| 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 Montfauçon . 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 . |