Now, in 1482, Quasimodo had grown up. He had become a
few years previously the bellringer of Notre-Dame, thanks to
his father by adoption, Claude Frollo,--who had become archdeacon
of Josas, thanks to his suzerain, Messire Louis de Beaumont,--who
had become Bishop of Paris, at the death of Guillaume Chartier in
1472, thanks to his patron, Olivier Le Daim, barber to Louis XI.,
king by the grace of God.
So Quasimodo was the ringer of the chimes of Notre-Dame.
In the course of time there had been formed a certain
peculiarly intimate bond which united the ringer to the church.
Separated forever from the world, by the double fatality of
his unknown birth and his natural deformity, imprisoned from
his infancy in that impassable double circle, the poor wretch
had grown used to seeing nothing in this world beyond the
religious walls which had received him under their shadow.
Notre-Dame had been to him successively, as he grew up and
developed, the egg, the nest, the house, the country, the
universe.
There was certainly a sort of mysterious and pre-existing
harmony between this creature and this church. When, still
a little fellow, he had dragged himself tortuously and by jerks
beneath the shadows of its vaults, he seemed, with his human
face and his bestial limbs, the natural reptile of that humid
and sombre pavement, upon which the shadow of the Romanesque
capitals cast so many strange forms.
Later on, the first time that he caught hold, mechanically,
of the ropes to the towers, and hung suspended from them,
and set the bell to clanging, it produced upon his adopted
father, Claude, the effect of a child whose tongue is unloosed
and who begins to speak.
It is thus that, little by little, developing always in
sympathy with the cathedral, living there, sleeping there, hardly
ever leaving it, subject every hour to the mysterious impress,
he came to resemble it, he incrusted himself in it, so to speak,
and became an integral part of it. His salient angles fitted
into the retreating angles of the cathedral (if we may be
allowed this figure of speech), and he seemed not only its
inhabitant but more than that, its natural tenant. One might
almost say that he had assumed its form, as the snail takes on
the form of its shell. It was his dwelling, his hole, his envelope.
There existed between him and the old church so profound an
instinctive sympathy, so many magnetic affinities, so many
material affinities, that he adhered to it somewhat as a
tortoise adheres to its shell. The rough and wrinkled cathedral
was his shell.
It is useless to warn the reader not to take literally all the
similes which we are obliged to employ here to express the
singular, symmetrical, direct, almost consubstantial union of a
man and an edifice. It is equally unnecessary to state to what
a degree that whole cathedral was familiar to him, after so
long and so intimate a cohabitation. That dwelling was
peculiar to him. It had no depths to which Quasimodo had not
penetrated, no height which he had not scaled. 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, like a lizard gliding
along a perpendicular wall, those two gigantic twins, so
lofty, so menacing, so formidable, possessed for him neither
vertigo, nor terror, nor shocks of amazement.
To see them so gentle under his hand, so easy to scale, one
would have said that he had tamed them. By dint of leaping,
climbing, gambolling amid the abysses of the gigantic cathedral
he had become, in some sort, a monkey and a goat, like
the Calabrian child who swims before he walks, and plays with
the sea while still a babe.
Moreover, it was not his body alone which seemed fashioned
after the Cathedral, but his mind also. In what condition
was that mind? What bent had it contracted, what form
had it assumed beneath that knotted envelope, in that savage
life? This it would be hard to determine. Quasimodo had
been born one-eyed, hunchbacked, lame. It was with great
difficulty, and by dint of great patience that Claude Frollo had
succeeded in teaching him to talk. But a fatality was
attached to the poor foundling. Bellringer of Notre-Dame at
the age of fourteen, a new infirmity had come to complete
his misfortunes: the bells had broken the drums of his ears;
he had become deaf. The only gate which nature had left
wide open for him had been abruptly closed, and forever.
In closing, it had cut off the only ray of joy and of light
which still made its way into the soul of Quasimodo. His
soul fell into profound night. The wretched being's misery
became as incurable and as complete as his deformity. Let us
add that his deafness rendered him to some extent dumb.
For, in order not to make others laugh, the very moment that
he found himself to be deaf, he resolved upon a silence which
he only broke when he was alone. He voluntarily tied that
tongue which Claude Frollo had taken so much pains to unloose.
