 Book III. CHAPTER II. A bird's-eye view of Paris. We have just attempted to restore, for the reader's benefit, that admirable church of Notre-Dame de Paris. We have briefly pointed out the greater part of the beauties which it possessed in the fifteenth century, and which it lacks today. But we have omitted the principal thing, the view of Paris which was then to be obtained from the summits of its towers. That was, in fact, when, after having long groped one's way up the dark spiral which perpendicularly pierces the thick wall of the belfries, one emerged, at last abruptly, upon one of the lofty platforms inundated with light and air. That was, in fact, a fine picture which spread out on all sides at once before the eye. A spectacle, sui generis, of which those of our readers who have had the good fortune to see a gothic city entire, complete, homogeneous, a few of which still remain, Nuremberg in Bavaria and Victoria in Spain, can readily form an idea, or even smaller specimens provided that they are well preserved, Vitre in Brittany, Nordhausen in Prussia. The Paris of three hundred and fifty years ago, the Paris of the fifteenth century, was already a gigantic city. We Parisians generally make a mistake as to the ground which we think that we have gained, since Paris has not increased much over one third since the time of Louis XI. It has certainly lost more in beauty than it has gained in size. Paris had its birth, as the reader knows, in that old island of the city which has the form of a cradle. The strand of that island was its first boundary wall, the same its first moat. Paris remained for many centuries in its island state, with two bridges, one on the north, the other on the south. And two bridge-heads, which were at the same time its gates and its fortresses. The Grand Châtelet on the right bank, the Petit Châtelet on the left. Then, from the date of the kings of the first race, Paris, being too cribbed and confined in its island, and unable to return thither, crossed the water. Then, beyond the Grand, beyond the Petit Châtelet, a first circle of walls and towers began to infringe upon the country on the two sides of the Seine. Some vestiges of this ancient enclosure still remain in the last century. Today, only the memory of it is left, and here and there a tradition, the Baudet's, or Baudetier Gate, Port Bagoda. Little by little the tide of houses, always thrust from the center of the city outwards, overflows, devours, wears away, and defaces this wall. Philippe Augustus makes a new dike for it. He imprisons Paris in a circular chain of great towers, both lofty and solid. For the period of more than a century the houses press upon each other, accumulate and raise their level in the space and, like water in a reservoir. They begin to deepen. They pile story upon story. They mount upon each other. They gush forth at the top, like all laterally compressed growth, and there is a rivalry as to which shall thrust its head above its neighbors for the sake of getting a little air. The street glows narrower and deeper. Every space is overwhelmed and disappears. The houses finally leap the wall of Philippe Augustus and scatter joyfully over the plain, without order, and all askew, like runaways. They plant themselves squarely, cut themselves gardens from the fields and take their trees. Beginning with 1367 the city spreads to such an extent into the suburbs that a new wall becomes necessary, particularly on the right bank. Charles V. builds it. But a city like Paris is perpetually growing. It is only such cities that become capitals. They are funnels, into which all the geographical, political, moral, and intellectual watersheds of a country, all the natural slopes of a people poor. Wells of civilization, so to speak, and also sewers, where commerce, industry, intelligence, population, all that is sap, all that is life, all that is the soul of a nation, filters and amasses unceasingly, drop by drop, century by century. So Charles V's wall suffered the fate of that of Philip Augustus. At the end of the 15th century the Fauburg strides across it, passes beyond it, and runs farther. In the 16th it seems to retreat visibly, and to bury itself deeper and deeper in the old city, so thick had the new city already become outside of it. Thus, beginning with the 15th century, where our story finds us, Paris had already outgrown the three concentric circles of walls, which, from the time of Julian the Apostate existed, so to speak, in germ in the Grand Châtelet and the Petit Châtelet. The mighty city had cracked in succession its four enclosures of walls, like a child grown too large for his garments of last year. Under Louis XI this sea of houses was seen to be pierced at intervals by several groups of ruined towers from the ancient wall, like the summits of hills in an inundation, like archipelagos of the old Paris submerged beneath the new. Since that time Paris has undergone yet another transformation, unfortunately for our eyes, but it has passed only one more wall, that of Louis XV, that miserable wall of mud and spittle worthy of the king who built it, worthy of the poet who sung it. Les meurs mûrents Paris rents Paris murmurant. The wall walling Paris makes Paris murmur. In the 15th century, Paris was still divided into three wholly distinct and separate towns, each having its own physiognomy, its own specialty, its manners, customs, privileges, and history. The city, the university, the town. The city, which occupied the island, was the most ancient, the smallest, and the mother of the other two, crowded in between them like, may we be pardoned a comparison, a little old woman between two large and handsome maidens. The university covered the left bank of the Seine, from the Tournel to the Tour de Nestlé, points which correspond in the Paris of today, the one to the wine market, the other to the mint. Its wall included a large part of that plain where Julian had built his hot baths. The Hill of Saint-Jean-Vierve was enclosed in it. The culminating point of this sweep of walls was the papal gate, that is to say, near the present site of the Pantheon. The town, which was the largest of the three fragments of Paris, held the right bank. Its key, broken or interrupted in many places, ran along the Seine, from the Tour de Belis to the Tour de Bois, that is to say, from the place where the granary stands today to the present site of the Tuileries. These four points, where the Seine intersected the wall of the capital, the Tournel and the Tour de Nestlé on the right, and the Tour de Belis and the Tour de Bois on the left, were called, preeminently, the four towers of Paris. The town encroached still more extensively upon the fields than the university. The culminating point of the town wall, that of Charles V, was at the gates of Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, whose situation has not been changed. As we have just said, each of these three great divisions of Paris was a town, but two special towns to be complete. A city which could not get along with the other two. Hence, three entirely distinct aspects. Churches abounded in the city, palaces in the town, and colleges in the university. Neglecting here the originalities of secondary importance in old Paris, and the capricious regulations regarding the public highways, we will say, from a general point of view, taking only masses and the whole group in this chaos of communal jurisdictions, that the island belonged to the bishop, the right bank to the provost of the merchants, the left bank to the rector. Overall ruled the provost of Paris. A royal, not a municipal office. The city had Notre-Dame, the town, the Louvre, and the Hôtel-de-Vee, the university, the Sarbonne. The town had the markets, the city, the hospital, the university, the Près-Oclair. Offences committed by the scholars on the left bank were tried in the law courts on the island, and were punished on the right bank at Mont-Fasson, unless the rector, feeling the university to be strong and the king weak, intervened, for it was the student's privilege to be hanged on their own grounds. The greater part of these privileges, it may be noted in passing, and there were some even better than the above, had been extorted from the kings by revolts and mutinies. It is the course of things from time immemorial. The king only lets go when the people tear away. There is an old charter which puts the matter naively, apropos of fidelity. Sivibus fidelitas in reges quo etamen alequotias sediti onibus interrepta multa peperit privileia. In the fifteenth century, the Seine bathed five islands within the walls of Paris. Louvier Island, where there were then trees, and where there is no longer anything but wood. L'île au vâche and L'île Notre-Dame, both deserted, with the exception of one house, both fiefs of the bishop. In the seventeenth century a single island was formed out of these two, which was built upon and named L'île Saint-Louis. Lastly the city, and at its point the little islet of the cow-tender, which was afterwards engulfed beneath the platform of the Pont-Nouf. The city then had five bridges, three on the right, the Pont Notre-Dame and the Pont-au-Chage of stone, the Pont-au-Mognier of wood, two on the left, the Petit-Pont of stone, and the Paul-Saint-Michel of wood, all loaded with houses. The university had six gates, built by Philippe Augustus. There were, beginning with La Tournelle, the Porte-Saint-Victore, the Porte-Bordel, the Porte-Papal, the Porte-Saint-Jacques, the Porte-Saint-Michel, the Porte-Saint-Germain. The town had six gates, built by Charles V. Beginning with the Tour de Belis, they were the Porte-Saint-Antoine, the Porte du Templar, the Porte Saint-Martin, the Porte Saint-Denis, the Porte Montmartre, the Porte Saint-Honoré. All these gates were strong and also handsome, which does not detract from strength. A large deep moat, with a brisk current during the high water of winter, bathed the base of the walled round Paris. The Sain furnished the water. At night the gates were shut, the river was barred at both ends of the city with huge iron chains, and Paris slept tranquilly. From a bird's-eye view, these three bergs, the city, the town, and the university, each presented to the eye an inextricable skein of eccentrically tangled streets. Nevertheless, at first sight, one recognized the fact that these three fragments formed but one body. One immediately perceived three long parallel streets, unbroken, undisturbed, traversing, almost in a straight line, all three cities, from one end to the other. From north to south, perpendicularly to the Sain, which bound them together, mingled them, infused them in each other, poured and transfused the people incessantly from one to the other, and made one out of the three. The