From The Hunchback of Notre Dame - anthology. French romantic writer Victor Hugo's novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831, trans. 1833), set in medieval Paris, tells the story of Quasimodo, a hunchback who is reviled for his ugliness. Quasimodo was left as an infant in the care of the oppressive Archdeacon Claude Frollo. The following selection describes Quasimodo's existence among the bells and statues of Notre Dame Cathedral's bell tower where he lives. From The Hunchback of Notre Dame By Victor Hugo CHAPTER III The Bell-Ringer of Notre-Dame Now, by the year 1482 Quasimodo had grown up. He had been for several years bell-ringer to the cathedral of Notre-Dame, thanks to his foster-father, Claude Frollo, who had become Archdeacon of Josas, thanks to his diocesan, Messire Louis de Beaumont, who had been appointed Bishop of Paris in 1472, thanks to his patron Olivier le Daim, barber to Louis XI, by the Grace of God, King, etc. etc. etc. In process of time a curious attachment grew up between the bellringer and the church. Cut off for ever from society by the double fatality of his unknown parentage and his distorted form, imprisoned from childhood within these impassable boundaries, the poor fellow was accustomed to see no object in the world beyond the religious walls which had taken him under their protection. Notre-Dame had been successively, to him, as he grew up and expanded, his egg, his nest, his home, his country, the universe. A sort of mysterious and pre-existent harmony had grown up between this creature and the edifice. While still quite a child he crawled about, twisting and hopping in the shade of its arches, he appeared, with his human face and his limbs scarcely human, a native reptile of that dark damp pavement, among the grotesque shadows thrown down upon it by the capitals of the Roman pillars. As he grew up the first time that he mechanically grasped the rope in the tower, and, hanging to it, set the bell in motion, the effect upon his foster-father was like that produced upon a parent by the first articulate sounds uttered by his child. Thus, by little and little, his spirit expanded in harmony with the cathedral; there he lived, there he slept; scarcely ever leaving it, and, being perpetually subject to its mysterious influence, he came at last to resemble it, to be encrusted with it, to form, as it were, an integral part of it. His salient angles dovetailed, if we may be allowed the expression, into the receding angles of the building, so that he seemed to be not merely its inhabitant, but to have taken its form and pressure. Between the ancient church and him there were an instinctive sympathy so profound, and so many magnetic affinities, that he stuck to it in some measure as the tortoise to its shell. It is scarcely necessary to say how familiar he had made himself with the whole cathedral in so long and so intimate a cohabitation. There was no depth that Quasimodo had not fathomed, no height that he had not scaled. Many a time had he climbed up the façade composed of several elevations, assisted only by the projections of the sculpture. Often might he have been seen crawling up the outside of the towers, like a lizard up a perpendicular wall: those twin giants, so tall, so threatening, so formidable, produced in him neither vertigo, fright, nor sudden giddiness. So gentle did they appear under his hand, and so easy to climb that you would have said he had tamed them. Be dint of leaping, scrambling, gliding, struggling, among the precipices of the venerable cathedral, he had become something between a monkey and a mountain goat, just as the boy of Calabria swims before he can walk, and makes the sea his playfellow. Not the person only but also the mind of Quasimodo appeared to be moulded by the cathedral. What manner of soul was his? What line had it acquired, what form had it received, within its gnarled envelope, in the course of his fantastic life? Quasimodo was born one-eyed, humpbacked, lame. It was not without great difficulty and great patience that Claude Frollo had taught him to speak; but there was a fatality attached to the unhappy foundling. Having become ringer of the bells of NotreDame at the age of fourteen, a fresh infirmity had come upon him: the volume of sound had broken the drum of his ear, and deafness was the consequence. Thus the only gate which nature had left wide open between him and the world was suddenly closed, and for ever. In closing, it shut out the only ray of light and joy that still reached his soul, which was now wrapped in profound darkness. The melancholy of the poor fellow became incurable and complete as his deformity. His deafness rendered him in some measure dumb also: for the moment he lost his hearing, he resolved to avoid the ridicule of others by a silence which he never broke but when he was alone. He voluntarily tied up that tongue, which Claude Frollo had taken such pains to loosen: hence, when necessity forced him to speak, his tongue was benumbed, awkward, and like a door the hinges of which have grown rusty. If then we were to attempt to penetrate through this thick and obdurate bark to the soul of Quasimodo; if we could sound the depths of this bungling