Now, in 1482, Quasimodo had grown up. He had become a few yearspreviously the bellringer of Notre-Dame, thanks to his father byadoption, Claude Frollo,--who had become archdeacon of Josas, thanksto his suzerain, Messire Louis de Beaumont,--who had become Bishop ofParis, 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 peculiarlyintimate bond which united the ringer to the church. Separated foreverfrom the world, by the double fatality of his unknown birth and hisnatural deformity, imprisoned from his infancy in that impassable doublecircle, the poor wretch had grown used to seeing nothing in this worldbeyond 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 harmonybetween this creature and this church. When, still a little fellow, hehad dragged himself tortuously and by jerks beneath the shadows ofits vaults, he seemed, with his human face and his bestial limbs, thenatural reptile of that humid and sombre pavement, upon which the shadowof the Romanesque capitals cast so many strange forms.
Later on, the first time that he caught hold, mechanically, of theropes to the towers, and hung suspended from them, and set the bell toclanging, it produced upon his adopted father, Claude, the effect of achild whose tongue is unloosed and who begins to speak.
It is thus that, little by little, developing always in sympathy withthe cathedral, living there, sleeping there, hardly ever leaving it,subject every hour to the mysterious impress, he came to resemble it, heincrusted 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 itsinhabitant but more than that, its natural tenant. One might almostsay that he had assumed its form, as the snail takes on the form ofits shell. It was his dwelling, his hole, his envelope. There existedbetween him and the old church so profound an instinctive sympathy, somany magnetic affinities, so many material affinities, that he adheredto it somewhat as a tortoise adheres to its shell. The rough andwrinkled cathedral was his shell.
It is useless to warn the reader not to take literally all thesimiles which we are obliged to employ here to express the singular,symmetrical, direct, almost consubstantial union of a man and anedifice. It is equally unnecessary to state to what a degree thatwhole cathedral was familiar to him, after so long and so intimate acohabitation. That dwelling was peculiar to him. It had no depths towhich Quasimodo had not penetrated, no height which he had not scaled.He often climbed many stones up the front, aided solely by the unevenpoints of the carving. The towers, on whose exterior surface he wasfrequently seen clambering, like a lizard gliding along a perpendicularwall, 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 havesaid that he had tamed them. By dint of leaping, climbing, gambollingamid 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 theCathedral, but his mind also. In what condition was that mind? Whatbent had it contracted, what form had it assumed beneath that knottedenvelope, in that savage life? This it would be hard to determine.Quasimodo had been born one-eyed, hunchbacked, lame. It was withgreat difficulty, and by dint of great patience that Claude Frollo hadsucceeded in teaching him to talk. But a fatality was attached to thepoor foundling. Bellringer of Notre-Dame at the age of fourteen, a newinfirmity had come to complete his misfortunes: the bells had broken thedrums of his ears; he had become deaf. The only gate which nature hadleft 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 stillmade its way into the soul of Quasimodo. His soul fell into profoundnight. The wretched being's misery became as incurable and as completeas his deformity. Let us add that his deafness rendered him to someextent dumb. For, in order not to make others laugh, the very momentthat he found himself to be deaf, he resolved upon a silence which heonly broke when he was alone. He voluntarily tied that tongue whichClaude 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 thatthick, hard rind; if we could sound the depths of that badly constructedorganism; if it were granted to us to look with a torch behind thosenon-transparent organs to explore the shadowy interior of that opaquecreature, to elucidate his obscure corners, his absurd no-thoroughfares,and suddenly to cast a vivid light upon the soul enchained at theextremity of that cave, we should, no doubt, find the unhappy Psyche insome poor, cramped, and ricketty attitude, like those prisoners beneaththe Leads of Venice, who grew old bent double in a stone box which wasboth 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, movingblindly within him. The impressions of objects underwent a considerablerefraction 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, nowidiotic.
The first effect of this fatal organization was to trouble the glancewhich he cast upon things. He received hardly any immediate perceptionof them. The external world seemed much farther away to him than it doesto us.
The second effect of his misfortune was to render him malicious.
He was malicious, in fact, because he was savage; he was savage becausehe was ugly. There was logic in his nature, as there is in ours.
His strength, so extraordinarily developed, was a cause of still greatermalevolence: "_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 felthimself, later on he had seen himself, spewed out, blasted, rejected.Human words were, for him, always a raillery or a malediction. As hegrew up, he had found nothing but hatred around him. He had caught thegeneral malevolence. He had picked up the weapon with which he had beenwounded.
After all, he turned his face towards men only with reluctance;his cathedral was sufficient for him. It was peopled with marblefigures,--kings, saints, bishops,--who at least did not burst outlaughing in his face, and who gazed upon him only with tranquillityand kindliness. The other statues, those of the monsters and demons,cherished no hatred for him, Quasimodo. He resembled them too much forthat. They seemed rather, to be scoffing at other men. The saints werehis friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends and guardedhim. So he held long communion with them. He sometimes passed wholehours crouching before one of these statues, in solitary conversationwith it. If any one came, he fled like a lover surprised in hisserenade.
And the cathedral was not only society for him, but the universe, andall nature beside. He dreamed of no other hedgerows than the paintedwindows, always in flower; no other shade than that of the foliage ofstone which spread out, loaded with birds, in the tufts of the Saxoncapitals; 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 arousedhis soul, and made it open its poor wings, which it kept so miserablyfolded in its cavern
, that which sometimes rendered him even happy, wasthe bells. He loved them, fondled them, talked to them, understood them.From the chime in the spire, over the intersection of the aisles andnave, to the great bell of the front, he cherished a tenderness for themall. The central spire and the two towers were to him as three greatcages, whose birds, reared by himself, sang for him alone. Yet it wasthese very bells which had made him deaf; but mothers often love bestthat child which has caused them the most suffering.
