opened here and there ; the dogs, and the dragons, and the
griffins of stone, which keep watch day and night, with out-
stretched neck and open jaws, around the monstious cathe-
dral, were heard to bark and howl. At Christmas, while
the great bell, which seemed to rattle in the throat, sum-
L
U6
THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTBE-DAME.
moned the pious to the midnight mass, the gloomy facade
of the cathedral wore such a strange and sinister air, that
the grand porch seemed to swallow the multitude, while
the rose- window above it looked on. All this proceeded
from Quasimodo. Egypt would have taken him for the
god of the temple ; the middle age believed him to be its
daemon : he was the soul of it. To such a point was he
so, that to those who knew that Quasimodo once existed
Notre- Dame now appears deserted, inanimate, dead. You
feel that there is something wanting. This immense body
is void ; it is a skeleton : the spirit has departed ; you see
its place, and that is all. It is like a scull : the sockets of
the eyes are still there, but the eyes themselves are gone.
CHAPTER IV.
THE DOG AND HIS MASTER.
There was, however, one human being whom Quasimodo
excepted from his antipathy, and to whom he was as much,
nay, perhaps more strongly attached than to his cathedral
that being was Claude Frollo.
The thing was perfectly natural. Claude Frollo had
taken pity on him, adopted him, supported him, brought
him up. It was between Claude Frollo's legs, that, when
quite small, he had been accustomed to seek refuge when
teased by boys or barked at by dogs. Claude Frollo had
taught him to speak, to read, to write. To crown all,Claude
Frollo had made him bell-ringer.
The gratitude of Quasimodo was in consequence pro-
found, impassioned, unbounded ; and though the counte-
nance of his foster-father was frequently gloomy and
morose, though his way of speaking was habitually short,
harsh, and imperious, never had this gratitude ceased for a
moment to sway him. The archdeacon had in Quasimodo
the most submissive of slaves, the most docile of attendants,
THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE-DAME. 147
the most vigilant of warders. After the poor bell-ringer
had lost his hearing, Claude Frollo and he conversed in a
language of signs, mysterious and understood by themselves
alone. Thus the archdeacon was the only human creature
with whom Quasimodo had kept up communication. There
were but two things in the world with which he still had
intercourse Notre-Dame and Claude Frollo.
Nothing on earth can be compared with the empire of
the archdeacon over the bell-ringer, and the attachment of
the bell-ringer to the archdeacon. A sign from Claude,
and the idea of giving him pleasure, would have sufficed to
make Quasimodo throw himself from the top of the towers
of Notre-Dame. It was truly extraordinary to see all that
physical strength, which had attained such a surprising
development in Quasimodo, placed implicitly by him at
the disposal of another. It bespoke undoubtedly filial sub-
mission, domestic attachment; but it proceeded also from the
fascination which mind exercises upon mind. It was an im-
perfect, distorted, defective organisation, with head abased and
supplicating eyes, before a superior, a lofty, a commanding,
intelligence : but, above all, it was gratitude but gratitude
so carried to its extreme limit that we know not what to
compare it with. This virtue is not one of those of which
the most striking examples are to be sought among men.
We shall therefore say that Quasimodo loved the arch-
deacon as never dog, never horse, never elephant, loved his
master.
In 1482 Quasimodo was about twenty, Claude Frollo
about thirty-six. The one had grown up, the other began
to grow old.
Claude Frollo was no longer the simple student of the
college of Torchi, the tender protector of an orphan child,
the young and thoughtful philosopher, so learned and yet
so ignorant. He was an austere, grave, morose, church-
man, second chaplain to the bishop, archdeacon of Josas,
having under him the two deaneries of Montlhery and
Chateaufort, and one hundred and seventy-four parish
priests. He was a sombre and awe-inspiring personage,
before whom trembled the singing boys in albs and long
coats, the precentors, the brothers of St. Augustin, the
h 2
148 THE HUiNCHBACK OF NOTRE-DAME.
clerk, who officiated in the morning services at Notre-
Dame, as he stalked slowly along beneath the lofty arches
of the choir, majestic, pensive, with arms folded and head
so bowed upon his besom that no part of his face was to
be seen but his bald and ample forehead.
