Chương Chương 17 · CLAUDE FROLLO.

. 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.”