It is true that their voice was the only one which he could stillhear. On this score, the big bell was his beloved. It was she whom hepreferred out of all that family of noisy girls which bustled abovehim, on festival days. This bell was named Marie. She was alone in thesouthern tower, with her sister Jacqueline, a bell of lesser size, shutup in a smaller cage beside hers. This Jacqueline was so called from thename of the wife of Jean Montagu, who had given it to the church, whichhad not prevented his going and figuring without his head at Montfaucon.In the second tower there were six other bells, and, finally, sixsmaller ones inhabited the belfry over the crossing, with the woodenbell, which rang only between after dinner on Good Friday and themorning of the day before Easter. So Quasimodo had fifteen bells in hisseraglio; but big Marie was his favorite.
No idea can be formed of his delight on days when the grand peal wassounded. At the moment when the archdeacon dismissed him, and said,"Go!" he mounted the spiral staircase of the clock tower faster than anyone else could have descended it. He entered perfectly breathless intothe aerial chamber of the great bell; he gazed at her a moment, devoutlyand lovingly; then he gently addressed her and patted her with hishand, 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 thesefirst caresses, he shouted to his assistants, placed in the lower storyof the tower, to begin. They grasped the ropes, the wheel creaked, theenormous capsule of metal started slowly into motion. Quasimodo followedit with his glance and trembled. The first shock of the clapper andthe 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, themovement of the bass was accelerated, and, in proportion as it describeda wider angle, Quasimodo's eye opened also more and more widely,phosphoric and flaming. At length the grand peal began; the whole towertrembled; woodwork, leads, cut stones, all groaned at once, from thepiles of the foundation to the trefoils of its summit. Then Quasimodoboiled and frothed; he went and came; he trembled from head to foot withthe tower. The bell, furious, running riot, presented to the twowalls of the tower alternately its brazen throat, whence escaped thattempestuous breath, which is audible leagues away. Quasimodo stationedhimself in front of this open throat; he crouched and rose with theoscillations of the bell, breathed in this overwhelming breath, gazedby turns at the deep place, which swarmed with people, two hundred feetbelow him, and at that enormous, brazen tongue which came, second aftersecond, to howl in his ear.
It was the only speech which he understood, the only sound which brokefor him the universal silence. He swelled out in it as a bird does inthe sun. All of a sudden, the frenzy of the bell seized upon him; hislook became extraordinary; he lay in wait for the great bell as itpassed, as a spider lies in wait for a fly, and flung himself abruptlyupon it, with might and main. Then, suspended above the abyss, borneto and fro by the formidable swinging of the bell, he seized the brazenmonster by the ear-laps, pressed it between both knees, spurred it onwith his heels, and redoubled the fury of the peal with the whole shockand weight of his body. Meanwhile, the tower trembled; he shrieked andgnashed his teeth, his red hair rose erect, his breast heaving like abellows, his eye flashed flames, the monstrous bell neighed, panting,beneath him; and then it was no longer the great bell of Notre-Dame norQuasimodo: it was a dream, a whirlwind, a tempest, dizziness mountedastride of noise; a spirit clinging to a flying crupper, a strangecentaur, half man, half bell; a sort of horrible Astolphus, borne awayupon a prodigious hippogriff of living bronze.
The presence of this extraordinary being caused, as it were, a breath oflife to circulate throughout the entire cathedral. It seemed as thoughthere escaped from him, at least according to the growing superstitionsof the crowd, a mysterious emanation which animated all the stones ofNotre-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 believethat they beheld the thousand statues of the galleries and the fronts inmotion. And the cathedral did indeed seem a docile and obedient creaturebeneath his hand; it waited on his will to raise its great voice; itwas possessed and filled with Quasimodo, as with a familiar spirit.One would have said that he made the immense edifice breathe. He waseverywhere about it; in fact, he multiplied himself on all points of thestructure. Now one perceived with affright at the very top of one ofthe towers, a fantastic dwarf climbing, writhing, crawling on allfours, descending outside above the abyss, leaping from projection toprojection, and going to ransack the belly of some sculptured gorgon; itwas Quasimodo dislodging the crows. Again, in some obscure corner of thechurch one came in contact with a sort of living chimera, crouchingand scowling; it was Quasimodo engaged in thought. Sometimes one caughtsight, upon a bell tower, of an enormous head and a bundle of disorderedlimbs swinging furiously at the end of a rope; it was Quasimodo ringingvespers or the Angelus. Often at night a hideous form was seen wanderingalong the frail balustrade of carved lacework, which crowns the towersand borders the circumference of the apse; again it was the hunchback ofNotre-Dame. Then, said the women of the neighborhood, the whole churchtook on something fantastic, supernatural, horrible; eyes and mouthswere opened, here and there; one heard the dogs, the monsters, and thegargoyles of stone, which keep watch night and day, with outstretchedneck and open jaws, around the monstrous cathedral, barking. And, ifit was a Christmas Eve, while the great bell, which seemed to emit thedeath rattle, summoned the faithful to the midnight mass, such an airwas spread over the sombre facade that one would have declared thatthe grand portal was devouring the throng, and that the rose window waswatching it. And all this came from Quasimodo. Egypt would have takenhim for the god of this temple; the Middle Ages believed him to be itsdemon: he was in fact its soul.
To such an extent was this disease that for those who know thatQuasimodo has existed, Notre-Dame is to-day deserted, inanimate, dead.One feels that something has disappeared from it. That immense body isempty; it is a skeleton; the spirit has quitted it, one sees its placeand that is all. It is like a skull which still has holes for the eyes,but no longer sight.
CHAPTER IV. THE DOG AND HIS MASTER.