Part 26

The sort of living being which lay upon that plank on the morning of Quasimodo, in the year of the Lord, 1467, appeared to excite to a high degree, the curiosity of the numerous group which had congregated about the wooden bed. The group was formed for the most part of the fair sex. Hardly any one was there except old women. In the first row, and among those who were most bent over the bed, four were noticeable, who, from their gray _cagoule_, a sort of cassock, were recognizable as attached to some devout sisterhood. I do not see why history has not transmitted to posterity the names of these four discreet and venerable damsels. They were Agnès la Herme, Jehanne de la Tarme, Henriette la Gaultière, Gauchère la Violette, all four widows, all four dames of the Chapel Étienne Haudry, who had quitted their house with the permission of their mistress, and in conformity with the statutes of Pierre d’Ailly, in order to come and hear the sermon. However, if these good Haudriettes were, for the moment, complying with the statutes of Pierre d’Ailly, they certainly violated with joy those of Michel de Brache, and the Cardinal of Pisa, which so inhumanly enjoined silence upon them. “What is this, sister?” said Agnès to Gauchère, gazing at the little creature exposed, which was screaming and writhing on the wooden bed, terrified by so many glances. “What is to become of us,” said Jehanne, “if that is the way children are made now?” “I’m not learned in the matter of children,” resumed Agnès, “but it must be a sin to look at this one.” “’Tis not a child, Agnès.” “’Tis an abortion of a monkey,” remarked Gauchère. “’Tis a miracle,” interposed Henriette la Gaultière. “Then,” remarked Agnès, “it is the third since the Sunday of the _Lætare_: for, in less than a week, we had the miracle of the mocker of pilgrims divinely punished by Notre-Dame d’Aubervilliers, and that was the second miracle within a month.” “This pretended foundling is a real monster of abomination,” resumed Jehanne. “He yells loud enough to deafen a chanter,” continued Gauchère. “Hold your tongue, you little howler!” “To think that Monsieur of Reims sent this enormity to Monsieur of Paris,” added la Gaultière, clasping her hands. “I imagine,” said Agnès la Herme, “that it is a beast, an animal,—the fruit of a Jew and a sow; something not Christian, in short, which ought to be thrown into the fire or into the water.” “I really hope,” resumed la Gaultière, “that nobody will apply for it.” “Ah, good heavens!” exclaimed Agnès; “those poor nurses yonder in the foundling asylum, which forms the lower end of the lane as you go to the river, just beside Monseigneur the bishop! what if this little monster were to be carried to them to suckle? I’d rather give suck to a vampire.” “How innocent that poor la Herme is!” resumed Jehanne; “don’t you see, sister, that this little monster is at least four years old, and that he would have less appetite for your breast than for a turnspit.” The “little monster” we should find it difficult ourselves to describe him otherwise, was, in fact, not a new-born child. It was a very angular and very lively little mass, imprisoned in its linen sack, stamped with the cipher of Messire Guillaume Chartier, then bishop of Paris, with a head projecting. That head was deformed enough; one beheld only a forest of red hair, one eye, a mouth, and teeth. The eye wept, the mouth cried, and the teeth seemed to ask only to be allowed to bite. The whole struggled in the sack, to the great consternation of the crowd, which increased and was renewed incessantly around it. Dame Aloïse de Gondelaurier, a rich and noble woman, who held by the hand a pretty girl about five or six years of age, and dragged a long veil about, suspended to the golden horn of her headdress, halted as she passed the wooden bed, and gazed for a moment at the wretched creature, while her charming little daughter, Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier, spelled out with her tiny, pretty finger, the permanent inscription attached to the wooden bed: “Foundlings.” “Really,” said the dame, turning away in disgust, “I thought that they only exposed children here.” She turned her back, throwing into the basin a silver florin, which rang among the liards, and made the poor goodwives of the chapel of Étienne Haudry open their eyes. A moment later, the grave and learned Robert Mistricolle, the king’s protonotary, passed, with an enormous missal under one arm and his wife on the other (Damoiselle Guillemette la Mairesse), having thus by his side his two regulators,—spiritual and temporal. “Foundling!” he said, after examining the object; “found, apparently, on the banks of the river Phlegethon.” “One can only see one eye,” observed Damoiselle Guillemette; “there is a wart on the other.” “It’s not a wart,” returned Master Robert Mistricolle, “it is an egg which contains another demon exactly similar, who bears another little egg which contains another devil, and so on.” “How do you know that?” asked Guillemette la Mairesse. “I know it pertinently,” replied the protonotary. “Monsieur le protonotare,” asked Gauchère, “what do you prognosticate of this pretended foundling?” “The greatest misfortunes,” replied Mistricolle. “Ah! good heavens!” said an old woman among the spectators, “and that besides our having had a considerable pestilence last year, and that they say that the English are going to disembark in a company at Harfleur.” “Perhaps that will