Chapter V: More About Claude Frollo

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
Torchi, 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[25], 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.

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 _béjaune_ 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
Nostræ-Dominæ_. 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, Guillaume 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[26] 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!”

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,
_aliquæ magnates mulieres, quæ 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.