The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

by Victor Hugo

he was completely absorbed in that species of ecstatic contemplation with which an author beholds his ideas fall, one by one, from the mouth of the actor into the vast silence of the audience.

He had made up his mind about the tumult, and was determined to proceed to the end, not giving up the hope of a return of attention on the part of the public. This gleam of hope acquired fresh life, when he saw Quasimodo, Coppenole, and the deafening escort of the pope of the procession of fools quit the hall amid great uproar. The throng rushed eagerly after them. “Good,” he said to himself, “there go all the mischief-makers.” Unfortunately, all the mischief-makers constituted the entire audience. In the twinkling of an eye, the grand hall was empty.

You know no other daisies [marguerites] than those which your April greensward gives your cows to browse upon; while I, a poet, am hooted, and shiver, and owe twelve sous, and the soles of my shoes are so transparent, that they might serve as glasses for your lantern! Thanks, ferryman, your cabin rests my eyes, and makes me forget Paris!”

And he accepted seriously all this ironical applause, all this derisive respect, with which the crowd mingled, it must be admitted, a good deal of very real fear. For the hunchback was robust; for the bandy-legged fellow was agile; for the deaf man was malicious: three qualities which temper ridicule.

The law which you apply to vagabonds, vagabonds apply to you. ’Tis your fault if it is harsh.

One really must behold the grimace of an honest man above the hempen collar now and then; that renders the thing honorable.

“Willing is not all,” said the surly Clopin; “good will doesn’t put one onion the more into the soup, and ’tis good for nothing except to go to paradise with; now, paradise and the thieves’ band are two different things. In order to be received among the thieves,14 you must prove that you are good for something, and for that purpose, you must search the manikin.”

“One moment!” said he; “I forgot! It is our custom not to hang a man without inquiring whether there is any woman who wants him. Comrade, this is your last resource. You must wed either a female vagabond or the noose.”

Gringoire breathed again. This was the second time that he had returned to life within an hour. So he did not dare to trust to it too implicitly.

“Do you know what friendship is?” he asked. “Yes,” replied the gypsy; “it is to be brother and sister; two souls which touch without mingling, two fingers on one hand.”

“Oh! love!” said she, and her voice trembled, and her eye beamed. “That is to be two and to be but one. A man and a woman mingled into one angel. It is heaven.”

I perceived at the end of a certain time, that I lacked something in every direction; and seeing that I was good for nothing, of my own free will I became a poet and rhymester. That is a trade which one can always adopt when one is a vagabond, and it’s better than stealing, as some young brigands of my acquaintance advised me to do.

Tempus edax, homo edacior18; which I should be glad to translate thus: time is blind, man is stupid.

Time is a devourer; man, more so.

This central mother church is, among the ancient churches of Paris, a sort of chimera; it has the head of one, the limbs of another, the haunches of another, something of all.

The trunk of a tree is immovable; the foliage is capricious.

the king only lets go when the people tear away.

It is with the roofs of a capital as with the waves of the sea,—they are grand.

Up to that moment, he had lived only in science; he now began to live in life.

He perceived that there was something else in the world besides the speculations of the Sorbonne, and the verses of Homer; that man needed affections; that life without tenderness and without love was only a set of dry, shrieking, and rending wheels.

He baptized his adopted child, and gave him the name of Quasimodo, either because he desired thereby to mark the day, when he had found him, or because he wished to designate by that name to what a degree the poor little creature was incomplete, and hardly sketched out. In fact, Quasimodo, blind, hunchbacked, knock-kneed, was only an “almost.”

What he loved above all else in the maternal edifice, that which aroused his soul, and made it open its poor wings, which it kept so miserably folded in its cavern, that which sometimes rendered him even happy, was the bells. He loved them, fondled them, talked to them, understood them. From the chime in the spire, over the intersection of the aisles and nave, to the great bell of the front, he cherished a tenderness for them all. The central spire and the two towers were to him as three great cages, whose birds, reared by himself, sang for him alone. Yet it was these very bells which had made him deaf; but mothers often love best that child which has caused them the most suffering.

Egypt would have taken him for the god of this temple; the Middle Ages believed him to be its demon: he was in fact its soul.

To such an extent was this disease that for those who know that Quasimodo has existed, Notre-Dame is to-day deserted, inanimate, dead. One feels that something has disappeared from it. That immense body is empty; it is a skeleton; the spirit has quitted it, one sees its place and that is all. It is like a skull which still has holes for the eyes, but no longer sight.

Hence, he became more and more learned, and, at the same time, as a natural consequence, more and more rigid as a priest, more and more sad as a man. There are for each of us several parallelisms between our intelligence, our habits, and our character, which develop without a break, and break only in the great disturbances of life.

Again, a young girl, more bold and saucy than was fitting, brushed the priest’s black robe, singing in his face the sardonic ditty, “Niche, niche, the devil is caught.”