first of these streets ran from the Porte Saint-Martin. It was called the Rue Saint-Jacques in the university, Rue de la Jouverie in the city, Rue Saint-Martin in the town. It crossed the water twice, under the name of the Petit Pont and the Pont Notre-Dame. The second, which was called the Rue de la Arpe on the left bank, Rue de la Barrillerie on the island, Rue Saint-Denis on the right bank, Pont Saint-Michel on one arm of the Sain, Pont au change on the other, ran from the Porte Saint-Michel in the university to the Porte Saint-Denis in the town. However, under all these names, there were but two streets, parent streets, generating streets, the two arteries of Paris. All the other veins of the triple city, either derived their supply from them or emptied into them. Independently of these two principal streets, piercing Paris diametrically in its whole breadth from side to side, common to the entire capital, the city and the university had also each its own great special street, which ran lengthwise by them, parallel to the Sain, cutting, as it passed, at right angles the two arterial thoroughfares. Thus, in the town, one descended in a straight line from the Porte Saint-Antoine to the Porte Saint-Honoré in the university from the Porte Saint-Victor to the Porte Saint-Germain. These two great thoroughfares, intersected by the two first, formed the canvas upon which reposed, nodded and crowded together on every hand the labyrinthine network of the streets of Paris. In the incomprehensible plan of these streets, one distinguished likewise, on looking attentively, two clusters of great streets, like magnified sheaves of grain, one in the university, the other in the town, which spread out gradually from the bridges to the gates. Some traces of this geometrical plan still exist today. Now, what aspect did this whole present when, as viewed from the summit of the Towers of Notre-Dame in 1482, that we shall try to describe? For the spectator who arrived panting upon that pinnacle, it was first a dazzling, confusing view of roofs, chimneys, streets, bridges, places, spires, bell-towers. Everything struck your eye at once. The carved gable, the pointed roof, the turrets suspended at the angles of the walls, the stone pyramids of the eleventh century, the fifteenth, the round, bare tower of the Dungeon Keep, the square and fretted tower of the church, the great and the little, the massive and the aerial. The eye was, for a long time, wholly lost in this labyrinth, where there was nothing which did not possess its originality, its reason, its genius, its beauty, nothing which did not painted and carved front with external beams, elliptical door, with projecting stories to the royal louvre, which then had a culminate of towers. But these are the principal masses which were then to be distinguished when the eye began to accustom itself to this tumult of edifices. In the first place, the city. The island of the city, as Soval says, sometimes has such happy turns of expression. The island of the city is made like a great ship, stuck in the mud and run aground in the current near the center of the Sain. We have just explained that in the fifteenth century this ship was anchored to the two banks of the river by five bridges. This form of a ship had also struck the heraldic scribes. For it is from that, and not from the Germans, that the ship which blazes the old shield of Paris comes, according to Favain and Pasquiaire. For him who understands how to decipher them, our memorial bearings are algebra, our memorial bearings have a tongue. The whole history of the second half of the Middle Ages is written in our memorial bearings. The first half is in the symbolism of the Roman churches. They are the successors of theocracy. Thus the city first presented itself to the eye with its stern to the east and its prow to the west. Turning towards the prow one had before one an innumerable flock of ancient roofs over which arched broadly the lead-covered apse of the Saint-Sful, like an elephant's haunches loaded with its tower. Only here this tower was the most audacious the most open the most ornamented spire of cabinet-maker's work that ever let the sky peep through its cone of lace. In front of Notre-Dame, and very near at hand, three streets opened into the cathedral square, a fine square lined with ancient houses. Over the south side of this place bent the wrinkled and sullen façade of the Hôtel d'Hur, and its roof which seemed covered with warts and pustules. Then, on the right and the left, to the east and west, within that wall of the city, which was yet so contracted, rose the bell-towers of its one and twenty churches, of every date, of every form, of every size, from the low and worm-eaten belfry of the Saint-Denis-du-Pa, to the slender needles of Saint-Pierre-au-Bouf's and Saint-Landry. Behind Notre-Dame, the cloister and its gothic gallery spread out towards the north, on the south, the half-Roman palace of the bishop, on the east, the desert point of the terrain. In this throng of houses the eye also distinguished, by the lofty openwork mitres of stone which then crowned the roof itself, even the most elevated windows of the palace, the Hôtel given by the city under Charles VI, to Gévanin-de-Ressin, a little farther on the pitched covered sheds of the palace market. In still another quarter the new apse of the Saint-Germain-la-Vue, lengthened in 1458 with a bit of the Rue-au-Fab, and then in places a square crowded with people, a pillory erected at the corner of a street, a fine fragment of the pavement of Philippe Augustus, a magnificent flagging, grooved for the horse's feet in the middle of the road, and so badly replaced in the 16th century by the miserable cobblestones called the Pavement of the League, a deserted back courtyard with one of those diaphanous staircase turrets, such as were erected in the 15th century, one of which is still to be seen in the Rue-de-Bordene. Lastly, at the right of the Saint-Chapelle towards the west, the Pellasse de Justice rested its group of towers at the edge of the water. The thickets of the king's gardens, which covered the western point of the city, massed the island de Passeur. As for the water, from the summit of the towers of Notre-Dame one hardly saw it, on either side of the city. The Sain was hidden by bridges, the bridges by houses. And when the Glance passed these bridges, whose roofs were visibly green, rendered moldy before their time by the vapors of the water, if it was directed to the left towards the university, the first edifice which struck it was a large, low sheaf of towers, the Petit Châtelet, whose yawning gate devoured the end of the Petit Pont. Then, if your view ran along the bank from east to west, from the tournel to the Tour de Nestlé, there was a long cordon of houses, with carved beams, stained glass windows, each story projecting over that beneath it, an interminable zigzag of bourgeois gables, frequently interrupted by the mouth of a street. And from time to time, also by the front or angle of a huge stone mansion, planted at its ease with quartz and gardens, wings and detached buildings, amid this populace of crowded and narrow houses, like a grand gentleman among the throng of rustics. There were five or six of these mansions on the quay, from the house of Lorraine, which shared with the Bernardin's the grand enclosure adjoining the tournel to the Hotel de Nestlé, whose principal tower ended Paris, and whose pointed roofs were in a position during three months of the year to encroach, with their black triangles, upon the scarlet disc of the setting sun. This side of the Sain was, however, the last mercantile of the two. Students furnished more of a crowd and more noise there than artisans, and there was not, properly speaking, any key except from the Pont Saint-Michel to the Tour de Nestlé. The rest of the bank of the Sain was now a naked strand, the same as beyond the Bernardin, again a throng of houses standing with their feet in the water as between the two bridges. There was a great uproar of laundresses. They screamed and talked and sang from morning till night along the beach, and beat a great deal of linen there, just as in our day. This is not the least of the gateys of Paris. The university presented a dense mass to the eye. From one end to the other it was homogeneous and compact. The thousand roofs, dense, angular, clinging to each other, composed nearly all of the same geometrical element, offered, when viewed from above, the aspect of a crystallization of the same substance. The capricious ravine of streets did not cut this block of houses into two disproportionate slices. The forty-two colleges were scattered about in a fairly equal manner, and there were some everywhere. The amusingly varied crests of these beautiful edifices were the product of the same art as the simple roofs which they overshot, and were actually only a multiplication of the square or the cube of the same geometrical figure. Hence they complicated the whole effect without disturbing it, completed without overloading it. Geometry is harmony. Some fine mansions here and there made magnificent outlines against the picturesque attics of the Left Bank. The House of Nevers, the House of Rome, the House of Rimes, which have disappeared. The Hotel du Cluny, which still exists, for the consolation of the artist, and whose tower was so stupidly deprived of its crown a few years ago. Close to Cluny, that Roman palace, with fine round arches, were once the hot baths of Julian. There were a great many abbeys, of a beauty more devout, of a grandeur more solemn than the mansions, but not less beautiful, not less grand. Those which first caught the eye were the Bernandans, with their three bell-towers. Saint-Jean-viève, whose square tower, which still exists, makes us regret the rest. The Sorbonne, half-college, half-monestary, of which so admirable a nave survives. The fine quadrilateral cloister of the Maturan, its neighbor, the cloister of Saint-Benoise, within whose walls they have had time to cobble up a theatre, between the seventh and eighth editions of this book. The Cordellier, with their three enormous adjacent gables. The Augustin, whose graceful spire formed, after the Tour de Nestlé, the second denticulation of this side of Paris, starting from the west. The colleges, which are in fact the intermediate ring between the cloister and the world, hold the middle position in the monumental series between the hotel and the abbeys, with a severity full of elegance, sculpture less giddy than the palaces, and architecture less severe than the convents. Unfortunately hardly anything remains of these monuments, where Gothic art combined with so just a balance, richness and economy. The churches, and they were numerous and