Dom Claude Frollo, however, had not meanwhile aban-
doned either the sciences or the education of his young
brother, those two occupations of his life : but time had
dashed those fond pursuits with the bitterness of disappoint-
ment. Little Jehan Frollo, surnamed du Moulin, from the
place where he had been nursed, had not as he grew up
taken that bent which Claude was solicitous to give him.
His brother had reckoned upon a pious, docile, and virtuous
pupil ; but the youth, like those young trees, which in
spite of all the gardener's efforts, obstinately turn towards
the quarter from which they receive air and sun, grew and
flourished, and threw out luxuriant branches towards idle-
ness, ignorance, and debauchery alone. Reckless of all re-
straint, he was a downright devil, who often made Dom
Claude knit his brow, but full of shrewdness and drollery,
which as often made him laugh. Claude had placed him
in the same college of Torchi where he had passed his
early years in study and retirement ; and it was mortifying
to him that this sanctuary, formerly edified by the name of
Frollo, should now be scandalised by it. On this subject
he frequently read Jehan very severe and very long lectures,
to which the latter listened with exemplary composure.
After all, the young scapegrace had a good heart : when
the lecture was over, he nevertheless returned quietly to his
profligate courses. At one time it was a new-comer whom
he worried into the payment of his footing a precious
tradition which has been carefully handed down to the
present day ; at another he had instigated a party of the
students to make a classic attack upon some tavern, where,
after beating the keeper with bludgeons, they merrily gutted
the house, staving even the wine-pipes in the cellar. Then
again there would be a long report in Latin, which the
sub-monitor of Torchi carried in woful wise to Dom Claude
with this painful marginal annotation; Rixa; prima causa
tinum optimum potatum. Lastly it was asserted O hor-
THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE-DAME. 149
ror of horrors in a lad of sixteen ! that his excesses oft-
times carried him to the gaming-houses themselves.
Grieved and thwarted by these circumstances in his
human affections, Claude had thrown himself with so much
the more ardour into the arms of Science, who at least does
not laugh you in the face, and always repays you, though
spmetimes in rather hollow coin, for the attentions which
you have bestowed on her. Thus he became more and
more learned, and at the same time, by a natural conse-
quence, more and more rigid as a priest, more and more
gloomy as a man.
As Claude Frollo had from his youth travelled through
almost the entire circle of human knowledge, positive, ex-
ternal, and lawful, he was forced, unless he could make up
his mind to stop where he was, to seek further food for
the insatiable cravings of his understanding. The antique
symbol of the serpent biting its tail is peculiarly appropriate
to science ; and it appears that Claude Frollo knew this
from experience. Several grave persons affirmed that after
exhausting the fas of human knowledge he had dared to
penetrate into the nefas. He had, it was said, tasted suc-
cessively all the apples of the tree of knowledge, and had
at last bitten at the forbidden fruit. He had taken his place
by turns, as our readers have seen, at the conferences of the
theologians in the Sorbonne, at the meetings of the philo-
sophers at the image of St. Hilaire, at the disputes of the
decretists at the image of St. Martin, at the congregations
of the physicians at the holy- water font of Notre-Dame.
All the allowable and approved dishes which those four
great kitchens, called the four faculties, could elaborate and
set before the understanding, he had feasted upon, and
satiety had supervened before his hunger was appeased.
He had then dug further and deeper, beneath all that
finite, material, limited science ; he had perhaps risked his
soul, and had seated himself in the cavern at that mysteri-
ous table of the alchymists and astrologers, one end of
which is occupied in the middle ages by Averroes, William
of Paris, and Nicolas Flam el, while the other, lighted by
the chandelier with seven branches, runs on to Solomon,
l 3
1 50 THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE-DAME.
Pythagoras, and Zoroaster. So, at least, it was conjectured,
whether right or wrong.
It is certain that the archdeacon frequently visited
the churchyard of the Innocents, where, to be sure, his
parents lay buried with the other victims of the pestilence
of 1 466 ; but then he appeared to take much less notice of
the cross at the head of their grave than of the tomb
erected close by it for Nicolas Flamel and Claude Per-
nelle.