“Hum! there’s a fellow whose soul is made like the other one’s body!”

But the insult generally passed unnoticed both by the priest and the bellringer. Quasimodo was too deaf to hear all these gracious things, and Claude was too dreamy.

There then ensued between the physician and the Archdeacon one of those congratulatory prologues which, in accordance with custom, at that epoch preceded all conversations between learned men, and which did not prevent them from detesting each other in the most cordial manner in the world. However, it is the same nowadays; every wise man’s mouth complimenting another wise man is a vase of honeyed gall.

Claude Frollo’s felicitations to Jacques Coictier bore reference principally to the temporal advantages which the worthy physician had found means to extract, in the course of his much envied career, from each malady of the king, an operation of alchemy much better and more certain than the pursuit of the philosopher’s stone.

“Medicine is the daughter of dreams.—JAMBLIQUE.”

“Listen, Messire Jacques. This is said in good faith. I am not the king’s physician, and his majesty has not given me the Garden of Dædalus in which to observe the constellations.

It was a presentiment that human thought, in changing its form, was about to change its mode of expression; that the dominant idea of each generation would no longer be written with the same matter, and in the same manner; that the book of stone, so solid and so durable, was about to make way for the book of paper, more solid and still more durable.

The first monuments were simple masses of rock, “which the iron had not touched,” as Moses says.

Moses said that in the Book of Exodus, chapter 20, verse 251. He was talking about the instructions that God gave him for building an altar of stones for worship. God told Moses that the stones should not be cut or shaped by tools, because that would defile them. God wanted the altar to be made of natural and uncut stones, as a sign of reverence and humility2. 1: Exodus 20:25 | New International Version | Bible Gateway 2: Exodus 20:25 Commentary - John Gill’s Exposition of the Bible From Bing.

We find the “standing stones” of the Celts in Asian Siberia; in the pampas of America.

The whole human race is on the scaffoldings. Each mind is a mason.

It is the second tower of Babel of the human race.

In neither case did the honor of the magistracy sustain any injury; for it is far better that a judge should be reputed imbecile or profound than deaf. Hence he took great care to conceal his deafness from the eyes of all, and he generally succeeded so well that he had reached the point of deluding himself, which is, by the way, easier than is supposed.

Having, then, thoroughly ruminated Quasimodo’s affair, he threw back his head and half closed his eyes, for the sake of more majesty and impartiality, so that, at that moment, he was both deaf and blind. A double condition, without which no judge is perfect.

Those women of love require either a lover or a child to fill their hearts. Otherwise, they are very unhappy. As she could not have a lover, she turned wholly towards a desire for a child, and as she had not ceased to be pious, she made her constant prayer to the good God for it.

was like the arrival of a Saviour, which the unhappy man was greeting. But as soon as the mule was near enough to the pillory to allow of its rider recognizing the victim, the priest dropped his eyes, beat a hasty retreat, spurred on rigorously, as though in haste to rid himself of humiliating appeals, and not at all desirous of being saluted and recognized by a poor fellow in such a predicament. This priest was Archdeacon Dom Claude Frollo.

Quasimodo’s eyes sparkled. It was the gypsy whom he had attempted to carry off on the preceding night, a misdeed for which he was dimly conscious that he was being punished at that very moment; which was not in the least the case, since he was being chastised only for the misfortune of being deaf, and of having been judged by a deaf man. He doubted not that she had come to wreak her vengeance also, and to deal her blow like the rest.

The sun, which Dubartas, that classic ancestor of periphrase, had not yet dubbed the “Grand Duke of Candles,” was none the less radiant and joyous on that account.

The noble damsels were dazzled by her in spite of themselves. Each one felt herself, in some sort, wounded in her beauty. Hence, their battle front (may we be allowed the expression) was immediately altered, although they exchanged not a single word. But they understood each other perfectly.

So he took the liberty of carrying you off, as though you were made for beadles! ’Tis too much. What the devil did that screech owl want with you? Hey, tell me!” “I do not know,” she replied. “The inconceivable impudence! A bellringer carrying off a wench, like a vicomte! a lout poaching on the game of gentlemen!

“Corne-de-bœuf! here’s pity as well placed as a feather in a pig’s tail!

I presume that this hole is jointly inhabited by bats and spiders, and that, consequently, it wages a double war of extermination on the flies.)

Civilization has not yet arrived at the point where one can go stark naked, as ancient Diogenes wished.

But what would you have, messire? One must eat every day, and the finest Alexandrine verses are not worth a bit of Brie cheese.

After all, concedo, I grant that it is a sad employment for my intellectual faculties, and that man is not made to pass his life in beating the tambourine and biting chairs. But, reverend master, it is not sufficient to pass one’s life, one must earn the means for life.”

She wears on her neck an amulet which, it is affirmed, will cause her to meet her parents some day, but which will lose its virtue if the young girl loses hers. Hence it follows that both of us remain very virtuous.”