splendid in the university, and they were graded there also in all the ages of architecture, from the round arches of Saint-Julien to the pointed arches of Saint-Severin. The churches dominated the whole. And, like one harmony more in this mass of harmonies, they pierced in quick succession the multiple open work of the gables with slashed spires, with open work bell-towers with slender pinnacles, whose line was also only a magnificent exaggeration of the acute angle of the roofs. The ground of the university was hilly. Moussa Javier formed an enormous mound to the south. And it was a sight to see from the summit of Notre-Dame how that throng of narrow and torturous streets, today the Latin Quarter, whose bunches of houses which spread out in every direction from the top of this eminence, precipitated themselves in disorder, and almost perpendicularly down its flanks nearly to the water's edge, having the air, some of falling, others of clambering up again, and all of holding to one another. A continual flux of a thousand black points which passed each other on the pavements made everything move before the eyes. It was the populace seen thus from aloft and afar. Lastly in the intervals of these roofs, of these spires, of these accidents of numberless edifices, which bent and writhed and jagged in so eccentric a manner the extreme line of the university, one caught a glimpse, here and there, of a great expanse of moss-grown wall, a thick round tower, a crenellated city gate, shadowing forth the fortress. It was the wall of Philippe Augustus. Beyond the fields gleamed green. Beyond fled the roads, along which were scattered a few more suburban houses, which became more infrequent as they became more distant. Some of these fall-burgs were important. There were, first, starting from La Tournelle, the Borg San Victor, with its one arch-bridge over the Biave. Its abbey, where one could read the epitaph of Louis Legro. Epitaphium Ludovici Grossi, and its church with an octagonal spire, flanked with four little bell-towers of the eleventh century. A similar one can be seen at atop. It is not yet destroyed. Next the Borg Saint-Marceau, which already had three churches and one convent. Then, leaving the mill of the gubbalands and its four white walls on the left, there was the fall-burg Saint-Jacques, with the beautiful carved cross in its square. The church of Saint-Jacques-du-Hopin, which was then Gothic, pointed, charming. Saint-Marois, a fine nave of the fourteenth century, which Napoleon turned into a hayloft. Notre-Dame-de-Champ, where there were Byzantine mosaics. Lastly, after having left behind, full in the country, the monastery des Chartres, a rich edifice contemporary with the Palais de Justice, with its little garden divided into compartments, and the haunted ruins of Vauvère, the eye fell to the west upon the three Roman spires of Saint-Germain-de-Pres. The Borg Saint-Germain, already a large community, formed fifteen or twenty streets in the rear. The pointed bell of Saint-Saul-peace marked one corner of the town. Close beside it, one described the quadrilateral enclosure of the fair of Saint-Germain, where the market is situated to-day. Then the abbot's pillory, a pretty little round tower, well capped with a leaden cone. The brickyard was further on, and the rue de Four, which led to the common bake-house, and the mill on its hillock, and the laisart house, a tiny house, isolated and half-seen. But that which attracted the eye most of all, and fixed it for a long time on that point, was the abbey itself. It is certain that this monastery, which had a grand air, both as a church and as a scenery, that a basal palace where the bishops of Paris counted themselves happy if they could pass the night. That refectory upon which the architect had bestowed the air, the beauty, and the rose-window of a cathedral. That elegant chapel of the Virgin. That monumental dormitory. Those vast gardens. That portcullis. That drawbridge. That envelope of battlements which notched to the eye the verger of the surrounding meadows. Those courtyards were gleamed men-at-arms intermingled with golden copes. The whole grouped and clustered about three lofty spires with round arches, well-planted upon agothic apse, made a magnificent figure against the horizon. When, at length, after having contemplated the university for a long time, you turned towards the right bank, towards the town, the character of the spectacle was abruptly altered. The town, in fact much larger than the university, was also less of a unit. At the first glance once saw that it was divided into many masses, singularly distinct. First, to the eastward, in that part of the town which still takes its name from the marsh where the Camulogenae entangled Caesar was a pile of palaces. The block extended to the very water's edge. Four, almost contiguous hotel, Jouet, Sainte, Barbeau, the house of the queen, mirrored their slate peaks, broken their slender turrets in the Sainte. These four edifices filled the space from the Rue des Nonandiers to the Abbey of the Salastans, whose spire gracefully relieved their line of gables and battlements. A few miserable greenish hovels, hanging over the water in front of the sumptuous hotel, did not prevent one from seeing the fine angles of their facades, their large square windows with stone mullions, their pointed porches overloaded with statues, the vivid outlines of their walls, always clear cut, and all those charming accidents of architecture which cause Gothic art to have the air of beginning in its combinations afresh with every monument. Behind these palaces, extended in all directions, now broken, fenced in, battlemented like a citadel, now veiled by great trees like a Carthusian convent, the immense and multi-form enclosure of that miraculous Hotel de Saint-Paul, where the King of France possessed the means of lodging superbly two and twenty princes of the rank of the Dauphin and the Duke of Burgundy, with their domestics and their suites, without counting the great lords and the emperor when he came to view Paris, and the lions who had their separate hotel at the Royal Hotel. Let us say here that a prince's apartment was then composed of nevertheless than eleven large rooms, from the Chamber of State to the Oratory, not to mention the galleries, baths, vapor baths, and other superfluous places, with which each apartment was provided, not to mention the private gardens for each of the King's guests, not to mention the kitchens, the cellars, the domestic offices, the general refractories of the house, the poultry yards where there were twenty-two general laboratories, from the bakehouses to the wine cellars, games of a thousand sorts, malls, tennis, and riding at the ring, aviaries, fishponds, menageries, stables, barns, libraries, arsenals, and foundries. This was what a king's palace, a louvre, a hotel de Saint Paul was then, a city within a city. From the tower where we are placed, the Hotel Saint Paul, almost half hidden by the four great houses of which we have just spoken, was still very considerable and very marvellous to see. One could there distinguish, very well, though cleverly united with the principal building by long galleries, decked with painted glass and slender columns, the three hotel which Charles V. had amalgamated with his palace. The Hotel du Petit Musée, with the airy balustrade which formed a graceful border to its roof. The Hotel of the Abbe de Saint Mar, having the vanity of a stronghold, a great tower, machicolations, loopholes, iron gratings, and over the large Saxon door, the armorial bearings of the Abbe between the two mortises of the drawbridge. The Hotel of the Comte Tompe, whose dungeon keep ruined at its summit, was rounded and notched like a coxcomb. Here and there three or four ancient oaks forming a tuft together like enormous cauliflower's. Tables of swans and the clear water of the fishponds, all in folds of light and shade. Many courtyards of which one beheld picturesque bits. The Hotel of the Lyon, with its low pointed arches on short Saxon pillars, its iron gratings, and its perpetual roar. Shooting up above the hole the scale ornamented spire of the Abbe Maria. On the left the house of the Provost of Paris, flanked by four small towers, delicately grooved in the middle. At the extremity the Hotel Saint Paul, properly speaking, with its multiplied façades, its successive enrichments from the time of Charles the Fifth, the hybrid excrescences with which the fancy of the architects had loaded it during the last two centuries, with all the abses of its chapels, all the gables of its galleries, a thousand weather cocks for the four winds, and its two lofty contiguous towers, whose conical roof, surrounded by battlements at its base, looked like those pointed caps which have their edges turned up. Continuing to mount the stories of this amphitheater of palaces spread out afar upon the ground, after crossing a deep ravine huddled out of the roofs in the town, which marked the passage of the Rue Saint-Antoine, the eye reached the house of Angoulême, a vast construction of many epics, where there were perfectly new and very white parts which melted no better into the hole than a red patch on a blue doublet. Nevertheless, the remarkably pointed and lofty roof of the modern palace, bristling with carved eaves, covered with sheets of lead, where coiled a thousand fantastic arabesques of sparkling incrustations of gilded bronze. That roof, so curiously damascened, darted upwards gracefully from the midst of the brown ruins of the ancient edifice. Whose huge and ancient towers, rounded by age-like casks, sinking together with old age, and rending themselves from top to bottom, resembled great bellies unbuttoned. And rose the forest of spires of the Palais de Tournel. Not a view in the world, either at Shambord or at the Alhambra, is more magic, more aerial, more enchanting than that thicket of spires, tiny bell towers, chimneys, weather veins, winding staircases, lanterns through which the daylight makes its way, which seem to cut out at a blow pavilions, spindle-shaped turrets, or as they were called then, tournels, all differing in form, in height, and attitude. One would have pronounced it a gigantic stone chessboard. To the right of the tournel, that truss of enormous towers, black as ink, running into each other and tied, as it were, by a circuit or moat. That dungeon-keep, much more pierced with loopholes than with windows. That drawbridge, always raised. That portcullis, always lowered, is the Bastille. Those sorts of black beaks which project from between the battlements, and which you take from a distance to be cave-spouts, are cannons. Beneath them, at the foot of the formidable edifice, behold the port Saint-Antoine buried