It is certain that he had often been seen walking along
the street of the Lombards and stealthily entering a small
house which formed the corner of the Rue des Ecrivains and
the Rue Marivaux. It was the house built by Nicolas Flamel,
in which he died about the year 1417, and which, having
been ever since uninhabited, was beginning to fall to ruin,
so worn were tjie walls by the alchymists and the profes-
sors of the occult science from all countries, who resorted
thither and scratched their names upon them. Some of the
neighbours even affirmed that they had once seen through
a hole the archdeacon digging and turning over the mould
in the two cellars, the jambs of which had been covered
with verses and hieroglyphics by Flamel himself. It was
supposed that Master Nicolas had buried the philosopher's
stone in one of these cellars ; and for two centuries the
alchymists, from Magistri to Father Pacifique, never ceased
delving and rummaging, till the house, weakened and under-
mined by their researches, at last tumbled about their ears.
It is certain, moreover, that the archdeacon was smitten
with a strange passion for the emblematic porch of Notre-
Dame, that page of conjuration written in stone by bishoo
^V r illiam of Paris, who has no doubt repented for having
prefixed so infernal a frontispiece to the sacred poem ever-
lastingly chanted by the rest of the edifice. It was also
believed that the archdeacon had discovered the hidden
meaning of the colossal St. Christopher, and of the other
tall enigmatical statue which then stood at the entrance of
the Parvis, and which the people called in derision Monsieur
Legris. But a circumstance which every body might have
remarked was his sitting hours without number on tha
parapet of the Parvis, contemplating the sculptures of the
THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE-DAME. 151
porch, sometimes examining the foolish virgins with their
lamps reversed, sometimes the wise virgins with their lamps
upright; at others calculating the angle of vision of the raven
On the left-hand side of the porch, looking at some mys-
terious spot in the church, where the philosopher's stone is
certainly concealed, if it is not in Nicolas Flamel's cellar.
It was, be it observed by the way, a singular destiny for
the church of Notre-Dame at that period to be thus loved
in different degrees and with such ardour by two beings so
dissimilar as Claude and Quasimodo loved by the one,
scarcely more than half-man, for its beauty, its majesty,
the harmonies resulting from its grand whole ; loved by
the other, with a mind cultivated to the utmost and a
glowing imagination, for its mystic signification, for its
hidden meaning, for the symbol concealed beneath the
sculptures of its facade, like the first text under the second
of a palimpsest, in short, for the riddle which it incessantly
proposes to the understanding.
Lastly, it is certain that the archdeacon had fitted up
for himself in the tower nearest to the Greve, close to the
belfry, a small and secret cell, which none, it was said,
but the bishop durst enter without his permission. This
cell had been made of old almost at the top of the tower,
among the ravens' nests, by bishop Hugo, of Besancon,
who had there practised the black art in his time. None
knew what that cell contained ; but from the Terrain
there had often been seen at night, through a small win-
dow at the back of the tower, a strange, red, intermitting
light, appearing, disappearing, and re-appearing at short
and equal intervals, apparently governed by the blast of
a bellows, and proceeding rather from the flame of a fire
than that of a lamp or candle. In the dark this had a
singular effect at that height, and the goodwives would
say : " There's the archdeacon puffing away again : hell
is crackling up yonder ! "
These, after all, were no very strong proofs of sorcery ;
still there was sufficient smoke to authorise the conclusion
that there must be some fire : at any rate the archdeacon
had that formidable reputation. It is nevertheless but
Just to state that the sciences of Egypt, necromancy, magic,
h 4,
152 THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE -DAME.
even the whitest and the most innocent, had not a more
inveterate enemy, a more pitiless accuser, before the of-
ficials of Notre- Dame. Whether this horror was sincere
or merely the game played by the rogue who is the first
to cry, " Stop thief ! " it did not prevent his being con-
sidered by the learned heads of the chapter as a soul lost
in the mazes of the Cabala, groping in the darkness of the
occult sciences, and already in the vestibule of hell. The
people held much the same opinion ; all who possessed
any sagacity regarded Quasimodo as the damon and
Claude Frollo as the conjuror. It was evident that the
bell-ringer had engaged to serve the archdeacon for a spe-
cific time, at the expiration of which he would be sure to
carry off his soul by way of payment. Accordingly the
archdeacon, in spite of the extreme austerity of his life,
was in bad odour with all good Christians, and there was
not a devout nose among them but could smell the magi-
cian.