prevent the queen from coming to Paris in the month of September,” interposed another; “trade is so bad already.” “My opinion is,” exclaimed Jehanne de la Tarme, “that it would be better for the louts of Paris, if this little magician were put to bed on a fagot than on a plank.” “A fine, flaming fagot,” added the old woman. “It would be more prudent,” said Mistricolle. For several minutes, a young priest had been listening to the reasoning of the Haudriettes and the sentences of the notary. He had a severe face, with a large brow, a profound glance. He thrust the crowd silently aside, scrutinized the “little magician,” and stretched out his hand upon him. It was high time, for all the devotees were already licking their chops over the “fine, flaming fagot.” “I adopt this child,” said the priest. He took it in his cassock and carried it off. The spectators followed him with frightened glances. A moment later, he had disappeared through the “Red Door,” which then led from the church to the cloister. When the first surprise was over, Jehanne de la Tarme bent down to the ear of la Gaultière,— “I told you so, sister,—that young clerk, Monsieur Claude Frollo, is a sorcerer.” CHAPTER II. CLAUDE FROLLO. In fact, Claude Frollo was no common person. He belonged to one of those middle-class families which were called indifferently, in the impertinent language of the last century, the high _bourgeoise_ or the petty nobility. This family had inherited from the brothers Paclet the fief of Tirechappe, which was dependent upon the Bishop of Paris, and whose twenty-one houses had been in the thirteenth century the object of so many suits before the official. As possessor of this fief, Claude Frollo was one of the twenty-seven seigneurs keeping claim to a manor in fee in Paris and its suburbs; and for a long time, his name was to be seen inscribed in this quality, between the Hôtel de Tancarville, belonging to Master François Le Rez, and the college of Tours, in the records deposited at Saint Martin des Champs. Claude Frollo had been destined from infancy, by his parents, to the ecclesiastical profession. He had been taught to read in Latin; he had been trained to keep his eyes on the ground and to speak low. While still a child, his father had cloistered him in the college of Torchi in the University. There it was that he had grown up, on the missal and the lexicon. Moreover, he was a sad, grave, serious child, who studied ardently, and learned quickly; he never uttered a loud cry in recreation hour, mixed but little in the bacchanals of the Rue du Fouarre, did not know what it was to _dare alapas et capillos laniare_, and had cut no figure in that revolt of 1463, which the annalists register gravely, under the title of “The sixth trouble of the University.” He seldom rallied the poor students of Montaigu on the _cappettes_ from which they derived their name, or the bursars of the college of Dormans on their shaved tonsure, and their surtout parti-colored of bluish-green, blue, and violet cloth, _azurini coloris et bruni_, as says the charter of the Cardinal des Quatre-Couronnes. On the other hand, he was assiduous at the great and the small schools of the Rue Saint Jean de Beauvais. The first pupil whom the Abbé de Saint Pierre de Val, at the moment of beginning his reading on canon law, always perceived, glued to a pillar of the school Saint-Vendregesile, opposite his rostrum, was Claude Frollo, armed with his horn ink-bottle, biting his pen, scribbling on his threadbare knee, and, in winter, blowing on his fingers. The first auditor whom Messire Miles d’Isliers, doctor in decretals, saw arrive every Monday morning, all breathless, at the opening of the gates of the school of the Chef-Saint-Denis, was Claude Frollo. Thus, at sixteen years of age, the young clerk might have held his own, in mystical theology, against a father of the church; in canonical theology, against a father of the councils; in scholastic theology, against a doctor of Sorbonne. Theology conquered, he had plunged into decretals. From the “Master of Sentences,” he had passed to the “Capitularies of Charlemagne;” and he had devoured in succession, in his appetite for science, decretals upon decretals, those of Theodore, Bishop of Hispalus; those of Bouchard, Bishop of Worms; those of Yves, Bishop of Chartres; next the decretal of Gratian, which succeeded the capitularies of Charlemagne; then the collection of Gregory IX.; then the Epistle of _Superspecula_, of Honorius III. He rendered clear and familiar to himself that vast and tumultuous period of civil law and canon law in conflict and at strife with each other, in the chaos of the Middle Ages,—a period which Bishop Theodore opens in 618, and which Pope Gregory closes in 1227. Decretals digested, he flung himself upon medicine, on the liberal arts. He studied the science of herbs, the science of unguents; he became an expert in fevers and in contusions, in sprains and abcesses. Jacques d’ Espars would have received him as a physician; Richard Hellain, as a surgeon. He also passed through all the degrees of licentiate, master, and doctor of arts. He studied the languages, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, a triple sanctuary then very little frequented. His was a veritable fever for acquiring and hoarding, in the matter of science. At the age of eighteen, he had made his way through the four faculties; it seemed to the young man that life had but one sole object: learning.