between its two towers. Beyond the tournel, as far as the wall of Charles V, spread out with rich compartments of verger and of flowers, a velvet carpet of cultivated land and royal parks, in the midst of which, one recognized by its labyrinth of trees and alleys, the famous deadless garden, which Louis XI had given to Quartier. The doctor's observatory rose above the labyrinth like a great isolated column, with a tiny house for a capital. Terrible astrologies took place in that laboratory. There today is the Place Royale. As we have just said, the quarter of the palace, of which we have just endeavored to give the reader some idea by indicating only the chief points, filled the angle with Charles V's wall made with a sain on the east. The center of the town was occupied by a pile of houses for the populace. It was there, in fact, that the three bridges disgorged upon the right bank, and the bridges led to the building of houses rather than palaces. That congregation of bourgeois habitations, pressed together like cells in a hive, had a beauty of its own. It is with the roofs of a capital as with the waves of the sea. They are grand. First the streets crossed and entangled, forming a hundred amusing figures in the block. Around the marketplace it was like a star with a thousand rays. The roofs sat Danis and Saint-Martin, with their innumerable ramifications, rose one after the other, like trees intertwining their branches. And then the tortuous lines, the roofs de la plattererie, de la vererie, de la tissiranderie, et cetera, meandered overall. There were also fine edifices which pierced the petrified pendulations of that sea of gables. At the head of the Pont de Changeres, behind which one beheld the Seine foaming beneath the wheels of the Pont de Monnier, there was the chalelet, no longer a Roman tower, as under Julie and the Apostate, but a feudal tower of the thirteenth century, and of a stone so hard that the pickaxe could not break away so much as the thickness of the fist in a space of three hours. There was the rich square bell tower of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie, with its angles all frothing with carvings, already admirable, although it was not finished in the fifteenth century. It lacked in particular the four monsters, which, still perched today on the corners of its roof, have the air of so many sphinxes who are propounding to New Paris the riddle of the ancient Paris. Réau, the sculptor, only placed them in position in 1526, and received twenty francs for his pains. There was the Maison-au-Pilier, the pillar-house, opening upon the Place de Grave, of which we have given the reader some idea. There was Saint-Gervais, which a front in good taste has since spoiled. Saint-Marie, whose ancient pointed arches were still almost round arches. Saint-Jean, whose magnificent spire was proverbial. There were twenty other monuments which did not disdain to bury their wonders in that chaos of black, deep, narrow streets. Add the crosses of carved stone, more lavishly scattered through the squares than even the gibbets. The cemetery of the innocence, whose architectural wall could be seen in the distance above the roofs. The pillory of the markets, whose top was visible between two chimneys of the Rue de la Cossonnerie. The latter of the Croix du Trahoix, in its square always black with people. The circular buildings of the wheat-mart. The fragments of Philippe Augustus' ancient wall, which could be made out here and there, drowned among the houses, its towers gnawed by ivy, its gates in ruins, with crumbling and deformed stretches of wall. The quay with its thousand shops, and its bloody knackers yards. The Seine encumbered with boats from the Port de Foix to Port Lavec, and you will have a confused picture of what the central trapezium of the town was like in 1482. With these two quarters, one of Hotel, the other of houses, the third feature of aspect presented by the city was a long zone of abbeys, which boarded it in nearly the whole of its circumference, from the rising to the setting sun, and behind the circle of fortifications which hemmed in Paris formed a second interior enclosure of convents and chapels. Thus immediately adjoining the parc de Tornelle between the Rue Saint-et-Tuan and the Vielle Rue de Tampole, there stood St. Catherine, with its immense cultivated lands, which were terminated only by the wall of Paris. Between the old and the new Rue de Tampole there was the Tampole, a sinister group of towers, lofty, erect, and isolated in the middle of a vast battlement enclosure. Between the Rue Nouve de Tampole and the Rue Saint-Martin there was the abbey of Saint-Martin, in the midst of its gardens, a superb fortified church, whose girdle of towers, whose diadem of bell towers, yielded in force and splendor only to Saint-Germain-de-Pres. Between the Rue Saint-Martin and the Rue Saint-Denis spread the enclosure of the Trinité. Lastly, between the Rue Saint-Denis and the Rue Montorgueuée stood the Filet d'Hueur. On one side the rotting roofs and unpaved enclosure of the Cour de Meracle could be described. It was the sole profane ring which was linked to that devout chain of convents. Finally, the fourth compartment, which stretched itself out in the agglomeration of the roofs on the right bank, and which occupied the western angle of the enclosure and the banks of the river downstream, was a fresh cluster of palaces and hotels pressed close about the base of the Louvre. This old Louvre of Philippe Augustus, that immense edifice whose great tower, rallied about it three and twenty chief towers, not to reckon the lesser towers, seemed from a distance to be enshrined in the gothic roofs of the Hôtel d'Elençon and the Petit Bourbon. This hydra of towers, giant guardian of Paris, with its four and twenty heads always erect, with its monstrous haunches loaded or scaled with slates and all streaming with metallic reflections terminated with wonderful effect the configuration of the town towards the west. Thus an immense block, which the Romans called Iusula, or island, of bourgeois houses, flanked on the right and the left by two blocks of palaces, crowned, the one by the Louvre, the other by the Tournel, bordered on the north by long girdle of abbeys and cultivated enclosures, all amalgamated and melted together in one view. Upon these thousands of edifices whose tiled and slated roofs outlined upon each other so many fantastic chains, the bell towers, tattooed, fluted, and ornamented with twisted bands, of the four and forty churches on the right bank, myriads of cross streets, their boundary on one side and enclosure of lofty walls with square towers, that of the university had round towers, on the other the same, cut by bridges and bearing on its bosom a multitude of boats, behold the town of Paris in the fifteenth century. Beyond the walls several suburban villages pressed close about the gates, but less numerous and more scattered than those of the university. In the Bastille there were twenty hovels clustered round the curious sculptures of the Croix-Fauban and the flying buttresses of the abbey of Saint-Antoine des Champs. Then Popencourt, lost amid wheat fields. Then Lacquartier, a merry village of wine shops. The hamlet of Saint Laurent, with its church, whose bell tower from afar seemed to add itself to the pointed towers of the poor Saint-Mortin. The Faubourg-Saint-Denis, with the vast enclosure of Saint-Ladre. Beyond the Montmartre gate the Grange Battelier encircled with white walls. Behind it, with its chalky slopes Montmartre, which had then almost as many churches as windmills, and which has kept only the windmills, for society no longer demands anything but bread for the body. Lastly, beyond the Louvre, the Faubourg-Saint-Denis already considerable at that time could be seen stretching away into the fields, and Petit-Proton gleaming green, and the Marchet-au-Pourceau spreading abroad, in whose center swelled the horrible apparatus used for boiling counterfeiters. Between Lacquartier and Saint Laurent your eye had already noticed, on the summit of an eminence crouching amid desert plains, a sort of edifice which resembled from a distance a ruined colonnade, mounted upon a basement with its foundation laid bare. This was neither a Parthenon nor a temple of the Olympian Jupiter. It was Mont-Fausson. Now, if the enumeration of so many edifices, summary as we have endeavored to make it, has not shattered in the reader's mind the general image of old Paris, as we have constructed it, we will recapitulate it in a few words. In the center, the island of the city, resembling as to form an enormous tortoise, and throwing out its bridges with tiles for scales like legs from beneath its gray shell of roofs. On the left, the monolithic trapezium, firm, dense, bristling of the university. On the right, the vast semicircle of the town, much more intermixed with gardens and monuments. The three blocks, city, university, and town, marbled with innumerable streets. Across all, the Seine, foster mother Seine, as says Father de Bruu, blocked with islands, bridges, and boats. All about an immense plain, patched with a thousand sorts of cultivated plots, sewn with fine villages. On the left, Ysie, Van Vrij, Vosgerard, Montrouge, Gentili, with its round tower and its square tower, etc. On the right, twenty others, from confluence to Via Lavec. On the horizon, a border of hills arranged in a circle like the rim of the basin. Finally, far away to the east, Vincennes, and its seven quadrangular towers. To the south, Bicetra, and its pointed turrets. To the north, Saint Denis and its spire. To the west, Saint Cloud and its dungeon keep. Such was the Paris which the ravens, who lived in 1482, beheld from the summits of the towers of Notre-Dame. Nevertheless Voltaire said of this city that, before Louis XIV, it possessed but four fine monuments. The Dome of the Sarbonne, the Val de Grasse, the Modern Louvre, and, I know not what the fourth was, the Luxembourg perhaps. Fortunately, Voltaire was the author of Candide in spite of this, and in spite of this he is, among all the men who have followed each other in the long series of humanity, the one who has best possessed the diabolical laugh. Moreover, this proves that one can be a fine genius and yet understand nothing of an art to which one does not belong. Did not Molière imagine that he was doing Raphael and Michelangelo a very great honor by calling them those minyards of their age? Let us return to Paris and to the fifteenth century. It was not then merely a handsome city. It was a homogeneous city, an architectural and historical product of the Middle Ages, a chronicle in stone. It was a city formed of two layers only, the Romanesque layer and the Gothic layer, for the Roman layer