And if, as he grew older, chasms were formed in his
science, neither had his heart remained free from them ;
at least there was good reason to believe so on surveying
that face in which the workings of his spirit were dis-
cernible only through a dark cloud. Whence was that
broad bald brow, that head always bent down, that bosom
for ever heaved by sighs ? What secret thought caused
his lips to smile with such a bitter expression, at the very
moment when his knitted brows approached one another
like two bulls preparing for the fight ? Why was the
remnant of his hair already grey ? What inward fire
was it that at times burst from his eyes, so as to make
them look like holes perforated in the wall of a furnace ?
These symptoms of a violent moral pre-occupation had
acquired an unusual degree of intensity at the period of
the occurrences related in this history. More than one of
the singing-boys had fled affrighted on meeting him alone
in the church, so strange and alarming were his looks.
More than once, during the service in the choir, the priest
in the next stall to his had heard him mingle unintelligible
parentheses with the responses. More than once the
laundress of the Terrain, employed to wash for the
THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE-DAME. 153
chapter, had observed, not without horror, marks as if
scratched by claws or finger-nails upon the surplice of
Monsieur the archdeacon of Josas.
In other respects his austerity was redoubled, and never
had he led a more exemplary life. From disposition as
well as profession he had always kept aloof from women :
he seemed now to dislike them more than ever. At the
mere rustling of a silk petticoat his hood was over his
eyes. On this point he was so strict that when the king's
daughter, the lady of Beaujeu, came in the month of De-
cember, 1481, to see the cloisters of Notre-Dame, he
seriously opposed her admission, reminding the bishop of
the statute of the black book, dated on the vigil of St.
Bartholomew, 1334, which forbids access to the cloister
to every woman ei whatsoever, whether old or young, mis-
tress or servant." Whereupon the bishop was forced to
appeal to the ordinance of Otho the legate, which excepts
" certain ladies of quality, who cannot be refused with-
out scandal" aliqutB magnates mulieres quce sine scandalo
evitari non possunt. Still the archdeacon protested, al-
leging that the ordinance of the legate, which dated from
1207> was anterior by one hundred and twenty-seven
years to the black book, and consequently annulled in point
of fact by the latter ; and he actually refused to appear
before the princess.
It was moreover remarked that his horror of the Egyp-
tians and Zingari seemed to have become more vehement
for some time past. He had solicited from the bishop an
edict expressly prohibiting the Bohemians to come and
dance and play in the area of the Parvis ; and he had
recently taken the pains to search through the musty ar-
chives of the official for cases of wizards and witches
sentenced to the flames or the gallows for practising the
black art in association with cats, swine, or goats.
154 THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRB-DAME.
BOOK V.
CHAPTER I.
ANCIENT ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE.
A very lucky wight was, in the year of grace 1482, that
doughty personage Robert d'Estouteville, knight, sieur of
Beyne, baron of Ivry and St. Andry in La Marche, coun-
cillor and chamberlain of the king, and keeper of the pro-
vosty of Paris. It was then nearly seventeen years agone
that the king had on the 7th of November 1465, the year
of the great comet *, conferred on him the important ap-
pointment of provost of Paris, which was considered rather
as a dignity than an office. It was a marvellous thing that
in 82 there should still be a gentleman holding a commission
under the king whose appointment dated from the time of
the marriage of the natural daughter of Louis XI. with
the Bastard of Bourbon. On the same day that Robert
d'Estouteville had succeeded Jacques de Villiers in the
provostship of Paris, Master Jean Dauvet superseded Messire
Helye de Thorrettes as first president of the court of par-
liament, Jean Jouvenal des Ursins supplanted Pierre de
Morvilliers in the office of chancellor of France, and
Regnault des Dormans turned Pierre Puy out of the post of
master of requests in ordinary to the king's household.
And how many presidents, chancellors, and masters, had
Robert d'Estouteville seen since he had held the provost-
ship of Paris ? It was " given to him to keep," said the
letters-patent, and well had he kept it forsooth. So closely
had he clung to it, so completely had he incorporated,
* This comet, against which Pope Calixtus ordered public prayers, is the
tame that will be again visible in 1835.
THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE-DAME. 155
identified himself with it, that he had escaped that mania
for changing his servants which possessed Louis XI., a
jealous, niggardly, and toiling sovereign, who thought to
keep up the elasticity of his power by frequent removals
and appointments. Nay more, the gallant knight had ob-
tained the reversion of his place for his son, and for two
years past the name of the noble Jacques d'Estouteville,
esquire, figured beside his own at the head of the register
of the ordinary of the provosty of Paris. Rare, indeed,
and signal favour ! It is true that Robert d'Estouteville
was a good soldier, that he had loyally raised the banner
against the league of the public welfare, and that he had
presented the queen with a most wonderful stag made of
sweetmeats, on the day of her entry into Paris. He was
moreover on terms of friendship with Messire Tristan the
Hermit, provost of the marshals of the king's household.
