Kabanata Kabanata 18 · _IMMANIS PECORIS CUSTOS, IMMANIOR IPSE_.

. _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.