Hunchback of Notre Dame (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (24 page)

I
t was some sixteen years previous to the date of this story, on a fine morning of the first Sunday after Easter, known in France as Quasimodo Sunday, that a living creature was laid, after Mass, in the Church of Notre-Dame, upon the bedstead fixed in the square outside, to the left of the entrance, opposite that “great image” of Saint Christopher, which the carven stone figure of Master Antoine des Essarts, knight, had contemplated on his knees until the year 1413, when it was thought proper to pull down both saint and believer. Upon this bed it was customary to expose foundlings to public charity. Whoever chose to take them, did so. In front of the bedstead was a copper basin for alms.

The sort of living creature lying on the board upon this Sunday morning, in the year of our Lord 1467, seemed to excite in a high degree the curiosity of the somewhat numerous group of people who had gathered around the bed. This group was largely composed of members of the fair sex. They were almost all old women.

In the foremost rank, and bending over the bed, were four who by their grey hoods and gowns seemed to belong to some religious community. I know no reason why history should not hand down to posterity the names of these four discreet and venerable dames. They were Agnès la Herme, Jehanne de la Tarme, Henriette la Gaultière, and Gauchère la Violette, all four widows, all four good women from the Etienne Haudry Chapel, who had come out for the day by their superior’s permission, and conformably to the statutes of Pierre d‘Ailly, to hear the sermon.

However, if these worthy Haudriettes were, for the time being, obeying the statutes of Pierre d‘Ailly, they were certainly wilfully violating those of Michel de Brache and the Cardinal of Pisa, which so barbarously condemned them to silence.

“What on earth is it, sister?” said Agnès to Gauchère, gazing at the little foundling as it shrieked and writhed upon its bed, terrified by so many observers.

“What is the world coming to,” said Jehanne, “if that is the way the children look nowadays?”

“I don’t know much about children,” added Agnès; “but it must surely be a sin to look at this thing.”

“It’s no child, Agnès.”

“It’s a deformed monkey,” remarked Gauchère.

“It’s a miracle,” continued Henriette la Gaultière.

“Then,” observed Agnès, “it’s the third since Lætare Sunday; for it’s not a week since we had the miracle of the mocker of pilgrims divinely punished by Our Lady of Aubervilliers, and that was the second miracle of the month.”

“This foundling, as they call it, is a regular monster of abomination,” added Jehanne.

“He howls fit to deafen a chorister,” said Gauchère. “Will you hold your tongue, you little screamer!”

“To think that the Bishop of Rheims should send this monstrosity to the Bishop of Paris,” went on La Gaultière, clasping her hands.

“I believe,” said Agnès la Herme, “that it’s a beast, an animal, a cross between a Jew and a pig; something, in fact, which is not Christian, and should be burned or drowned.”

“I’m sure I hope,” exclaimed La Gaultière, “that no one will offer to take it.”

“Oh, good gracious!” cried Agnès, “I pity those poor nurses in the Foundling Hospital at the end of the lane, as you go down to the river, just next door to his lordship the bishop, if this little monster is given to them to suckle. I’d rather nurse a vampire.”

“What a simpleton you are, poor La Herme!” cried Jehanne; “don’t you see, sister, that this little wretch is at least four years old, and that he would have less appetite for your breast than for a piece of roast meat.”

In fact, “the little monster” (for we ourselves should find it hard to describe him otherwise) was no new-born baby. He was a very bony and very uneasy little bundle, tied up in a linen bag marked with the monogram of M. Guillaume Chartier, then Bishop of Paris, with a head protruding from one end. This head was a most misshapen thing; there was nothing to be seen of it but a shock of red hair, an eye, a mouth, and teeth. The eye wept, the mouth shrieked, and the teeth seemed only waiting a chance to bite. The whole body kicked and struggled in the bag, to the amazement of the crowd, which grew larger and changed continually around it.

Dame Aloïse de Gondelaurier, a rich and noble lady, leading a pretty girl of some six years by the hand, and trailing a long veil from the golden horn of her headdress, stopped as she passed the bed, and glanced for an instant at the miserable creature, while her lovely little daughter Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier, arrayed in silk and velvet, spelled out with her pretty little finger the permanent inscription fastened to the bedstead “For Foundlings.”