had disappeared long before with the exception of the hot baths of Julian, where it still pierced through the thick crust of the Middle Ages. As for the Celtic layer, no specimens were any longer to be found, even when sinking wells. Fifty years later, when the Renaissance began to mingle with this unity which was so severe and yet so varied, the dazzling luxury of its fantasies and systems, its debasements of Roman round arches, Greek columns and Gothic bases, its sculpture which was so tender and so ideal, its peculiar taste for arabesques and acanthus leaves, its architectural paganism, contemporary with Luther, Paris was perhaps still more beautiful, although less harmonious to the eye and to the thought. But this splendid moment lasted only for a short time. The Renaissance was not impartial. It did not content itself with building. It wished to destroy. It is true that it required the room. Thus Gothic Paris was complete only for a moment. The Jacques de la Boucherie had barely been completed when the demolition of the old Louvre was begun. After that the great city became more disfigured every day. Gothic Paris, beneath which Roman Paris was effaced, was effaced in its turn. But can anyone say what Paris has replaced it? There is the Paris of Catherine de Medici's at the Tullaris, the Paris of Henri II at the Hotel de Vie, two edifices still in fine taste. The Paris of Henri IV at the Place Royale, façades of brick with stone corners and slated roofs, tri-coloured houses. The Paris of Louis XIII at the Val de Grasse, a crushed and squat architecture with vaults like basket handles and something indescribably pot-bellied in the column and thick set in the dome. The Paris of Louis XIV in the Invalidée, grand, rich, gilded, cold. The Paris of Louis XV in Saint-Sulpice, volutes, knots of ribbon, clouds, vermicelli, and chicory leaves, all in stone. The Paris of Louis XVI in the Pantheon, Saint Peter of Rome, badly copied, the edifice is awkwardly heaped together which has not amended its lines. The Paris of the Republic in the School of Medicine, a poor Greek and Roman taste which resembles the Colosseum or the Parthenon as the Constitution of the Year III resembles the Laws of Minos. It is called in architecture the Messador taste. The Paris of Napoleon and the Place Vendôme. This one is sublime, a column of bronze made of cannons. The Paris of the Restoration at the Bourse, a very white colonnade supporting a very smooth frieze. The whole is square and cost twenty millions. To each of these characteristic monuments there is attached by a similarity of taste, fashion, and attitude a certain number of houses scattered about in different quarters and which the eyes of the connoisseur easily distinguishes and furnishes with a date. When one knows how to look one finds the spirit of a century and the physiognomy of a king even in the knocker on a door. The Paris of the present day has then no general physiognomy. It is a collection of specimens of many centuries and the finest have disappeared. The capital grows only in houses and what houses? At the rate at which Paris is now proceeding it will renew itself every fifty years. Thus the historical significance of its architecture is being effaced every day. Monuments are becoming rarer and rarer and one seems to see them gradually engulfed by the flood of houses. Our fathers had a Paris of stone, our sons will have one of plaster. So far as the modern monuments of new Paris are concerned we would gladly be excused from mentioning them. It is not that we do not admire them as they deserve. The Saint-Jean-viève of Monsieur Souffleau is certainly the finest Savoy cake that has ever been made in stone. The Palace of the Legion of Honor is also a very distinguished bit of pastry. The Dome of the Wheat Market is an English jockey cap on a grand scale. The Towers of Saint-Sulpice are two huge clarinettes and the form is as good as any other. The telegraph, contorted and grimacing, forms an admirable accident upon their roofs. Saint Roche has a door which, for magnificence, is comparable only to that of Saint Thomas d'Aquine. It has also a crucifixion and high relief in a cellar with a sun of gilded wood. These things are fairly marvellous. The lantern of the labyrinth of the Jardin de Plant is also very ingenious. As for the Palace of the Bourse, which is Greek as to its colonnade, Roman in the round arches of its doors and windows, of the Renaissance by virtue of its flattened vault, it is indubitably a very correct and very pure monument. The proof is that it is crowned with an attic, such as was never seen in Athens, a beautiful, straight line, gracefully broken here and there by stovepipes. Let us add that if it is according to rule that the architecture of a building should be adapted to its purpose in such a manner that this purpose shall be immediately apparent from the mere aspect of the building, one cannot be too much amazed at a structure which might be indifferently. The Palace of a King, a Chamber of Communes, a Town Hall, a College, a Writing School, an Academy, a Warehouse, a Courthouse, a Museum, a Barracks, a Sepulchre, a Temple, or a Theater. However, it is an exchange. An edifice ought to be, moreover, suitable to the climate. This one is evidently constructed expressly for our cold and rainy skies. It has a roof almost as flat as roofs in the east, which involves sweeping the roof in winter when it snows, and of course, roofs are made to be swept. As for its purpose, of which we just spoke, it fulfills it to a marvel. It is a bourse in France as it would have been a temple in Greece. It is true that the architect was at a good deal of trouble to conceal the clock face which would have destroyed the purity of the fine lines of the façade, but on the other hand we have that colonnade which circles round the edifice and under which, on days of high religious ceremony, the theories of the stockbrokers and the courtiers of the commerce can be developed so majestically. These are very superb structures. Let us add a quantity of fine, amusing and varied streets, like the Rue de Rivoli, and I do not despair of Paris presenting to the eye, when viewed from a balloon, that richness of line, that opulence of detail, that diversity of aspect, that grandiose something in the simple and unexpected in the beautiful, which characterizes a checkerboard. However admirable as the Paris of today may seem to you, reconstruct the Paris of the fifteenth century. Call it up before you in thought. Look at that sky, a thwart that surprising forest of spires, towers and belfries, spread out in the center of the city. Tear away at the point of the islands, fold at the arches of the bridges, the same with its broad green and yellow expanses, more variable than the skin of a serpent. But clearly against an azure horizon the gothic profile of this ancient Paris. Make its contour float in a winter's mist which clings to its numerous chimneys. Drown it in profound nights and watch the odd play of lights and shadows in that somber labyrinth of edifices. Cast upon it a ray of light which shall vaguely outline it, and cause to emerge from the fog the great heads of the towers. However take that black silhouette again, enliven with shadow the thousand acute angles of the spires and gables, and make its start out more toothed than a shark's jaw against a copper-colored western sky. And then compare. And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression with which the modern one can no longer furnish you, climb, on the morning of some grand festival beneath the rising sun of Easter or of Pentecost, climb upon some elevated point whence you command the entire capital, and be present at the awakening of the chimes. Behold at a signal given from heaven, for it is the sun which gives it all those churches quiver simultaneously. First come scattered strokes, running from one church to another, as when musicians give warning that they are about to begin. Then all at once, behold, for it seems at times as though the ear also possessed a sight of its own, behold rising from each bell-tower something like a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. First the vibration of each bell mounts straight upwards, pure and so to speak isolated from the others, into the splendid morning sky. Then little by little as they swell they melt together, mingle are lost in each other, and amalgamate in a magnificent concert. It is no longer anything but a mass of sonorous vibrations incessantly sent forth from the numerous bell-freeze. Floats, undulates, bounds, whirls over the city, prolongs far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of its oscillations. Nevertheless this sea of harmony is not chaos. Great and profound as it is, it is not lost in its transparency. You behold the windings of each group of notes which escapes from the bell-freeze. You can follow the dialogue by turns grave and shrill of the treble and the bass. You can see the octaves leap from one tower to another. You watch them spring forth, winged, light and whistling from the silver bell, to fall broken and limping from the bell of wood. You admire in their midst the rich gamut which incessantly ascends and reassends the seven bells of Saint-Eustache. You see light and rapid notes running across it, executing three or four luminous zig-zags, and vanishing like flashes of lightning. Yonder is the abbey of Saint-Martin, a shrill, cracked singer. Here the gruff and gloomy voice of the Bastille. At the other end the great tower of the Louvre with its base. The royal chime of the palace scatters on all sides, and without relaxation resplendent trills upon which fall, at regular intervals, the heavy strokes from the bell-free of Notre-Dame, which makes them sparkle like the anvil under the hammer. At intervals you behold the passage of sounds of all forms which come from the triple-peel of Saint-Germain-de-Pres. Then again, from time to time, this mass of sublime noises opens and gives passage to the beats of the Ave Maria, which bursts forth and sparkles like an regret of stars. Below, in the very depths of the concert, you confusedly distinguish the interior chanting of the churches, which exhales through the vibrating pores of their vaulted roofs. Assuredly, this is an opera which it is worth the trouble of listening to. Ordinarily, the noise which escapes from Paris by day is the city speaking. By night it is the city breathing. In this case it is the city singing. Lend an ear then to this concert of bell-towers. Spread over all the murmur of half a million men, the eternal plant of the river, the infinite breathings of the wind, the grave and distant quartet of the four forests arranged upon the hills, on the horizon like immense stacks of organ pipes. Extinguish, as in a half shade, all that is too hoarse and too shrill about the center chime, and say whether you know anything in the world more rich and joyful, more golden, more dazzling than this tumult of bells and chimes, than this furnace of music. Than these ten thousand brazen voices chanting simultaneously in the flutes of stone, three hundred feet high. Than this city which is no longer anything but an orchestra, than this symphony which produces the noise of a tempest. End of Book 3 Chapter 2 Book 4 Chapter 1 of the Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Book 4 Chapter 1. Good Souls 16 years previous to the epic when this story takes place, one fine morning, on Quasimodo Sunday, a living creature had been deposited, after mass, in the church of Notre-Dame, on the wooden bed securely fixed in the vestibule on the left, opposite that great image of Saint Christopher, which the figure of Messier Antoine des Sartres, Chevalier, carved in stone, had been gazing at on his knees since 1413, when they took it into their heads to overthrow the saint and the faithful follower. Upon this bed of wood it was customary to expose foundlings for public charity. Whoever cared to take them did so. And front of the wooden bed was a copper basin for alms. 