piece of organization; if we were enabled to hold a torch behind these untransparent organs, to explore the gloomy interior of this opaque being, to illumine its obscure corners and its unmeaning cul-de-sacs, and to throw all at once a brilliant light upon the spirit enchained at the bottom of this den; we should doubtless find the wretch in some miserable attitude, stunted and rickety, like the prisoners under the leads of Venice, who grow old, doubled up in a box of stone, too low to stand up and too short to lie down in. It is certain that the spirit pines in a misshapen form. Quasimodo scarcely felt within him the blind movements of a soul made in his own image. The impressions of objects underwent a considerable refraction before they reached the seat of thought. His brain was a peculiar medium: the ideas which entered it came out quite twisted. The reflection resulting from this refraction was necessarily divergent and devious. Hence a thousand optical illusions, a thousand aberrations of judgment, a thousand byways into which his sometimes silly, sometimes crazy, imagination would wander. The first effect of this vicious organization was to confuse the view which he took of things. He received scarcely a single direct perception. The exterior world appeared to him at a greater distance than it does to us. The second result of his misfortune was that it rendered him mischievous. He was, in truth, mischievous because he was savage; he was savage because he was ugly. There was logic in his nature, as there is in ours. His strength, developed in a most extraordinary manner, was another cause of his propensity to mischief. Malus puer robustus, says Hobbes. We must nevertheless do him justice: malice was probably not innate in him. From his earliest intercourse with men he had felt, and afterward he had seen, himself despised, rejected, cast off. Human speech had never been to him aught but a jeer or a curse. As he grew up he had found nothing but hatred about him. He had adopted it. He had acquired the general malignity. He had picked up the weapon with which he had been wounded. After all, he turned toward mankind with reluctance: his cathedral was enough for him. It was peopled with figures of marble, with kings, saints, bishops, who at least did not laugh in his face, and looked upon him only with an air of tranquillity and benevolence. The other statues, those of monsters and demons, bore no malice against him. They were too like him for that. Their raillery was rather directed against other men. The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and guarded him; he would therefore pass whole hours crouched before one of these statues, and holding solitary converse with it. If anyone came by he would run off like a lover surprised in a serenade. The cathedral was not only his society but his world--in short, all nature to him. He dreamed of no other trees than the painted windows, which were always in blossom; of no other shades than the foliage of stone adorned with birds in the Saxon capitals; of no other mountains than the colossal towers of the church; of no other ocean than Paris which roared at their feet. But that which he loved most of all in the maternal edifice, that which awakened his soul and caused it to spread its poor wings, otherwise so miserably folded up in its prison, that which even gave him at times a feeling of happiness, was the bells. He loved them, he caressed them, he talked to them, he understood them--from the chimes in the steeple of the transept to the great bell above the porch. The belfry of the transept and the two towers were like three immense cages, in which the birds that he had reared sang for him alone. It was these same birds, however, which had deafened him: but mothers are often fondest of the child which has caused them the greatest pain. It is true that theirs were the only voices he could still hear. On this account the great bell was his best beloved. He preferred her before all the other sisters of this noisy family, who fluttered about him on festival days. The name of this great bell was Mary. She was placed in the southern tower, along with her sister Jacqueline, a bell of inferior size, enclosed in a cage of less magnitude by the side of her own. This Jacqueline was called after the wife of Jehan Montague, who gave her to the church; a gift which, however, did not prevent his losing his head at Montfaucon. In the second tower were six other bells; and, lastly, the six smallest dwelt in the steeple of the transept, with the wooden bell, which was only rung between noon on Holy Thursday and the morning of Easter Eve. Thus Quasimodo had fifteen bells in his seraglio, but big Mary was his favourite. It is impossible to form a conception of his joy on the days of the great peals. The instant the Archdeacon let him off, and said 'Go,' he ran up the winding staircase of the belfry quicker than another could have gone down. He hurried, out of breath, into the aerial chamber of the great bell, looked at her attentively and lovingly for a moment; then began to talk kindly to her, and patted her with his hand, as you would do a good horse which you are going to put on his mettle. He would pity her for the labour she was about to undergo. After these first caresses he shouted to his assistants in a lower story of the tower to begin. They seized the ropes, the windlass creaked, and slowly and heavily the enormous cone of metal was set in motion. Quasimodo, with heaving bosom, watched the movement. The first shock of the clapper against the wall of brass shook the woodwork upon which it was hung. Quasimodo vibrated with the bell. 