He looked like a giant broken to pieces and badly cemented together.
When this species of Cyclop appeared upon the threshold of the chapel, motionless, thickset, almost as broad as he was long, “the square of his base,” as a great man once expressed it, the people recognized him instantly, by his party-colored red and purple coat spangled with silver, and particularly by the perfection of his ugliness, and cried aloud with one voice:— “It is Quasimodo, the bell-ringer! It is Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre-Dame! Quasimodo, the one-eyed! Quasimodo, the bandy-legged! Noel! No?l!”
The poor devil evidently had an abundance of nicknames to choose from.
“Let all pregnant women beware!” cried the students.
“Or all those who hope to be so,” added Joannes.
In fact, the women hid their faces.
“Oh, the ugly monkey!” said one of them.
“As wicked as he is ugly,” added another.
“He’s the very devil,” added a third.
“I am unlucky enough to live near Notre-Dame. I hear him prowling among the gutters by night.”
“With the cats.”
“He’s always on our roofs.”
“He casts spells upon us through the chimneys.”
“The other evening he came and pulled a face at me through the window. I thought it was a man. He gave me such a fright!”
“I’m sure he attends the Witches’ Sabbath. Once he left a broomstick on my leads.”
“Oh, what a disagreeable hunchback’s face he has!”
“Oh, the villainous creature!”
“Faugh!”
The men, on the contrary, were charmed, and applauded.
Quasimodo, the object of this uproar, still stood at the chapel door, sad and serious, letting himself be admired.
A student （Robin Poussepain, I think） laughed in his very face, and somewhat too close. Quasimodo merely took him by the belt and cast him ten paces away through the crowd; all without uttering a word.
Master Coppenole, lost in wonder, approached him.
“By God’s cross and the Holy Father! you are the most lovely monster that I ever saw in my life. You deserve to be pope of Rome as well as of Paris.”
So saying, he laid his hand sportively upon his shoulder. Quasimodo never budged. Coppenole continued:— “You’re a rascal with whom I have a longing to feast, were it to cost me a new douzain of twelve pounds Tours. What say you?”
Quasimodo made no answer.
“By God’s cross!” said the hosier, “you’re not deaf, are you?”
He was indeed deaf.
Still, he began to lose his temper at Coppenole’s proceedings, and turned suddenly towards him, gnashing his teeth so savagely that the Flemish giant recoiled, like a bull-dog before a cat.
Then a circle of terror and respect, whose radius was not less than fifteen geometric paces, was formed about the strange character. An old woman explained to Master Coppenole that Quasimodo was deaf.
“Deaf!” said the hosier, with his hearty Flemish laugh. “By God’s cross! but he is a perfect pope!”
“Ha! I know him now,” cried Jehan, who had at last descended from his capital to view Quasimodo more closely; “it’s my brother the archdeacon’s bell-ringer. Good-day, Quasimodo!”
“What a devil of a fellow!” said Robin Poussepain, still aching from his fall. “He appears: he’s a hunchback; he walks: he’s bandy-legged; he looks at you: he is blind of one eye; you talk to him: he is deaf. By the way, what use does this Polyphemus make of his tongue?”
“He talks when he likes,” said the old woman; “he grew deaf from ringing the bells. He is not dumb.”
“That’s all he lacks,” remarked Jehan.
“And he has one eye too many,” said Robin Poussepain.
“Not at all,” judiciously observed Jehan. “A one-eyed man is far more incomplete than a blind one. He knows what he lacks.”
But all the beggars, all the lackeys, all the cutpurses, together with the students, had gone in procession to fetch, from the storeroom of the basoche, the pasteboard tiara and mock robes of the Pope of Fools. Quasimodo submitted to be arrayed in them without a frown, and with a sort of proud docility. Then he was seated upon a barrow painted in motley colors. Twelve officers of the fraternity of fools raised it to their shoulders; and a sort of bitter, scornful joy dawned upon the morose face of the Cyclop when he saw beneath his shapeless feet the heads of so many handsome, straight, and well-made men. Then the howling, tatterdemalion train set out, as was the custom, to make the tour of the galleries within the Palace before parading the streets and public squares.