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 anyone 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 cagoulet, 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 Agnes la Hermée, Jean de la Tarmée, Henriette la Gautier, Ganchère la Violette. All four widows, all four dames of the chapel at Yann Audrey, who had quitted their house with the permission of their mistress, and in conformity with the statutes of Pierre d'Ali, in order to come and hear the sermon. However, if these good Audreyettes were, for the moment, complying with the statutes of Pierre d'Ali, 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 Agnes to Gautier, 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 Jehan, if that is the way children are made now. I am not learned in the matter of children, resumed Agnes, but it must be a sin to look at this one. Tis not a child, Agnes. Tis an abortion of a monkey, remarked Gautier. Tis a miracle, interposed Henriette Legautier. Then, remarked Agnes, it is the third since the Sunday of the Loetari, for in less than a week we had the miracle of the mocker of the pilgrims divinely punished by Notre-Dame d'Ober Viliers, and that was the second miracle within a month. This pretended founding is a real monster of abomination, resumed Jehan. He yells loud enough to deafen a chanter, continued Gautier. Hold your tongue, you little howler! To think that Montseur of Rheim sent this enormity to Montseur of Paris, added Legautier, clasping her hands. I imagine, said Agnes Le Hermé, 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 Legautier, that nobody will apply for it. Ah, good heavens! exclaimed Agnes. Those poor nurses yonder in the Foundling Asylum, which forms the lower end of the lane, as you go to the river, just beside Montseur 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 Le Hermé is, resumed Jehan. 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 turn spit? The little monster, we should find it difficult ourselves to describe him otherwise, was in fact not a newborn child. It was a very angular and very lively little mass, imprisoned in its linen sack, stamped with the cipher of Messier Gayeum Chatier, 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 Alois de Gondalaurier, 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, as she passed the wooden bed, and gazed for a moment at the wretched creature, while her charming little daughter, Flor d'Alide de Gondalaurier, 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 good wives of the chapel of Etienne Audry open their eyes. A moment later, the grave and learneded Robert Mr. Coe, the king's proto-notary, passed, with an enormous missile under one arm, and his wife on the other, Damoiselle Guillaumette Lamarès, 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 Phlegathon. "'One can only see one eye,' observed Damoiselle Guillaumette. There is a wart on the other.' "'It is not a wart,' returned Master Robert Mr. Coe. 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 Guillaumette Lamarès. "'I know it pertinently,' replied the proto-notary. "'Monsieur la proto-noterie,' asked Gauchère. "'What do you prognosticate of this pretended Foundling?' "'The greatest misfortunes,' replied Mr. Coe.' "'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 our Fleur. "'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 Jehan de la Tarmée, "'that it would be better for the louts of Paris if this little magician were put to bed on a faggot than on a plank.' "'A fine flaming faggot,' added the old woman. "'It would be more prudent,' said Mr. Coe. "'For several minutes a young priest have been listening to the reasoning of the odriettes 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 had already licked their chops over the fine flaming faggot. "'I adopted 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, Jehan de la Tarmée bent down to the ear of La Gautière. "'I told you, sister, that young clerk, Monsieur Claude Frollo, is a sorcerer.'" End of book four, chapter one. Book four, chapter two, of the hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Book four, chapter two, 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 Bourgeois, or the Petty Nobility. This family had inherited from the brothers Pac-Clay, the thief of Tierschappé, 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 thief, Claude Frollo was one of the twenty-seven seniors keeping claim to a manor in Fille in Paris and its suburbs. And for a long time his name was to be seen inscribed in this quality, between the Hôtel de Tancarvie belonging to Master François Le Ré and the College of Tours in the records deposited at Saint-Martin-de-Champ. 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 Torchy in the university. There it was that he had grown up on the missile 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 de Fuare did not know what it was to Dari Alapas et Capilos Lanare and cut no figure in that revolt of 1463 which the analysts register gravely under the title of the Sixth Trouble of the University. He seldom rallied the poor students of Montaigu on the capets from which they'd arrived their name or the bursars of the College of Dormans on their shaved hauncher and their certu, party-colored of bluish-green, blue and violet cloth, Azorini, coloris et brunis as says the Charter of the Cardinal des Quatre-Corons. 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 Abbey de Saint-Pierre-de-Valle, at the moment of beginning his reading on canon law, always perceived, glued to a pillar of the school Saint-Vendre-Gessile, opposite his rostrum, was Claude Frollo, armed with his horn ink-bottle, biting his pen, scribbling on his thread bare knee and in winter, blowing on his fingers. The first auditor, whom Monsieur Mille-Dilier, 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 the 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 Hispilus, those of Bouchard, bishop of Worms, those of Eves, bishop of Chartres. Next, the decretal of Gratian, which succeeded the capitularies of Charlemagne. Then the collection of Gregory the Ninth, then the epistle of Superspecula, of Honorius the Third. 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. To decretals digested, he flung himself upon medicine on the liberal arts. He studied the science of herbs, the science of ungwents. He became an expert in fevers and in contusions in sprains and abscesses. Jacques de Spar would have received him as a physician, Richard Helene 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 18, he had made his way through the four faculties. It seemed to the young man that life had but one sole object, learning. It was towards this epic that the excessive heat of the summer of 1466 caused that grand outburst of the plague, which carried off more than 40,000 souls in the Vicomte of Paris, and among others, as Jean de Troyes states, master Arnaud, astrologer to the king, who was a very fine man, both wise and pleasant. The rumor spread in the university that the Routir Chape was especially devastated by the malady. It was there that Claude's parents resided in the midst of their fief. The young scholar rushed in great alarm to the paternal mansion. When he entered it, he found that both father and mother had died on the preceding day. A very young brother of his, who was in swaddling clothes, was still alive and crying, abandoned in his cradle. This was all that remained to Claude of his family. The young man took the child under his arm and went off in a pensive mood. Up to that moment he had lived only in science. He now began to live in life. This catastrophe was a crisis in Claude's existence. Orphaned the eldest head of the family at the age of nineteen, he felt himself rudely recalled from the reveries of school to the realities of this world. Then, moved with pity, he was seized with passion and devotion towards that child, his brother. A sweet and strange thing was a human affection to him, who had hitherto loved his books alone. This affection developed to a singular point. In a soul so new, it was like a first love, separated since infancy from his parents, whom he had hardly known, cloistered and emured as it were in his books, eager above all things to study and to learn, exclusively attentive up to that time to his intelligence, which broadened in science, to his imagination, which expanded in letters. The poor scholar had not yet had time to feel the place of his heart. This young brother, without mother or father, this little child, which had fallen abruptly from heaven into his arms, made a new man of him. He perceived that there was something else in the world besides the speculations of the Sarban, 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. Only he imagined, for he was at the age when illusions are as yet replaced only by illusions, that the affections of blood and family were the sole ones necessary, and that a little brother to love suffice to fill an entire existence. He threw himself, therefore, into the love for his little Jehan, with the passion of a character already profound, ardent, concentrated, that poor frail creature, pretty, fair-haired, rosy and curly, that orphan, with another orphan, for his only support, touched him to the bottom of his heart. And, grieve thinker as he was, he was set to meditating upon Jehan with an infinite compassion. He kept watch and ward over him as over something very fragile and very worthy of care. He was more than a brother to the child, he became a mother