Victor Marie Hugo (1802–1885). Notre Dame de Paris.
The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction. 1917.
V. Quasimodo
I
In an instant the chapel was filled with competitors, and the doors closed upon them.
From his place on the platform Coppenole ordered everything, directed everything, arranged everything. During the hubbub, and pretexting vespers and other affairs of importance, the Cardinal, no less disconcerted than Gringoire, retired with his whole suite, and the crowd, which had evinced so lively an interest in his arrival, was wholly unmoved by his departure. Guillaume Rym alone noticed the rout of his Eminence.
Popular attention, like the sun, pursued its even course. Starting at one end of the Hall, it remained stationary for a time in the middle, and was now at the other end. The marble table, the brocade-covered platform, had had their day; now it was the turn of the Chapel of Louis XI. The field was clear for every sort of folly; the Flemings and the rabble were masters of the situation.
The pulling of faces began. The first to appear in the opening—eye-lids turned inside out, the gaping mouth of a ravening beast, the brow creased and wrinkled like the hussar boots of the Empire period—was greeted with such a roar of inextinguishable laughter that Homer would have taken all these ragamuffins for gods.
Nevertheless, the great Hall was anything rather than Olympus, as Gringoire’s poor Jupiter knew to his cost. A second, a third distortion followed, to be succeeded by another and another; and with each one the laughter redoubled, and the crowd stamped and roared its delight. There was in the whole scene a peculiar frenzy, a certain indescribable sense of intoxication and fascination almost impossible to convey to the reader of our times and social habits.
Picture to yourself a series of faces representing successively every geometrical form, from the triangle to the trapezium, from the cone to the polyhedron; every human expression, from rage to lewdness; every stage of life, from the creases of the newly born to the wrinkles of hoary age; every phantasm of mythology and religion, from Faunus to Beelzebub; every animal head, from the buffalo to the eagle. from the shark to the bulldog. Conceive all the grotesques of the Pont-Neuf, those nightmares turned to stone under the hand of Germain Pilon, inspired with the breath of life, and rising up one by one to stare you in the face with gleaming eyes; all the masks of the Carnival of Venice passing in procession before you—in a word, a human kaleidoscope.
The orgy became more and more Flemish. Tenniers himself could have given but a feeble idea of it; a Salvator Rosa battle-piece treated as a bacchic feast would be nearer the mark. There were no longer scholars, ambassadors, burghers, men or women; neither Clopin Trouillefou nor Gilles Lecornu nor Marie Quatrelivres nor Robin Poussepain. The individual was swallowed up in the universal license. The great Hall was simply one vast furnace of effrontery and unbridled mirth, in which every mouth was a yell, every countenance a grimace, every individual a posture. The whole mass shrieked and bellowed. Every new visage that came grinning and gnashing to the window was fresh fuel to the furnace. And from this seething multitude, like steam from a caldron, there rose a hum—shrill, piercing, sibilant, as from a vast swarm of gnats.
“Oh! oh! malediction!”
“Oh, look at that face!”
“That’s no good.”
“Show us another.”
“Guillemette Maugrepuis, look at that ox-muzzle. It only wants horns. It can’t be thy husband.”
“The next!”
“Ventre du pape! What sort of a face do you call that?”
“Holà there—that’s cheating! no more than the face is to be shown!”
“Is that Perette Callebotte?—devil take her—it’s just what she would do!”
“Noël! Noël!”
“I shall choke!”
“Here’s one whose ears won’t come through.”
And so on, and so on.
To do our friend Jehan justice, however, he was still visible in the midst of the pandemonium, high up on his pillar like a ship’s boy in the mizzen, gesticulating like a maniac, his mouth wide open and emitting sounds that nobody heard; not because they were drowned by the all-pervading clamour, terrific as it was, but because doubtless they had reached the limit at which shrill sounds are audible—the twelve thousand vibrations of Sauveur, or the eight thousand of Biot.