'Vah!' he would cry, with a burst of idiot laughter. Meanwhile the motion of the bell was accelerated, and as the angle which it described became more and more obtuse the eye of Quasimodo glistened and shone out with a more phosphoric light. At length the grand peal began: the whole tower trembled; rafters, leads, stones, all groaned together, from the piles of the foundation to the trefoils of the parapet. Quasimodo then boiled over with delight; he foamed at the mouth; he ran backward and forward; he trembled with the tower from head to foot. The great bell, let loose, and, as it were, furious with rage, turned its enormous throat first to one side and then to the other side of the tower, and thence issued a roar that might be heard four leagues round. Quasimodo placed himself before this open mouth; he crouched down and rose up, as the bell swung to and fro, inhaled its boisterous breath, and looked by turns at the abyss two hundred feet deep below him, and at the enormous tongue of brass which came ever and anon to bellow in his ear. This was the only speech that he could hear, the only sound that broke the universal silence to which he was doomed. He would spread himself out in it like a bird in the sun. All at once the frenzy of the bell would seize him; his look became wild; he would watch the rocking engine, as a spider watches a fly, and suddenly leap upon it. Then, suspended over the abyss, carried to and fro in the formidable oscillation of the bell, he seized the brazen monster by the earlets, strained it with his knees, sparred it with his heels, and with the whole weight and force of his body increased the fury of the peal. While the tower began to quake he would shout and grind his teeth, his red hair bristled up, his breast heaved and puffed like the bellows of a forge, his eye flashed fire, and the monstrous bell neighed breathless under him. It was then no longer the bell of Notre-Dame and Quasimodo: it was a dream, a whirlwind, a tempest, vertigo astride of uproar; a spirit clinging to a winged monster; a strange centaur, half man, half bell; a species of horrible Astolpho, carried of by a prodigious hippogriff of living brass. The presence of this extraordinary being seemed to infuse the breath of life into the whole cathedral. A sort of mysterious emanation seemed--at least so the superstitious multitude imagined--to issue from him, to animate the stones of Notre-Dame, and to make the very entrails of the old church heave and palpitate. When it was known that he was there it was easy to fancy that the thousand statues in the galleries and over the porches moved and were instinct with life. In fact, the cathedral seemed to be a docile and obedient creature in his hands; waiting only his will to raise her mighty voice; being possessed and filled with Quasimodo as with a familiar genius. He might be said to make the immense building breathe. He was, in fact, everywhere; he multiplied himself at all the points of the edifice. At one time the spectator would be seized with affright, on beholding at the top of one of the towers an odd-looking dwarf, climbing, twining, crawling on all fours, descending externally into the abyss, leaping from one projecting point to another, and fumbling in the body of some sculptured Gorgon: it was Quasimodo unnesting the crows. At another, the visitor stumbled, in some dark corner of the church, upon a crouching, grim-faced creature, a sort of living chimera--it was Quasimodo musing. At another time might be seen under a belfry an enormous head and a bundle of ill-adjusted limbs furiously swinging at the end of a rope--it was Quasimodo ringing the vespers or the angelus. Frequently, at night, a hideous figure might be seen wandering on the delicate open-work balustrade which crowns the towers and runs round the apsis--it was still the hunchback of Notre-Dame. At such time, according to the reports of the gossips of the neighbourhood, the whole church assumed a fantastic, supernatural, frightful aspect; eyes and mouths opened here and there; the dogs, and the dragons, and the griffins of stone, which keep watch day and night with outstretched neck and open jaws round the monstrous cathedral, were heard to bark and howl. At Christmas, while the great bell, which seemed to rattle in the throat, summoned the pious to the midnight Mass, the gloomy façade 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 Ages believed him to be its demon: he was the soul of it. To such a point was he so that to those who knew that Quasimodo once existed NotreDame 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 skull: the sockets of the eyes are still there, but the eyes themselves are gone. Source: Hugo, Victor. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. New York: Random House, 1941.
