Chapter III: Immanis Pecoris Custos, Immanior Ipse

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 Montfaucon. 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 façade 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.