As to Gringoire, the first moment of depression over, he had regained his self-possession, had stiffened his back against adversity.
“Go on,” said he for the third time to his players. “Go on, you speaking machines,” and proceeded to pace with long strides in front of the marble table. At one moment he was seized with the desire to go and present himself at the round window, if only for the gratification of pulling a face at this thankless crowd. “But no,” he said to himself, “that would be beneath our dignity—no vengeance. We will fight on to the end. The power of poetry over the people is great. I shall yet regain my hold. We shall see which will win the day, belles-lettres or grimaces.”
Alas! he was the sole spectator of his piece.
No, I am wrong. The big, patient man, whom he had already consulted at a critical moment, still faced the stage. As to Gisquette and Liénarde, they had long since deserted him.
Touched to the heart by the stanchness of this audience of one, Gringoire went up to him and accosted him, shaking him gently by the arm, for the good man was leaning against the balustrade dozing comfortably.
“Sir,” said Gringoire, “I thank you.”
“Sir,” returned the big man with a yawn, “for what?”
“I see the cause of your annoyance,” resumed the poet. “This infernal din prevents your listening in comfort. But never fear, your name shall go down to posterity. Your name, if I may ask?”
“Renault Château, Keeper of the Seal of the Châtelet of Paris, at your service.”
“Sir, you are the sole representative of the Muses,” said Gringoire.
“You are too good, sir,” replied the Keeper of the Seal of Châtelet.
“The one person who has paid suitable attention to the piece. What do you think of it?”
“H’m, h’m,” replied the big official drowsily. “Really quite entertaining.”
Gringoire had to be content with this faint praise, for the conversation was abruptly cut short by a thunder of applause mingled with shouts of acclamation. The Fools had elected their Pope.
“Noël! Noël! Noël!” roared the crowd from all sides.
In truth, the grimace that beamed through the broken rose-window at this moment was nothing short of miraculous. After all the faces—pentagonal, hexagonal, and heteroclite—which had succeeded each other in the stone frame, without realizing the grotesque ideal set up by the inflamed popular imagination, nothing inferior to the supreme effort now dazzling the spectators would have sufficed to carry every vote. Master Coppenole himself applauded, and Clopin Trouillefou, who had competed—and Lord knows to what heights his ugliness could attain—had to own himself defeated. We will do likewise, nor attempt to convey to the reader a conception of that tetrahedral nose, that horse-shoe mouth, of that small left eye obscured by a red and bristling brow, while the right disappeared entirely under a monstrous wart, of those uneven teeth, with breaches here and there like the crenated walls of a fortress, of that horny lip over which one of the teeth projected like an elephant’s tusk, of that cloven chin, nor, above all, of the expression overlying the whole—an indefinable mixture of malice, bewilderment, and sadness. Picture such an ensemble to yourself if you can.
There was not a single dissentient voice. They rushed to the Chapel and in triumph dragged forth the thrice lucky Pope of Fools. Then surprise and admiration reached the culminating point—he had but shown his natural countenance.
Rather, let us say, his whole person was a grimace. An enormous head covered with red bristles; between the shoulders a great hump balanced by one in front; a system of thighs and legs so curiously misplaced that they only touched at the knees, and, viewed from the front, appeared like two sickles joined at the handles; huge splay feet, monstrous hands, and, with all this deformity, a nameless impression of formidable strength, agility, and courage—strange exception to the eternal rule, which decrees that strength, like beauty, shall be the outcome of harmony.
Such was he whom the Fools had chosen for their Pope. He looked like a giant broken and badly repaired.
The moment this species of Cyclops appeared in the doorway of the Chapel, standing motionless, squat, almost as broad as he was long, squared by the base, as a great man has described it, he was instantly recognised by his party-coloured coat, half red, half violet, sprinkled with little silver bells, and above all, by the perfection of his ugliness.
