, 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. This tiny cell had
formerly been made almost at the summit of the tower,
among the ravens' nests, by Bishop Hugo de Besançon* who
had wrought sorcery there in his day. What that cell
contained, no one knew; but from the strand of the Terrain,
at night, there was often seen to appear, disappear, and
reappear at brief and regular intervals, at a little dormer
window opening upon the back of the tower, a certain red,
intermittent, singular light which seemed to follow the panting
breaths of a bellows, and to proceed from a flame, rather than
from a light. In the darkness, at that height, it produced a
singular effect; and the goodwives said: "There's the
archdeacon blowing! hell is sparkling up yonder!"
* Hugo II. de Bisuncio, 1326-1332.
There were no great proofs of sorcery in that, after all, but
there was still enough smoke to warrant a surmise of fire, and
the archdeacon bore a tolerably formidable reputation. We
ought to mention however, that the sciences of Egypt, that
necromancy and magic, even the whitest, even the most innocent,
had no more envenomed enemy, no more pitiless denunciator
before the gentlemen of the officialty of Notre-Dame.
Whether this was sincere horror, or the game played by the
thief who shouts, "stop thief!" at all events, it did not prevent
the archdeacon from being considered by the learned heads of
the chapter, as a soul who had ventured into the vestibule of
hell, who was lost in the caves of the cabal, groping amid the
shadows of the occult sciences. Neither were the people
deceived thereby; with any one who possessed any sagacity,
Quasimodo passed for the demon; Claude Frollo, for the
sorcerer. It was evident that the bellringer was to serve the
archdeacon for a given time, at the end of which he would
carry away the latter's soul, by way of payment. Thus the
archdeacon, in spite of the excessive austerity of his life, was
in bad odor among all pious souls; and there was no devout
nose so inexperienced that it could not smell him out to
be a magician.
And if, as he grew older, abysses had formed in his science,
they had also formed in his heart. That at least, is what one
had grounds for believing on scrutinizing that face upon
which the soul was only seen to shine through a sombre cloud.
Whence that large, bald brow? that head forever bent? that
breast always heaving with sighs? What secret thought
caused his mouth to smile with so much bitterness, at the
same moment that his scowling brows approached each other
like two bulls on the point of fighting? Why was what hair
he had left already gray? What was that internal fire which
sometimes broke forth in his glance, to such a degree that his
eye resembled a hole pierced in the wall of a furnace?
These symptoms of a violent moral preoccupation, had
acquired an especially high degree of intensity at the epoch
when this story takes place. More than once a choir-boy had
fled in terror at finding him 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, ~ad omnem tonum~, unintelligible
parentheses. More than once the laundress of the Terrain
charged "with washing the chapter" had observed, not
without affright, the marks of nails and clenched fingers
on the surplice of monsieur the archdeacon of Josas.
However, he redoubled his severity, and 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. The mere rustling of a silken petticoat
caused his hood to fall over his eyes. Upon this score he was
so jealous of austerity and reserve, that when the Dame de
Beaujeu, the king's daughter, came to visit the cloister of
Notre-Dame, in the month of December, 1481, he gravely
opposed her entrance, reminding the bishop of the statute of
the Black Book, dating from the vigil of Saint-Barthélemy,
1334, which interdicts access to the cloister to "any woman
whatever, old or young, mistress or maid." Upon which the
bishop had been constrained to recite to him the ordinance of
Legate Odo, which excepts certain great dames, ~aliquoe
magnates mulieres, quoe sine scandalo vitari non possunt~.
And again the archdeacon had protested, objecting that the
ordinance of the legate, which dated back to 1207, was anterior
by a hundred and twenty-seven years to the Black Book, and
consequently was abrogated in fact by it. And he had refused
to appear before the princess.
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 for an edict which expressly forbade
the Bohemian women to come and dance and beat their tambourines
on the place of the Parvis; and for about the same length of
time, he had been ransacking the mouldy placards of the
officialty, in order to collect the cases of sorcerers and
witches condemned to fire or the rope, for complicity in crimes
with rams, sows, or goats. _
Read next: VOLUME I: BOOK FOURTH: Chapter 6 - Unpopularity
Read previous: VOLUME I: BOOR FOURTH: Chapter 4 - The Dog and his Master
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