“Really,” said the lady, turning away in disgust, “I thought they only put children here!”

She turned her back, throwing into the basin a silver coin which jingled loudly among the copper pence, and made the four good women from the Etienne Haudry Home stare.

A moment later, the grave and learned Robert Mistricolle, prothonotary to the king, passed with a huge missal under one arm and his wife under the other (Damoiselle Guillemette la Mairesse), being thus armed on either hand with his spiritual and his temporal advisers.

“A foundling,” said he, after examination, “found apparently on the shores of the river Phlegethon!”

“It sees with but one eye,” remarked Damoiselle Guillemette; “there is a wart over the other.”

“That is no wart,” replied Master Robert Mistricolle; “that is an egg which holds just such another demon, who also bears another little egg containing another demon, and so on
ad infinitum.”

“How do you know?” asked Guillemette la Mairesse.

“I know it for very good reasons,” answered the prothonotary.

“Mr. Prothonotary,” inquired Gauchère la Violette, “what do you predict from this pretended foundling?”

“The greatest misfortunes,” replied Mistricolle.

“Ah, good heavens!” said an old woman in the audience; “no wonder we had such a great plague last year, and that they say the English are going to land at Harfleur!”

“Perhaps it will prevent the queen from coming to Paris in September,” added another; “and trade ’s so bad already!”

“It is my opinion,” cried Jehanne de la Tarme, “that it would be better for the people of Paris if this little sorcerer here were laid on a fagot rather than a board.”

“A fine flaming fagot!” added the old woman.

“That would be more prudent,” said Mistricolle.

For some moments a young priest had been listening to the arguments of the Haudriettes and the sententious decrees of the prothonotary. His was a stern face, with a broad brow and penetrating eye. He silently put aside the crowd, examined the “little sorcerer,” and stretched his hand over him. It was high time; for all the godly old women were already licking their lips at the thought of the “fine flaming fagot.”

“I adopt this child,” said the priest.

He wrapped it in his cassock and bore it away. The spectators looked after him with frightened eyes. A moment later he had vanished through the Porte Rouge, which then led from the church to the cloisters.

When their first surprise was over, Jehanne de la Tarme whispered in La Gaultière’s ear,—

“I always told you, sister, that that young scholar Monsieur Claude Frollo was a wizard.”

Indeed, Claude Frollo was no ordinary character. He belonged to one of those middle-class families called indifferently, in the impertinent language of the last century, the better class of citizens, or petty nobility. This family had inherited from the brothers Paclet the estate of Tirechappe, which was held of the Bishop of Paris, and the twenty-one houses belonging to which had been the subject of so many suits before the judge of the bishop’s court during the thirteenth century. As holder of this fief, Claude Frollo was one of the one hundred and forty-one lords and nobles claiming memorial dues in Paris and its suburbs; and his name was long to be seen inscribed, in that capacity, between those of the Hotel de Tancarville, belonging to Master François le Rez, and the College of Tours, in the cartulary deposited for safe keeping at Saint-Martin des Champs.

Claude Frollo had from early childhood been destined by his parents to enter the ranks of the clergy. He was taught to read in Latin; he was trained to look down and speak low. While still very young his father put him at the convent School of Torchi in the University. There he grew up on the missal and the lexicon.

He was moreover a sad, serious, sober child, who loved study and learned quickly. He never shouted at play, took little part in the riotous frolics of the Rue du Fouarre, knew not what it was to
“dare alapas et capillos laniare,”
^bc
and had no share in the mutiny of 1463, which historians gravely set down as the “sixth disturbance at the University.” It seldom occurred to him to tease the poor scholars of Montaigu about their capotes,—the little hoods from which they took their name,—or the bursars of the College of Dormans about their smooth tonsure, and their motley garb of grey, blue, and violet cloth,
“azurini coloris et bruni,”
as the charter of Cardinal des Quatre-Couronnes words it.