The situation of Messire Robert was, of course, rather
enviable. In the first place he enjoyed a handsome salary,
to which hung, like supernumerary bunches of grapes to
his vine, the revenues of the civil and criminal registries
of the provostship, and also the civil and criminal revenues
of the court of the Chatelet, to say nothing of the tolls col-
lected at the bridge of Mante and Corbeil, and other minor
perquisites. Add to this the pleasure of riding in the city
cavalcades and processions, and showing off among the
half-scarlet half-tawny robes of the city officers his fine
military armour, which you may still admire sculptured on
his tomb in the abbey of Valmont in Normandy, and his
morion embossed all over at Montlhery. And then, was it
nothing to have the entire supremacy over the keeper, the
warden, the gaoler, and the two auditors of the Chatelet,
the sixteen commissaries of the sixteen quarters, the hun-
dred and twenty horse-patrole, the hundred and twenty
vergers, and the whole of the watch of the city ? Was it
nothing to administer justice, civil and criminal, to have a
right to burn, to hang, to draw, besides the inferior juris-
diction " in the first instance," as the charters express it, in
that viscounty of Paris and the seven noble bailiwicks
thereto appertaining ? Can you conceive any thing more
gratifying than to issue orders and pass sentence, as Messire
156 THE HUNCHBACK 01? XOTRE-DAME.
Robert d'Estouteville daily did in the Grand Chatelet be-
neath the wide elliptic arches of Philip Augustus ? or to
go, as he was accustomed, every evening to that charming
house situate in the Rue Galilee, in the purlieus of the
Palais Royal, which he held in right of his wife Madame
Ambroise de Lore, to rest from the fatigue of having sent
some poor devil to pass the night in " that little lodge in
the Rue de l'Escorcherie, which the provosts and echevins
were wont to make their prison ; the. same being eleven
feet long, seven feet four inches in width, and eleven feet
high."
Not only had Messire Robert d'Estouteville his particular
court as provost and viscount of Paris, but he had also a
finger in the infliction of the sentences decreed by the king
himself. There was not a head of any distinction but
passed through his hands before it was delivered up to the
executioner. It was he who fetched the duke de Nemours
from the Bastille St. Antoine to convey him to the Halles,
and M. de St. Pol, who, on his way to the Greve, exclaimed
loudly and bitterly against his fate, to the great delight of
the provost, who was no friend to the constable.
Here certes were reasons more than sufficient to make a
man satisfied with his life, and yet on the morning of
January 7th, 1482, Messire Robert d'Estouteville awoke
in a dogged ill-humour. And the cause of this ill-humour
he would have been puzzled to tell himself. Was it be-
cause the sky was gloomy ? Did his old belt of Montlhery
constrict with too military a pressure his provostship's
goodly corporation ? Had he seen a troop of ragamuffins
in doublets without shirts, in hats without crowns, with
wallet and flask at their side, passing along the street under
his window, and setting him at defiance ? Was it that
vague presentiment of the three hundred and seventy livres,
sixteen sols, eight deniers, of which the future king Charles
VIII. in the following year docked the revenues of the
provostship ? The reader has his choice ; for our own
parts we are inclined to believe that he was in an ill-humour
merely because he was in an ill-humour.
Besides, it was the morrow of a public festivity, a day
of annoyance to every body, and more especially to the
THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE-DAME. 157
magistrate whose duty it was to clear away all the filth,
material and figurative, made by a fete at Paris. And
then, too, he had to sit for the trial of offenders at the
Grand Chatelet. Now we have remarked that judges in
general arrange matters so that the days on which they
have to perform their judicial functions are their days of
ill-humour, that they may be sure to have somebody on
whom they can conveniently vent it in the name of the
king, of the law, and of justice.
Meanwhile the proceedings had commenced without him.
His deputies did the business for him, according to custom:
and ever since the hour of eight in the morning some
scores of citizens of both sexes, crowded into a dark corner
of the court of the Chatelet, between a strong oaken bar-