Chapter II: Claude Frollo

In fact, Claude Frollo was no common person.

He belonged to one of those middle-class families which were
called indifferently, in the impertinent language of the last
century, the high _bourgeoise_ or the petty nobility. This family
had inherited from the brothers Paclet the fief of Tirechappe,
which was dependent upon the Bishop of Paris, and whose
twenty-one houses had been in the thirteenth century the object
of so many suits before the official. As possessor of this fief,
Claude Frollo was one of the twenty-seven seigneurs keeping claim
to a manor in fee in Paris and its suburbs; and for a long time,
his name was to be seen inscribed in this quality, between the
Hôtel de Tancarville, belonging to Master François Le Rez, and
the college of Tours, in the records deposited at Saint Martin
des Champs.

Claude Frollo 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. There it was that he had
grown up, on the missal and the lexicon.

Moreover, he was a sad, grave, serious child, who studied
ardently, and learned quickly; he never uttered a loud cry in
recreation hour, mixed but little in the bacchanals of the Rue du
Fouarre, did not know what it was to _dare alapas et capillos
laniare_, and had cut no figure in that revolt of 1463, which the
annalists register gravely, under the title of “The sixth trouble
of the University.” He seldom rallied the poor students of
Montaigu on the _cappettes_ from which they derived their name,
or the bursars of the college of Dormans on their shaved tonsure,
and their surtout parti-colored of bluish-green, blue, and violet
cloth, _azurini coloris et bruni_, as says the charter of the
Cardinal des Quatre-Couronnes.

On the other hand, he was assiduous at the great and the small
schools of the Rue Saint Jean de Beauvais. The first pupil whom
the Abbé de Saint Pierre de Val, at the moment of beginning his
reading on canon law, always perceived, glued to a pillar of the
school Saint-Vendregesile, opposite his rostrum, was Claude
Frollo, armed with his horn ink-bottle, biting his pen,
scribbling on his threadbare knee, and, in winter, blowing on his
fingers. The first auditor whom Messire Miles d’Isliers, doctor
in decretals, saw arrive every Monday morning, all breathless, at
the opening of the gates of the school of the Chef-Saint-Denis,
was Claude Frollo. Thus, at sixteen years of age, the young clerk
might have held his own, in mystical theology, against a father
of the church; in canonical theology, against a father of the
councils; in scholastic theology, against a doctor of Sorbonne.

Theology conquered, he had plunged into decretals. From the
“Master of Sentences,” he had passed to the “Capitularies of
Charlemagne;” and he had devoured in succession, in his appetite
for science, decretals upon decretals, those of Theodore, Bishop
of Hispalus; those of Bouchard, Bishop of Worms; those of Yves,
Bishop of Chartres; next the decretal of Gratian, which succeeded
the capitularies of Charlemagne; then the collection of Gregory
IX.; then the Epistle of _Superspecula_, of Honorius III. He
rendered clear and familiar to himself that vast and tumultuous
period of civil law and canon law in conflict and at strife with
each other, in the chaos of the Middle Ages,—a period which
Bishop Theodore opens in 618, and which Pope Gregory closes in
1227.

Decretals digested, he flung himself upon medicine, on the
liberal arts. He studied the science of herbs, the science of
unguents; he became an expert in fevers and in contusions, in
sprains and abcesses. Jacques d’ Espars would have received him
as a physician; Richard Hellain, as a surgeon. He also passed
through all the degrees of licentiate, master, and doctor of
arts. He studied the languages, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, a triple
sanctuary then very little frequented. His was a veritable fever
for acquiring and hoarding, in the matter of science. 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.

It was towards this epoch, that the excessive heat of the summer
of 1466 caused that grand outburst of the plague which carried
off more than forty thousand souls in the vicomty of Paris, and
among others, as Jean de Troyes states, “Master Arnoul,
astrologer to the king, who was a very fine man, both wise and
pleasant.” The rumor spread in the University that the Rue
Tirechappe was especially devastated by the malady. It was there
that Claude’s parents resided, in the midst of their fief. 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, who was in
swaddling clothes, was still alive and crying abandoned in his
cradle. This was all that remained to Claude of his family; the
young man took the child under his arm and went off in a pensive
mood. 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 the reveries of school to the
realities of this world. Then, moved with pity, he was seized
with passion and devotion towards that child, his brother; a
sweet and strange thing was a human affection to him, who had
hitherto loved his books alone.

This affection developed to a singular point; in a soul so new,
it was like a first love. Separated since infancy from his
parents, whom he had hardly known; cloistered and immured, as it
were, in his books; eager above all things to study and to learn;
exclusively attentive up to that time, to his intelligence which
broadened in science, to his imagination, which expanded in
letters,—the poor scholar had not yet had time to feel the place
of his heart.

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 perceived that there was something else in the
world besides the speculations of the Sorbonne, and the verses of
Homer; that man needed affections; that life without tenderness
and without love was only a set of dry, shrieking, and rending
wheels. Only, he imagined, for he was at the age when illusions
are as yet replaced only by illusions, that the affections of
blood and family were the sole ones necessary, and that a little
brother to love sufficed to fill an entire existence.

He threw himself, therefore, 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,—that orphan with another orphan for his only
support, touched him to the bottom of his heart; and grave
thinker as he was, he set to meditating upon Jehan with an
infinite compassion. He kept watch and ward over him as over
something very fragile, and very worthy of care. 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. Besides the fief of
Tirechappe, he had inherited from his father the fief of Moulin,
which was a dependency of the square tower of Gentilly; it was a
mill on a hill, near the château of Winchestre (Bicêtre). 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. Therefore, he attached himself more closely than ever to
the clerical profession. His merits, his learning, his quality of
immediate vassal of the Bishop of Paris, threw the doors of the
church wide open to him. At the age of twenty, by special
dispensation of the Holy See, he was a priest, and served as the
youngest of the chaplains of Notre-Dame the altar which is
called, because of the late mass which is said there, _altare
pigrorum_.

There, plunged more deeply than ever in his dear books, which he
quitted only to run for an hour to the fief of Moulin, this
mixture of learning and austerity, so rare at his age, had
promptly acquired for him the respect and admiration of the
monastery. From the cloister, his reputation as a learned man had
passed to the people, among whom it had changed a little, a
frequent occurrence at that time, into reputation as a sorcerer.

It was at the moment when he was returning, on Quasimodo day,
from saying his mass at the Altar of the Lazy, which was by the
side of the door leading to the nave on the right, near the image
of the Virgin, 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, in very sooth. 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, in order that,
whatever might be the future faults of the little Jehan, he
should have beside him that charity done for his sake. It was a
sort of investment of good works, which he was effecting in the
name of his young brother; it was a stock of good works which he
wished to amass in advance for him, in case the little rogue
should some day find himself short of that coin, the only sort
which is received at the toll-bar of paradise.

He baptized his adopted child, and gave him the name of
Quasimodo, either because he desired thereby to mark the day,
when he had found him, or because he wished to designate by that
name to what a degree the poor little creature was incomplete,
and hardly sketched out. In fact, Quasimodo, blind, hunchbacked,
knock-kneed, was only an “almost.”