But, on the other hand, he was faithful to the great and little schools in the Rue Saint-Jean de Beauvais. The first scholar to be seen by the Abbot of Saint-Pierre de Val, as he began his lecture on canon law, was always Claude Frollo, glued to a column in the Saint-Vendregesile School, directly opposite the speaker’s chair, armed with his inkhorn, chewing his pen, scribbling on his threadbare knee, and in winter blowing on his fingers to keep them warm. The first auditor whom Master Miles d‘Isliers, doctor of decretals, saw hurrying up all out of breath every Monday morning at the opening of the doors of the Chef-Saint-Denis School, was Claude Frollo. Accordingly, at the age of sixteen the young scholar was quite able to argue matters of mystical theology with a father of the Church, of canonical theology with a father of the Councils, and of scholastic theology with a doctor of the Sorbonne.

Theology mastered, he plunged into decretals. After the “Master of Sentences,” he fell upon the “Capitularies of Charlemagne;” and devoured in turn, in his appetite for knowledge, decretal after decretal,—those of Theodore, Bishop of Hispala; those of Bouchard, Bishop of Worms; those of Yves, Bishop of Chartres; then the decree of Gratian, which followed the “Capitularies of Charlemagne;” then the collection of Gregory IX; then the epistle
“Super Specula,”
of Honorius III. He gained a clear idea of, he became familiar with, that vast and bewildering period when civil law and canon law were struggling and laboring amid the chaos of the Middle Ages,—a period beginning with Bishop Theodore in 618, and ending with Pope Gregory in 1227.

Decretals digested, he turned to medicine and the liberal arts. He studied the science of herbs, the science of salves; he became skilled in fevers and bruises, in wounds and sores. Jacques d‘Espars would have given him the degree of doctor of medicine; Richard Hellain, that of surgeon. He also took all the degrees in all the other arts. He studied languages, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew,—a triple shrine then but little worshipped. His was a genuine thirst for acquiring and treasuring the facts of science. At eighteen, he had done with the four faculties; life seemed to the youth to have but one purpose,—to gain knowledge.

It was about this time that the excessive heat of the summer of 1466 caused an epidemic of the plague, which carried off more than forty thousand souls in the viscounty of Paris, and among others, says Jehan de Troyes, “Master Arnoul, astrologian to the king, who was a very virtuous, wise, and pleasant man.” A rumor spread through the University that the Rue Tirechappe was especially subject to the disease. There Claude’s parents lived, in the heart of their estate. The young scholar hastened in alarm to the paternal mansion. On entering, he found that his father and mother had died the night before. A baby brother was still living, and lay crying in his cradle. He was all that was left to Claude of his family. The youth took the child in his arms and walked thoughtfully away. Hitherto, he had lived for science only; he now began to live in the present.

This catastrophe marked a turning point in his existence. An orphan, the eldest, the head of a family at the age of nineteen, he was rudely recalled from scholastic dreams to actual realities. Then, moved by pity, he was filled with love and devotion for this child, his brother; and human affection was a strange sweet thing to him who had loved nothing but books before.

This affection grew to a singular degree; in so virgin a soul it was like a first love. Parted in infancy from his parents, whom he scarcely knew, cloistered and as it were immured among his books, eager to study and to learn everything, hitherto paying exclusive attention to his intellect, which delighted in literature, the poor student had had no time to learn that he had a heart. This little fatherless, motherless brother, this baby dropped unawares from heaven into his arms, made a new man of him. He saw that there were other things in the world than the speculations of the Sorbonne and the verses of Homer; that man required affection; that life without tenderness and without love was only a noisy, miserable, unfeeling machine. Only he fancied—for he was at the age when illusions are still replaced by illusions only—that the ties of family and kindred were all that was necessary, and that a little brother to love was enough to fill up a whole life.

He therefore yielded to his love for little Jehan with the passion of a character which was already energetic, ardent, and concentrated. The poor frail creature, a pretty, fair-haired, rosy, curly-locked child, an orphan with none to look to for support but another orphan, stirred him to the very soul; and like the serious thinker that he was, he began to meditate about Jehan with infinite compassion. He thought and cared for him as for something very fragile and very precious. He was more than a brother to the boy; he became a mother to him.