to him. Little Jehan had lost his mother while he was still at the breast. Claude gave him to a nurse. Besides the thief of Tir-Shape, he had inherited from his father the thief of Molan, which was a dependency of the square tower of Gentili. It was a mill on a hill, near the Chateau of Winchester, Bicetra. There was a miller's wife there who was nursing a fine child. It was not far from the university, and Claude carried the little Jehan to her in his own arms. From that time forth, feeling that he had a burden to bear, he took life very seriously. The thought of his little brother became not only his recreation, but the object of his studies. He resolved to consecrate himself entirely to a future for which he was responsible in the sight of God and never to have any other wife, any other child than the happiness and fortune of his brother. Therefore he attached himself more closely than ever to the clerical profession. His merits, his learning, his quality of immediate vassal of the Bishop of Paris threw the doors of the church wide open to him. At the age of twenty, by special dispensation of the Holy See, he was a priest, and served as the youngest of the chaplains of Notre-Dame, the altar which is called, because of the late mass which is said there, Altari Pigrorum. There plunged more deeply than ever in his dear books, which he quitted only to run for an hour to the thief of Mulan, and this mixture of learning and austerity, so rare at his age, had promptly acquired for him the respect and admiration of the monastery. From the cloister his reputation as a learned man had passed to the people, among whom it had changed a little, a frequent occurrence at that time, into reputation as a sorcerer. It was at the moment when he was returning, on Quasimodo day, from saying his mass at the altar of the Lazy, which was by the side of the door leading to the nave on the right, near the image of the Virgin, that his attention had been attracted by the group of old women chattering around the bed for foundlings. Then it was that he approached the unhappy little creature, which was so hated and so menaced. That distress, that deformity, that abandonment, the thought of his young brother, the idea which suddenly occurred to him, that if he were to die, his dear little Jehan might also be flung miserably on the plank for foundlings. All this had gone to his heart simultaneously. A great pity had moved in him, and he had carried off the child. When he removed the child from the sack, he found it greatly deformed, in very sooth. The poor little wretch had a wart on his left eye, his head placed directly on his shoulders, his spinal column was crooked, his breastbone prominent, and his legs bowed. But he appeared to be lively, and although it was impossible to say in what language he lisped, his cry indicated considerable force and health. Claude's compassion increased at the sight of his ugliness, and he made a vow in his heart to rear the child for the love of his brother, in order that whatever might be the future faults of the little Jehan he would have beside him that charity done for his sake. It was a sort of investment in good works, which he was affecting in the name of his young brother. It was a stock of good works which he wished to amass in advance for him, in case the little rogue should someday find himself short of that coin, the only sort which is received at the toll-bar of Paradise. 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, not need was only and almost. End of Book Four, Chapter Two. Book Four, Chapter Three of the Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Book Four, Chapter Three. Imanis Picoris Custos, Imanior Ipse. Now, in 1482, Quasimodo had grown up. He had become, a few years previously, the bell-ringer of Notre-Dame, thanks to his father by adoption Claude Frollo, who had become Archdeacon of José, thanks to his suzerain, Monsieur Louis de Beaumont, who had become a bishop of Paris at the death of Guillaume Chartier in 1472, thanks to his patron, Olivier Le Damme, barber to Louis XI, King by the Grace of God. So, Quasimodo was the ringer of the chimes of Notre-Dame. In the course of time, there had been formed a certain peculiarly intimate bond which united the ringer to the church. Separated forever from the world by the double fatality of his unknown birth and his natural deformity, imprisoned from his infancy in that impassable double-circle, the poor wretch had grown used to seeing nothing in this world beyond the religious walls which had received him under their shadow. Notre-Dame had been to him successively as he grew up and developed the egg, the nest, the house, the country, the universe. There was certainly a sort of mysterious and pre-existing harmony between this creature and this church. When, still a little fellow, he had dragged himself tortuously and by jerks beneath the shadows of its vaults, he seemed with his human face and his bestial limbs the natural reptile of that humid and somber pavement upon which the shadow of the Romanesque capitals cast so many strange forms. Later on, the first time that he caught hold mechanically of the ropes to the towers and hung suspended from them and set the bell to clanging, it produced upon his adopted father, Claude, the effect of a child whose tongue is unloosed and who begins to speak. It is thus that, little by little, developing always in sympathy with the cathedral, living there, sleeping there, hardly ever leaving it, subject every hour to the mysterious impress, he came to resemble it, he encrusted himself in it, so to speak, and became an integral part of it. His salient angles fitted into the retreating angles of the cathedral, if he may be allowed this figure of speech, and he seemed not only its inhabitant, but more than that, its natural tenant. One might almost say that he had assumed its form, as the snail takes on the form of its shell. It was his dwelling, his whole, his envelope. There existed between him and the old church so profound an instinctive sympathy, so many magnetic affinities, so many material affinities, that he adhered to it somewhat as a tortoise adheres to its shell. The rough and wrinkled cathedral was his shell. It is useless to warn the reader not to take literally all the similes which we are obliged to employ here to express the singular, symmetrical, direct, almost, consubstantial union of a man and an edifice. It is equally unnecessary to state to what a degree that the whole cathedral was familiar to him after so long and so intimate a cohabitation. That dwelling was peculiar to him. It had no depths to which Quasimodo had not penetrated, no height which he had not scaled. He often climbed many stones up the front, aided solely by the uneven points of the carving, the towers on whose exterior surface he was frequently seen clambering like a lizard gliding along a perpendicular wall, those two gigantic twins, so lofty, so menacing, so formidable, possessed for him neither vertigo nor terror nor shocks of amazement. To see them so gentle under his hand, so easy to scale, one would have said that he had tamed them. By dint of leaping, climbing, gambling amid the abysses of the gigantic cathedral, he had become, in some sort, a monkey and a goat, like the Calabrian child who swims before he walks and plays with the sea while still a babe. Moreover, it was not his body alone which seemed fashioned after the cathedral, but his mind also. In what condition was that mind? What bent had it contracted? What form had it assumed beneath that knotted envelope in that savage life? This it would be hard to determine. Quasimodo had been born one-eyed, hunchbacked lame. It was with great difficulty and by dint of great patience that Claude Frollo had succeeded in teaching him to talk. But a fatality was attached to the poor foundling. Bell-ringer of Notre-Dame at the age of 14, a new infirmity had come to complete his misfortunes. The bells had broken the drums of his ears. He had become deaf. The only gate which nature had left wide open for him had been abruptly closed and forever. In closing it had cut off the only ray of joy and of light which still made its way into the soul of Quasimodo. His soul fell into profound night. The wretched being's misery became as incurable and as complete as his deformity. Let us add that his deafness rendered him to some extent dumb. For in order not to make others laugh, the very moment that he found himself to be deaf, he resolved upon a silence which he only broke when he was alone. He voluntarily tied that tongue which Claude Frollo had taken so much pains to unloose. Hence it came about that when necessity constrained him to speak, his tongue was torpid, awkward, and like a door whose hinges had grown rusty. If now we were to try to penetrate to the soul of Quasimodo through that thick hard rind, if we could sound the depths of that badly constructed organism, if it were granted to us to look with a torch behind those non-transparent organs to explore the shadowy interior of that opaque creature to elucidate his obscure corners, his absurd, no thoroughfares, and suddenly to cast a vivid light upon the soul enchained at the extremity of that cave, we should, no doubt, find the unhappy psyche in some poor, cramped and rickety attitude like those prisoners beneath the leads of Venice who grew old bent double in a stone box which was both too low and too short for them. It is certain that the mind becomes atrophied in a defective body. Quasimodo was barely conscious of a soul cast in his own image, moving blindly within him. The impressions of objects underwent a considerable refraction before reaching his mind. His brain was a peculiar medium. The ideas which passed through it were issued forth completely distorted. The reflection which resulted from this refraction was necessarily divergent and perverted. Hence a thousand optical illusions, a thousand aberrations of judgment, a thousand deviations which his thoughts strayed, now mad, now idiotic. The first effect of this fatal organization was to trouble the glance which he cast upon things. He received hardly any immediate perception of them. The external world seemed much farther away to him than it does to us. The second effect of his misfortune was to render him malicious. He was malicious, in fact, because he was savage. He was savage because he was ugly. There was logic in his nature as there is in ours. His strength, so extraordinarily developed, was a cause of still greater malevolence. Malus puer robustus, says Hobbes. This injustice must, however, be rendered to him. Malevolence was not, perhaps, innate in him. From his very first steps among men, he had felt himself, later on he had seen himself, spewed out, blasted, rejected. Human