Hence, it came about, that when necessity constrained
him to speak, his tongue was torpid, awkward, and like a door
whose hinges have grown rusty.
If now we were to try to penetrate to the soul of Quasimodo
through that thick, hard rind; if we could sound the depths
of that badly constructed organism; if it were granted to us
to look with a torch behind those non-transparent organs
to explore the shadowy interior of that opaque creature, to
elucidate his obscure corners, his absurd no-thoroughfares, and
suddenly to cast a vivid light upon the soul enchained at the
extremity of that cave, we should, no doubt, find the unhappy
Psyche in some poor, cramped, and ricketty attitude, like
those prisoners beneath the Leads of Venice, who grew old
bent double in a stone box which was both too low and too
short for them.
It is certain that the mind becomes atrophied in a defective
body. Quasimodo was barely conscious of a soul cast in his
own image, moving blindly within him. The impressions of
objects underwent a considerable refraction before reaching
his mind. His brain was a peculiar medium; the ideas which
passed through it issued forth completely distorted. The
reflection which resulted from this refraction was, necessarily,
divergent and perverted.
Hence a thousand optical illusions, a thousand aberrations
of judgment, a thousand deviations, in which his thought
strayed, now mad, now idiotic.
The first effect of this fatal organization was to trouble the
glance which he cast upon things. He received hardly any
immediate perception of them. The external world seemed
much farther away to him than it does to us.
The second effect of his misfortune was to render him malicious.
He was malicious, in fact, because he was savage; he was
savage because he was ugly. There was logic in his nature, as
there is in ours.
His strength, so extraordinarily developed, was a cause of
still greater malevolence: "~Malus puer robustus~," says
Hobbes.
This justice must, however be rendered to him. 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. Human words were,
for him, always a raillery or a malediction. As he grew up,
he had found nothing but hatred around him. He had caught
the general malevolence. 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. The other statues,
those of the monsters and demons, cherished no hatred for
him, Quasimodo. He resembled them too much for that.
They seemed rather, to be scoffing at other men. The saints
were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his
friends and guarded him. So he held long communion with
them. He sometimes passed whole hours crouching before
one of these statues, in solitary conversation with it. If any
one came, he fled like a lover surprised in his serenade.
And the cathedral was not only society for him, but the
universe, and all nature beside. He dreamed of no other
hedgerows than the painted windows, always in flower; no
other shade than that of the foliage of stone which spread
out, loaded with birds, in the tufts of the Saxon capitals; of
no other mountains than the colossal towers of the church; of
no other ocean than Paris, roaring at their bases.
What he loved above all else in the maternal edifice, that
which aroused his soul, and made it open its poor wings,
which it kept so miserably folded in its cavern, that which
sometimes rendered him even happy, was the bells. He
loved them, fondled 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. Yet it was these very bells which
had made him deaf; but mothers often love best that child
which has caused them the most suffering.
It is true that their voice was the only one which he could
still hear. On this score, the big bell was his beloved. It
was she whom he preferred out of all that family of noisy
girls which bustled above him, on festival days. This bell
was named Marie. She was alone in the southern tower, with
her sister Jacqueline, a bell of lesser size, shut up in a smaller
cage beside hers. This Jacqueline was so called from the
name of the wife of Jean Montagu, who had given it to the
church, which had not prevented his going and figuring without
his head at Montfau?on. In the second tower there were
six other bells, and, finally, six smaller ones inhabited the
belfry over the crossing, with the wooden bell, which rang
only between after dinner on Good Friday and the morning of
the day before Easter. So Quasimodo had fifteen bells in his
seraglio; but big Marie was his favorite.
No idea can be formed of his delight on days when the
grand peal was sounded. At the moment when the archdeacon
dismissed him, and said, "Go!" he mounted the spiral
staircase of the clock tower faster than any one else could
have descended it. He entered perfectly breathless into the
aerial chamber of the great bell; he gazed at her a moment,
devoutly and lovingly; then he gently addressed her and
patted her with his hand, like a good horse, which is about
to set out on a long journey. He pitied her for the trouble
that she was about to suffer. After these first caresses, he
shouted to his assistants, placed in the lower story of the
tower, to begin. They grasped the ropes, the wheel creaked,
the enormous capsule of metal started slowly into motion.
