MORE ABOUT CLAUDE FROLLO.

In 1482, Quasimodo was about twenty years of age; Claude Frollo, about thirty-six.

One had grown up, the other had grown old.

Claude Frollo was no longer the simple scholar of the college of Torch, the tender

protector of a little child, the young and dreamy philosopher who knew many things and

was ignorant of many.

He was a priest, austere, grave, morose; one charged with souls; monsieur the

archdeacon of Josas, the bishop's second acolyte, having charge of the two deaneries

of Montlhery, and Chateaufort, and one hundred and seventy-four country curacies.

He was an imposing and sombre personage, before whom the choir boys in alb and in

jacket trembled, as well as the machicots, and the brothers of Saint-Augustine and the

matutinal clerks of Notre-Dame, when he

passed slowly beneath the lofty arches of the choir, majestic, thoughtful, with arms

folded and his head so bent upon his breast that all one saw of his face was his large,

bald brow.

Dom Claude Frollo had, however, abandoned neither science nor the education of his

young brother, those two occupations of his life.

But as time went on, some bitterness had been mingled with these things which were

so sweet. In the long run, says Paul Diacre, the best

lard turns rancid.

Little Jehan Frollo, surnamed (du Moulin) "of the Mill" because of the place where he

had been reared, had not grown up in the direction which Claude would have liked to

impose upon him.

The big brother counted upon a pious, docile, learned, and honorable pupil.

But the little brother, like those young trees which deceive the gardener's hopes

and turn obstinately to the quarter whence they receive sun and air, the little

brother did not grow and did not multiply,

but only put forth fine bushy and luxuriant branches on the side of laziness,

ignorance, and debauchery.

He was a regular devil, and a very disorderly one, who made Dom Claude scowl;

but very droll and very subtle, which made the big brother smile.

Claude had confided him to that same college of Torchi where he had passed his

early years in study and meditation; and it was a grief to him that this sanctuary,

formerly edified by the name of Frollo, should to-day be scandalized by it.

He sometimes preached Jehan very long and severe sermons, which the latter intrepidly

endured.

After all, the young scapegrace had a good heart, as can be seen in all comedies.

But the sermon over, he none the less tranquilly resumed his course of seditions

and enormities.

Now it was a bejaune or yellow beak (as they called the new arrivals at the

university), whom he had been mauling by way of welcome; a precious tradition which

has been carefully preserved to our own day.

Again, he had set in movement a band of scholars, who had flung themselves upon a

wine-shop in classic fashion, quasi classico excitati, had then beaten the

tavern-keeper "with offensive cudgels," and

joyously pillaged the tavern, even to smashing in the hogsheads of wine in the

cellar.

And then it was a fine report in Latin, which the sub-monitor of Torchi carried

piteously to Dom Claude with this dolorous marginal comment,--Rixa; prima causa vinum

optimum potatum.

Finally, it was said, a thing quite horrible in a boy of sixteen, that his

debauchery often extended as far as the Rue de Glatigny.

Claude, saddened and discouraged in his human affections, by all this, had flung

himself eagerly into the arms of learning, that sister which, at least does not laugh

in your face, and which always pays you,

though in money that is sometimes a little hollow, for the attention which you have

paid to her.

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.

As Claude Frollo had passed through nearly the entire circle of human learning--

positive, exterior, and permissible--since his youth, he was obliged, unless he came

to a halt, ubi defuit orbis, to proceed

further and seek other aliments for the insatiable activity of his intelligence.

The antique symbol of the serpent biting its tail is, above all, applicable to

science.

It would appear that Claude Frollo had experienced this.

Many grave persons affirm that, after having exhausted the fas of human learning,

he had dared to penetrate into the nefas.

He had, they said, tasted in succession all the apples of the tree of knowledge, and,

whether from hunger or disgust, had ended by tasting the forbidden fruit.

He had taken his place by turns, as the reader has seen, in the conferences of the

theologians in Sorbonne,--in the assemblies of the doctors of art, after the manner of

Saint-Hilaire,--in the disputes of the

decretalists, after the manner of Saint- Martin,--in the congregations of physicians

at the holy water font of Notre-Dame, ad cupam Nostroe-Dominoe.

All the dishes permitted and approved, which those four great kitchens called the

four faculties could elaborate and serve to the understanding, he had devoured, and had

been satiated with them before his hunger was appeased.

Then he had penetrated further, lower, beneath all that finished, material,

limited knowledge; he had, perhaps, risked his soul, and had seated himself in the

cavern at that mysterious table of the

alchemists, of the astrologers, of the hermetics, of which Averroes, Gillaume de

Paris, and Nicolas Flamel hold the end in the Middle Ages; and which extends in the

East, by the light of the seven-branched

candlestick, to Solomon, Pythagoras, and Zoroaster.

That is, at least, what was supposed, whether rightly or not.

It is certain that the archdeacon often visited the cemetery of the Saints-

Innocents, where, it is true, his father and mother had been buried, with other

victims of the plague of 1466; but that he

appeared far less devout before the cross of their grave than before the strange

figures with which the tomb of Nicolas Flamel and Claude Pernelle, erected just

beside it, was loaded.

It is certain that he had frequently been seen to pass along the Rue des Lombards,

and furtively enter a little house which formed the corner of the Rue des Ecrivans

and the Rue Marivault.

It was the house which Nicolas Flamel had built, where he had died about 1417, and

which, constantly deserted since that time, had already begun to fall in ruins,--so

greatly had the hermetics and the

alchemists of all countries wasted away the walls, merely by carving their names upon

them.

