The couple shared in the neighbourhood the fate of those poets of whom Régnier says:
“Toutes sortes de gens vont après les poètes,
Comme après les hiboux vont criant les fauvettes.”1
Now some ill-conditioned monkey would risk his skin and bones for the ineffable pleasure of sticking a pin in Quasimodo’s hump, or some pretty wench, with more freedom and impudence than was seemly, would brush the priest’s black robe, thrusting her face into his, while she sang the naughty song beginning:
“Niche, niche, le diable est pris!”2
Anon, a group of squalid old women, crouching in the shade on the steps of a porch, would abuse the Archdeacon and the bell-ringer roundly as they passed, or hurl after them with curses the flattering remark: “There goes one whose soul is like the other one’s body!” Or, another time, it would be a band of scholars playing at marbles or hopscotch who would rise in a body and salute them in classical manner, with some Latin greeting such as “Eia! Eia! Claudius cum claudo!”3
But, as a rule, these amenities passed unheeded by either the priest or the bell-ringer. Quasimodo was too deaf, and Claude too immersed in thought to hear them.
______________________
1
All sorts of people run after the poets,
As after the owls fly screaming the linnets.
2 Hide, hide, the devil is caught!
3 Ho! ho! Claude with the cripple!
BOOK V
Chapter 1 - The Abbot of Saint-Martin’s
The fame of Dom Claude Frollo had spread abroad. To it, just about the time of his refusal to encounter the Lady of Beaujeu, he owed a visit which remained long in his memory.
It happened one evening. Claude had just retired after the evening office to his canonical cell in the cloister of Notre-Dame. Beyond a few glass phials pushed away into a corner and containing some powder which looked suspiciously like an explosive, the cell had nothing noteworthy or mysterious about it. Here and there were some inscriptions on the walls, but they consisted purely of learned axioms or pious extracts from worthy authors. The Archdeacon had just seated himself at a huge oak chest covered with manuscripts, and lighted by a three-armed brass lamp. He leaned his elbow on an open tome: Honorius of Autun’s De pr?destinatione et libero arbitrio, 2 while he musingly turned over the leaves of a printed folio he had just brought over, the sole production of the printing-press which stood in his cell. His reverie was broken by a knock at the door.
“Who’s there?” called the scholar in the friendly tone of a famished dog disturbed over a bone.
“A friend—Jacques Coictier,” answered a voice outside.
He rose and opened the door.
It was, in fact, the King’s physician, a man of some fifty years, the hardness of whose expression was somewhat mitigated by a look of great cunning. He was accompanied by another man. Both wore long, slate-gray, squirrel-lined robes, fastened from top to bottom and belted round the middle, and caps of the same stuff and colour. Their hands disappeared in their sleeves, their feet under their robes, and their eyes under their caps.
“God save me, messire!” said the Archdeacon, as he admitted them; “I was far from expecting so flattering a visit at this late hour.” And while he spoke thus courteously, he glanced suspiciously and shrewdly from the physician to his companion.
“It is never too late to pay a visit to so eminent a scholar as Dom Claude Frollo of Tirechappe,” replied Doctor Coictier, whose Burgundian accent let his sentences trail along with all the majestic effect of a long-trained robe.
The physician and the Archdeacon then embarked upon one of those congratulatory prologues with which, at that period, it was customary to usher in every conversation between scholars, which did not prevent them most cordially detesting one another. For the rest, it is just the same to-day; the mouth of every scholar who compliments another is a vessel full of honeyed gall.
The felicitations addressed by Claude to Jacques Coictier alluded chiefly to the numerous material advantages the worthy physician had succeeded in extracting, in the course of his much-envied career, from each illness of the King—a surer and more profitable kind of alchemy than the pursuit of the philosopher’s stone.
“Truly, Doctor Coictier, I was greatly rejoiced to learn of the promotion of your nephew, my reverend Superior, Pierre Versé, to a bishopric. He is made Bishop of Amiens, is he not?”
“Yes, Monsieur the Archdeacon, it is a gracious and merciful gift of the Lord.”
“Let me tell you you made a brave show on Christmas-day at the head of your company of the Chamber of Accountants, Monsieur the President.”