Quasimodo followed it with his glance and trembled. The
first shock of the clapper and the brazen wall made the
framework upon which it was mounted quiver. Quasimodo
vibrated with the bell.
"Vah!" he cried, with a senseless burst of laughter. However,
the movement of the bass was accelerated, and, in proportion
as it described a wider angle, Quasimodo's eye opened
also more and more widely, phosphoric and flaming. At
length the grand peal began; the whole tower trembled;
woodwork, leads, cut stones, all groaned at once, from the
piles of the foundation to the trefoils of its summit. Then
Quasimodo boiled and frothed; he went and came; he trembled
from head to foot with the tower. The bell, furious,
running riot, presented to the two walls of the tower
alternately its brazen throat, whence escaped that tempestuous
breath, which is audible leagues away. Quasimodo stationed
himself in front of this open throat; he crouched and rose
with the oscillations of the bell, breathed in this overwhelming
breath, gazed by turns at the deep place, which swarmed
with people, two hundred feet below him, and at that enormous,
brazen tongue which came, second after second, to howl
in his ear.
It was the only speech which he understood, the only sound
which broke for him the universal silence. He swelled out
in it as a bird does in the sun. All of a sudden, the frenzy
of the bell seized upon him; his look became extraordinary;
he lay in wait for the great bell as it passed, as a spider lies
in wait for a fly, and flung himself abruptly upon it, with
might and main. Then, suspended above the abyss, borne to
and fro by the formidable swinging of the bell, he seized the
brazen monster by the ear-laps, pressed it between both knees,
spurred it on with his heels, and redoubled the fury of the
peal with the whole shock and weight of his body. Meanwhile,
the tower trembled; he shrieked and gnashed his teeth,
his red hair rose erect, his breast heaving like a bellows, his
eye flashed flames, the monstrous bell neighed, panting, beneath
him; and then it was no longer the great bell of Notre-
Dame nor Quasimodo: it was a dream, a whirlwind, a tempest,
dizziness mounted astride of noise; a spirit clinging to a flying
crupper, a strange centaur, half man, half bell; a sort of
horrible Astolphus, borne away upon a prodigious hippogriff
of living bronze.
The presence of this extraordinary being caused, as it were,
a breath of life to circulate throughout the entire cathedral.
It seemed as though there escaped from him, at least according
to the growing superstitions of the crowd, a mysterious
emanation which animated all the stones of Notre-Dame, and
made the deep bowels of the ancient church to palpitate. It
sufficed for people to know that he was there, to make them
believe that they beheld the thousand statues of the galleries
and the fronts in motion. And the cathedral did indeed seem
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. One would have
said that he made the immense edifice breathe. He was
everywhere about it; in fact, he multiplied himself on all
points of the structure. Now one perceived with affright 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, and going to
ransack the belly of some sculptured gorgon; 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 vespers
or the Angelus. Often at night a hideous form was seen
wandering along the frail balustrade of carved lacework,
which crowns the towers and borders the circumference of
the apse; again it was the hunchback of Notre-Dame. Then,
said the women of the neighborhood, the whole church took
on something fantastic, supernatural, horrible; eyes and
mouths were opened, here and there; one heard the dogs, the
monsters, and the gargoyles of stone, which keep watch night
and day, with outstretched neck and open jaws, around the
monstrous cathedral, barking. And, if it was a Christmas
Eve, while the great bell, which seemed to emit the death
rattle, summoned the faithful to the midnight mass, such an
air was spread over the sombre fa?ade that one would have
declared that the grand portal was devouring the throng, and
that the rose window was watching it. And all this came
from Quasimodo. Egypt would have taken him for the god
of this temple; the Middle Ages believed him to be its
demon: he was in fact its soul.
To such an extent was this disease that for those who know
that Quasimodo has existed, Notre-Dame is to-day deserted,
inanimate, dead. One feels that something has disappeared
from it. That immense body is empty; it is a skeleton; the
spirit has quitted it, one sees its place and that is all. It is
like a skull which still has holes for the eyes, but no
longer sight.
CHAPTER IV.