Some neighbors even affirm that they had once seen, through an air-hole, Archdeacon

Claude excavating, turning over, digging up the earth in the two cellars, whose

supports had been daubed with numberless

couplets and hieroglyphics by Nicolas Flamel himself.

It was supposed that Flamel had buried the philosopher's stone in the cellar; and the

alchemists, for the space of two centuries, from Magistri to Father Pacifique, never

ceased to worry the soil until the house,

so cruelly ransacked and turned over, ended by falling into dust beneath their feet.

Again, it is certain that the archdeacon had been seized with a singular passion for

the symbolical door of Notre-Dame, that page of a conjuring book written in stone,

by Bishop Guillaume de Paris, who has, no

doubt, been damned for having affixed so infernal a frontispiece to the sacred poem

chanted by the rest of the edifice.

Archdeacon Claude had the credit also of having fathomed the mystery of the colossus

of Saint Christopher, and of that lofty, enigmatical statue which then stood at the

entrance of the vestibule, and which the

people, in derision, called "Monsieur Legris."

But, what every one might have noticed was the interminable hours which he often

employed, seated upon the parapet of the area in front of the church, in

contemplating the sculptures of the front;

examining now the foolish virgins with their lamps reversed, now the wise virgins

with their lamps upright; again, calculating the angle of vision of that

raven which belongs to the left front, and

which is looking at a mysterious point inside the church, where is concealed the

philosopher's stone, if it be not in the cellar of Nicolas Flamel.

It was, let us remark in passing, a singular fate for the Church of Notre-Dame

at that epoch to be so beloved, in two different degrees, and with so much

devotion, by two beings so dissimilar as Claude and Quasimodo.

Beloved by one, a sort of instinctive and savage half-man, for its beauty, for its

stature, for the harmonies which emanated from its magnificent ensemble; beloved by

the other, a learned and passionate

imagination, for its myth, for the sense which it contains, for the symbolism

scattered beneath the sculptures of its front,--like the first text underneath the

second in a palimpsest,--in a word, for the

enigma which it is eternally propounding to the understanding.

Furthermore, it is certain that the archdeacon had established himself in that

one of the two towers which looks upon the Greve, just beside the frame for the bells,

a very secret little cell, into which no

one, not even the bishop, entered without his leave, it was said.

This tiny cell had formerly been made almost at the summit of the tower, among

the ravens' nests, by Bishop Hugo de Besancon who had wrought sorcery there in

his day.

What that cell contained, no one knew; but from the strand of the Terrain, at night,

there was often seen to appear, disappear, and reappear at brief and regular

intervals, at a little dormer window

opening upon the back of the tower, a certain red, intermittent, singular light

which seemed to follow the panting breaths of a bellows, and to proceed from a flame,

rather than from a light.

In the darkness, at that height, it produced a singular effect; and the

goodwives said: "There's the archdeacon blowing! hell is sparkling up yonder!"

.

There were no great proofs of sorcery in that, after all, but there was still enough

smoke to warrant a surmise of fire, and the archdeacon bore a tolerably formidable

reputation.

We ought to mention however, that the sciences of Egypt, that necromancy and

magic, even the whitest, even the most innocent, had no more envenomed enemy, no

more pitiless denunciator before the gentlemen of the officialty of Notre-Dame.

Whether this was sincere horror, or the game played by the thief who shouts, "stop

thief!" at all events, it did not prevent the archdeacon from being considered by the

learned heads of the chapter, as a soul who

had ventured into the vestibule of hell, who was lost in the caves of the cabal,

groping amid the shadows of the occult sciences.

Neither were the people deceived thereby; with any one who possessed any sagacity,

Quasimodo passed for the demon; Claude Frollo, for the sorcerer.

It was evident that the bellringer was to serve the archdeacon for a given time, at

the end of which he would carry away the latter's soul, by way of payment.

Thus the archdeacon, in spite of the excessive austerity of his life, was in bad

odor among all pious souls; and there was no devout nose so inexperienced that it

could not smell him out to be a magician.

And if, as he grew older, abysses had formed in his science, they had also formed

in his heart.

That at least, is what one had grounds for believing on scrutinizing that face upon

which the soul was only seen to shine through a sombre cloud.

Whence that large, bald brow? that head forever bent? that breast always heaving

with sighs?

What secret thought caused his mouth to smile with so much bitterness, at the same

moment that his scowling brows approached each other like two bulls on the point of

fighting?

Why was what hair he had left already gray? What was that internal fire which sometimes

broke forth in his glance, to such a degree that his eye resembled a hole pierced in

the wall of a furnace?

These symptoms of a violent moral preoccupation, had acquired an especially

high degree of intensity at the epoch when this story takes place.

More than once a choir-boy had fled in terror at finding him alone in the church,

so strange and dazzling was his look.

More than once, in the choir, at the hour of the offices, his neighbor in the stalls

had heard him mingle with the plain song, ad omnem tonum, unintelligible parentheses.

More than once the laundress of the Terrain charged "with washing the chapter" had

observed, not without affright, the marks of nails and clenched fingers on the

surplice of monsieur the archdeacon of Josas.

However, he redoubled his severity, and had never been more exemplary.

By profession as well as by character, he had always held himself aloof from women;

he seemed to hate them more than ever. The mere rustling of a silken petticoat

caused his hood to fall over his eyes.

Upon this score he was so jealous of austerity and reserve, that when the Dame

de Beaujeu, the king's daughter, came to visit the cloister of Notre-Dame, in the

month of December, 1481, he gravely opposed