And if, as he grew old, there were voids in his science, there were others in his heart. At least, so one was led to believe on looking at that face in which his soul never shone forth save through a dark cloud. Whence came that broad bald brow, that head forever bowed, that breast forever heaved by sighs? What secret thought made his lips smile so bitterly at the very moment that his frowning brows met like two bulls about to tussle? Why were his few remaining hairs already grey? What was that inward fire which sometimes broke forth in his eye to such a degree that it looked like a hole pierced in the wall of a furnace?
These signs of intense moral preoccupation had acquired a high pitch of intensity at the very time of this story. More than once a choir-boy had taken to his heels in alarm on finding him alone in the church, so strange and wild was his look. More than once, in the choir, during divine service, his neighbor in the stalls had heard him mingle unintelligible parentheses with the church music. More than once the laundress of the Terrain, employed “to wash the chapter,” had remarked, not without terror, marks of nails and clinched fingers in the surplice of the archdeacon of Josas.
In other respects he redoubled his severity, and had never been more exemplary. From disposition as well as by profession he had always held himself aloof from women; he seemed now to hate them more than ever. The mere rustle of a silk petticoat made him pull his hood over his eyes. He was so jealous of his austerity and reserve upon this point that when Madame de Beaujeu, daughter of the king, came, in the month of December, 1481, to visit the convent of Notre-Dame, he gravely opposed her entrance, reminding the bishop of that statute in the Black Book, dated on the eve of St. Bartholomew, 1334, which forbids all access to the cloister to every woman “whatsoever, old or young, mistress or maid;” upon which the bishop was constrained to quote to him the ordinance of the legate Odo, which excepts certain great ladies, “aliqu? magnates mulieres, qu? sine scandalo vitari non possunt.”bn And the archdeacon still protested, objecting that the legate’s decree, which went back to 1207, antedated the Black Book by one hundred and twenty-seven years, and was consequently annulled by it; and he refused to appear before the princess.
It was moreover remarked that his horror of the gipsies seemed to have increased for some time past. He had solicited from the bishop an edict expressly forbidding the tribe from coming to dance and play the tambourine in the square before the cathedral; and he had also searched the musty official papers, to collect all cases of witches and wizards condemned to be burned or hanged for complicity in witchcraft with goats, swine, or rams.
CHAPTER VI
Unpopularity
The archdeacon and the bell-ringer, as we have already observed, were not held in much favor by the great and little folk about the cathedral. When Claude and Quasimodo went forth together, as they frequently did, and were seen in company, the man behind the master, traversing the cool, narrow, shady streets about Notre-Dame, more than one malicious speech, more than one satirical exclamation and insulting jest, stung them as they passed, unless Claude Frollo, though this was rare, walked with head erect, displaying his stern and almost majestic brow to the abashed scoffers.
Both were in their district like the “poets” of whom Régnier speaks:— “All sorts of folks will after poets run,
As after owls song-birds shriek and fly.”
Now a sly brat would risk his bones for the ineffable delight of burying a pin in Quasimodo’s hump: and now a lovely young girl, full of fun, and bolder than need be, would brush against the priest’s black gown, singing in his ear the sarcastic song,— “Hide, hide, for the devil is caught.”
Sometimes a squalid group of old women, squatting in a row in the shade upon the steps of some porch, scolded roundly as the archdeacon and the bell-ringer went by, and flung after them with curses this encouraging greeting: “Well, one of them has a soul as misshapen as the other one’s body!” Or else it would be a band of students and beetle-crushersbo playing at hop-scotch, who jumped up in a body and hailed them in classic fashion with some Latin whoop and hoot: “Eia! eia! Claudius cum Claudo!”bp
But usually all insults were unheeded by both priest and ringer. Quasimodo was too deaf and Claude too great a dreamer to hear them.
BOOK V
CHAPTER I
Abbas Beati Martini bq
Dom Claude’s renown had spread far and wide. It procured him, at about the period when he refused to see Madame de Beaujeu, the honor of a visit which he long remembered.
It was on a certain evening. He had just retired after divine service to his canonic cell in the convent of Notre-Dame. This apartment, aside from a few glass phials banished to a corner, and full of somewhat suspicious powder, which looked vastly like gunpowder, contained nothing strange or mysterious. There were inscriptions here and there upon the walls, but they were merely scientific statements, or pious extracts from well-known authors. The archdeacon had just seated himself, by the light of a three-beaked copper lamp, before a huge chest covered with manuscripts. His elbow rested on a wide-open book by Honorius d‘Autun, “De Pr?destinatione et libero arbitrio,”br and he was very meditatively turning the leaves of a printed folio which he had brought upstairs with him,—the only product of the press which his cell contained. In the midst of his reverie there was a knock at the door. “Who is there?” cried the sage in the gracious tone of a hungry dog disturbed while eating his bone.