“’Tis Quasimodo the bell-ringer!” shouted the people with one voice; “Quasimodo the Hunchback of Notre Dame! Quasimodo the one-eyed! Quasimodo the bandy-legged! Noël! Noël!”
The poor devil had evidently a large stock of nicknames to choose from.
“Let all pregnant women beware!” cried the scholars.
“Or those that wish to be!” added Joannes.
And in effect the women hastily covered their faces.
“Oh, the hideous ape!” exclaimed one.
“And as wicked as he is ugly,” returned another.
“’Tis the devil himself,” added a third.
“I am unlucky enough to live near Notre Dame. I hear him scrambling about the leads all night.”
“With the cats.”
“He’s forever on our roofs.”
“He casts spells at us down our chimneys.”
“The other night he came and made faces at me through my sky-light window. I though it was a man. What a fright I got.”
“I am certain he goes to the witches’ Sabbath. He once left a broom on my leads.”
“Oh, his horrid hunchback’s face!”
“Oh, the wicked creature!”
“Fie upon him!”
On the other hand, the men were enchanted and applauded vociferously.
Meanwhile Quasimodo, the object of all this uproar, stood grave and unmoved in the doorway of the Chapel, and suffered himself to be admired. One of the scholars, Robin Poussepain I think it was, came up and laughed in his face—somewhat too close. Without a word Quasimodo seized him by the belt and tossed him into the crowd full ten paces off.
“God’s cross! Holy Father!” exclaimed Master Coppenole in amazement. “Yours is the rarest ugliness I have over beheld in all my born days. You deserve to be Pope of Rome, as well as of Paris.” And so saying, he clapped a jovial hand on the hunchback’s shoulder.
Quasimodo did not stir. “Now here’s a fellow,” continued Coppenole, “I have a mind to dine with, even if it cost me a new douzain of twelve livres tournois. What say you?”
Quasimodo made no reply.
“Croix-Dieu!” cried the hosier, “art deaf?”
As a matter of fact he was deaf.
However, he began to be annoyed by Coppenole’s manner, and suddenly turned upon him with such a snarl that the Flemish giant recoiled like a bulldog before a cat.
The result of this was that a circle of terror and respect, with a radius of at least fifteen geometric paces, was formed around the alarming personage.
An old woman explained to Master Coppenole that Quasimodo was deaf.
“Deaf?” cried the hosier with his great Flemish guffaw; “Croix-Dieu! then he’s every inch a Pope!”
“Why, I know him!” exclaimed Jehan, who by this time had clambered down from his pillar to examine the hunchback more closely. “It’s my brother the Archdeacon’s bellringer. Good-day, Quasimodo.”
“The man’s a devil,” growled Robin Poussepain, still giddy from his fall. “He shows himself, and you discover he is a hunchback; he walks, and he is bow-legged; he looks at you, and he has only one eye; you speak to him, and he is deaf. Why, what does this Polyphemus do with his tongue?”
“He can speak when he likes,” said the old woman. “He is deaf from the bell-ringing; he is not dumb.”
“That’s all that’s wanting to make him perfect,” remarked Jehan.
“And he has an eye too many.”
“Not at all,” said Jehan judicially; “a one-eyed man is more incomplete than a blind one, for he is conscious of what he lacks.”
Meanwhile all the beggars, all the lackeys, all the cutpurses, had tacked themselves on to the scholars, and gone in procession to the wardrobe of the Basoche to fetch the pasteboard tiara and the mock robe reserved for the Fools’ Pope, with which Quasimodo permitted himself to be invested without turning a hair, and with a sort of proud docility. They then seated him on a chair, twelve officers of the Fraternity of Fools lifted him on their shoulders, and a gleam of bitter and disdainful satisfaction lit up the morose face of the Cyclops as he saw the heads of all these fine, strong, straight-limbed men beneath his misshapen feet.
Then the whole bellowing, tattered crew set itself in motion to make the customary round of the interior galleries of the Palais, before marching through the streets and byways of the city.