words were for him always a railery or a malediction. As he grew up he had found nothing but hatred around him. He had caught the general malevolence. He had picked up the weapon with which he had been wounded. After all, he turned his face towards men only with reluctance. His cathedral was sufficient for him. It was people with marble figures, kings, saints, bishops, who at least did not burst out laughing in his face, who gazed upon him only with tranquility and kindness. The other statues, those of the monsters and demons, cherished no hatred for him, Quasimodo. He resembled them too much for that. They seemed rather to be scoffing at other men. The saints were his friends and blessed him. The monsters were his friends and guarded him. So he held long communion with them. He sometimes passed whole hours crouching before one of these statues in solitary conversation with it. If anyone came, he fled like a lover surprised in his serenade. And the cathedral was not only society for him, but the universe and all nature beside. He dreamed of no other hedgerows than the painted windows, always in flower. No other shade than that of the foliage of stone which spread out, loaded with birds in the tufts of the Saxon capitals, of no other mountains than the colossal towers of the church, of no other ocean than Paris, roaring at their bases. What he loved above all else in the maternal edifice, that which aroused his soul and made it open its poor wings, which kept it 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 and the spire over the intersection of the aisles and the 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 loved best that child which has caused them the most suffering. It is true that their voice was the only one which he could still hear. On this score, the big bell was his beloved. It was she whom he preferred out of all that family of noisy girls which bustled above him on festival days. This bell was named Marie. She was alone in the southern tower with her sister Jacqueline, a bell of lesser size, shut up in a smaller cage beside hers. This Jacqueline was so called from the name of the wife of Jean Montagueux, who had given it to the church, which had not prevented his going and figuring without his head at Montfaisson. In the second tower there were six other bells, and finally six smaller ones inhabited the bell free over the crossing with the wooden bell, which rang only between after dinner on Good Friday and the morning of the day before Easter. So Quasimodo had 15 bells in his serrallio, but Big Marie was his favorite. No idea can be formed of his delight on days when the grand peal was sounded. At the moment when the archdeacon dismissed him and said, Go, he mounted the spiral staircase of the clock tower faster than anyone else could have descended it. He entered perfectly breathless into the aerial chamber of the great bell. He gazed at her a moment devoutly and lovingly. Then he gently addressed her and patted her with his hand, like a good horse, which is about to set out on a long journey. He pitied her for the trouble she was about to suffer. After these first caresses, he shouted to his assistants, placed in the lower story of the tower to begin. They grasped the ropes, the wheel creaked, the enormous capsule of metal started slowly into motion. Quasimodo followed it with his glance and trembled. The first shock of the clapper and the brazen wall made the framework upon which it was mounted quiver. Quasimodo vibrated with the bell. Va! he cried, with a senseless burst of laughter. However the great movement of the base was accelerated and, in proportion as it described a wider angle, Quasimodo's eye opened also more and more widely, phosphoric and flaming. At length the grand peel began. The whole tower trembled. Woodwork, leads, cut stones all groaned at once from the piles of the foundation to the tree foils of its summit. Then Quasimodo boiled and frothed. He went and came. He trembled from head to foot with the tower. The bell, furious, running riot, presented to the two walls of the tower alternately its brazen throat, whence escaped that tempestuous breath which is audible leagues away. Quasimodo stationed himself in front of this open throat. He crouched and rose with the oscillations of the bell, breathed in this overwhelming breath, gazed by turns at the deep place which swarmed with people two hundred feet below him, and at that enormous brazen tongue which came second after second to howl in his ear. It was the only speech which he understood, the only sound which broke for him the universal silence. He swelled out in it as a bird does in the sun. All of a sudden the frenzy of the bell seized upon him. His look became extraordinary. He lay in wait for the great bell as it passed, as a spider lies in wait for a fly, and flung himself abruptly upon it with might and mane. Then, suspended above the abyss, borne to and fro by the formidable swinging of the bell, he seized the brazen monster by the ear-lapse, pressed it between both knees, spurred it on with his heels, and redoubled the fury of the peel with the whole shock and weight of his body. Meanwhile the tower trembled. He shrieked and gnashed his teeth, his red hair rose erect, his breast heaving like a bellows, his eye flashed flames, the monstrous bell naid panting beneath him. And then it was no longer the great bell of Notre Dame nor Quasimodo. It was a dream, a whirlwind, a tempest, dizziness mounted astride of noise, a spirit clinging to a flying cropper, a strange centaur, half-man, half-bell, a sort of horrible astalphus borne away upon a prodigious hippogriff of living bronze. The presence of this extraordinary being caused, as it were, a breath of life to circulate through the entire cathedral. It seemed as though there escaped from him, at least according to the growing superstitions of the crowd, a mysterious emanation which animated all the stones of Notre Dame, and made the deep bowels of the ancient church to palpitate. It sufficed for people to know that he was there, to make them believe that they beheld the thousand statues of the galleries and the fronts in motion. And the cathedral did indeed seem a docile and obedient creature beneath his hand. It waited on his will to raise its great voice. It was possessed and filled with Quasimodo, as with a familiar spirit. One would have said that he made the immense edifice breathe. He was everywhere about it. In fact, he multiplied himself on all points of the structure. Now, when perceived with a fright at the very top of one of the towers, a fantastic dwarf climbing, riving, crawling on all fours, descending outside above the abyss, leaping from projection to projection and going to ransack the belly of some sculptured gorgon. It was Quasimodo dislodging the crows. Again, in some obscure corner of the church, one came in contact with a sort of living chimera, crouching and scowling. It was Quasimodo engaged in thought. Sometimes one caught sight upon a bell tower, of an enormous head and a bundle of disordered limbs swinging furiously at the end of a rope. It was Quasimodo ringing vespers or the Angelus. Often at night, a hideous form was seen wandering along the frail balustrade of carved lacework which crowns the towers and borders of the circumference of the apse. Again it was the hunchback of Notre Dame. Then, said the women of the neighborhood, the whole church took on something fantastic, supernatural, horrible. Eyes and mouths were open here and there. One heard the dogs, the monsters, and the gargoyles of stone, which keep watch night and day without stretch neck and open jaws around the monstrous cathedral, barking. And, if it was a Christmas Eve, while the great bell, which seemed to emit the death rattle, summoned the faithful to the midnight mass, such an air was spread over the somber façade that one would have declared that the grand portal was devouring the throng and that the rose window was watching it. And all this came from Quasimodo. 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 existed, Notre Dame is today 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. End of Book Four, Chapter Three. Book Four, Chapter Four of the Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Book Four, Chapter Four. The Dog and His Master. Nevertheless, there was one human creature whom Quasimodo accepted from his malice and from his hatred for others, and whom he loved even more, perhaps, than his cathedral. This was Claude Frollo. The matter was simple. Claude Frollo had taken him in, had adopted him, had nourished him, had reared him. When a little lad, it was between Claude Frollo's legs that he was accustomed to seek refuge, when the dogs and the children barked after him. Claude Frollo had taught him to talk, to read, to write. Claude Frollo had finally made him the bell-ringer. Now, to give the big bell in marriage to Quasimodo was to give Juliet to Romeo. Hence, Quasimodo's gratitude was profound, passionate, boundless, and although the visage of his adopted father was often clouded or severe, although his speech was habitually curt, harsh, imperious, that gratitude never wavered for a single moment. The Archdeacon had in Quasimodo the most submissive slave, the most docile lackey, the most vigilant of dogs. When the poor bell-ringer became deaf, there had been established between him and Claude Frollo a language of signs, mysterious and understood by themselves alone. In this manner the Archdeacon was the sole human being with whom Quasimodo had preserved communication. He was in sympathy with but two things in this world, Notre-Dame and Claude Frollo. There is nothing which can be compared with the empire of the Archdeacon over the bell-ringer, with the attachment of the bell-ringer for the Archdeacon. A sign from Claude and the idea of giving him pleasure would have suffice to make Quasimodo hurl himself headlong from the summit of Notre-Dame. It was a remarkable thing, all that physical strength which had reached in Quasimodo such an extraordinary development and which was placed by him blindly at the disposition of another. There was in it, no doubt, filial devotion, domestic attachment. There was also the fascination of one spirit by another spirit. It was a poor, awkward and clumsy organization which stood with lowered head and supplicating eyes before a lofty and profound, a powerful and superior intellect. Lastly, and above all, it was gratitude, gratitude so pushed to its extremist limit that we do not know to what to compare it. This virtue is not one of those of which the finest examples are to be met with among men. We will say then that Quasimodo loved the Archdeacon as never a dog, never a horse, never an elephant, loved his master. End of book four, chapter four.