“Vice-President, Dom Claude. Alas! nothing more.”
“How fares it with your superb mansion in the Rue Saint-Andry des Arcs? It is in very truth a Louvre! And I am much taken by the apricot-tree sculptured on the door, with the pleasant play of words inscribed beneath it, ’A L’Abri-Cotier.”’
“Well, well, Ma?tre Claude, all this masons’ work costs me dearly. In the same measure as my house rises higher, my funds sink lower.”
“Oho! Have you not your revenues from the jail, and the provostship of the Palais de Justice, and the rents from all the houses, workshops, booths, and market-stalls within the circuit of Paris? That is surely an excellent milch cow.”
“My castellany of Poissy has not brought me in a sou this year.”
“But your toll dues at Triel, Saint-James, and Saint-Germain-en-Laye—they are always profitable?”
“Six times twenty livres only, and not even Paris money at that.”
“But you have your appointment as Councillor to the King—that means a fixed salary surely?”
“Yes, Colleague Claude, but that cursed Manor of Poligny, they make such a coil about, is not worth more to me than sixty gold crowns—taking one year with another.”
The compliments which Dom Claude thus addressed to Jacques Coictier were uttered in that tone of veiled, bitter, sardonic raillery, with that grievous, yet cruel, smile of a superior and unfortunate man, who seeks a moment’s distraction in playing on the gross vanity of the vulgarly prosperous man. The other was quite unconscious of it.
“By my soul!” said Claude at last, pressing his hand, “I rejoice to see you in such excellent health.”
“Thank you, Ma?tre Claude.”
“Speaking of health,” cried Dom Claude, “how is your royal patient?”
“He does not pay his doctor sufficiently well,” said the physician with a side glance at his companion.
“Do you really think that, friend Coictier?” said the stranger.
These words, uttered in a tone of surprise and reproach, recalled the Archdeacon’s attention to the stranger’s presence, though, to tell the truth, he had never, from the moment he crossed the threshold, quite turned away from this unknown guest. Indeed, it required the thousand reasons Claude had for humouring the all-powerful physician of Louis XI to make him consent to receive him thus accompanied. Therefore, his expression was none of the friendliest when Jacques Coictier said to him:
“By-the-bye, Dom Claude, I have brought a colleague, who was most desirous of seeing one of whom he has heard so much.”
“Monsieur is a scholar?” asked the Archdeacon, fixing Coictier’s companion with a penetrating eye. But from under the brows of the stranger he met a glance not less keen or less suspicious than his own.
He was, so far as one could judge by the feeble rays of the lamp, a man of about sixty, of middle height, and apparently ailing and broken. His face, although the features were sufficiently commonplace, had something commanding and severe; his eye glittered under the deep arch of his brow like a beacon-light far down a cavern; and under the cap, pulled down almost to his nose, one divined instinctively the broad forehead of a genius.
He took upon himself to answer the archdeacon’s inquiry.
“Reverend sir,” said he in grave tones, “your fame has reached me, and I was desirous of consulting you. I am but a poor gentleman from the provinces who takes the shoes off his feet before entering the presence of the learned. I must acquaint you with my name: they call me Compère2 Tourangeau.”
“Singular name for a gentleman,” thought the Archdeacon. Nevertheless, he felt himself in the presence of something powerful and commanding. The instinct of his high intelligence led him to suspect one no less high beneath the fur-trimmed cap of Compère Tourangeau; and as he scrutinized that quiet figure, the sneering smile that twitched round the corners of his morose mouth as he talked to Coictier faded slowly away, like the sunset glow from an evening sky.
He had seated himself again, gloomy and silent, in his great arm-chair, his elbow had resumed its accustomed place on the table, his head leaning on his hand.
After a few moments of deep reflection, he signed to his two visitors to be seated, and then addressed himself to Compère Tourangeau.
“You came to consult me, sir, and on what subject?”
“Your Reverence,” answered Tourangeau, “I am sick, very sick. Rumour says you are a great ?sculapius, and I am come to ask your advice as to a remedy.”
“A remedy!” exclaimed the Archdeacon, shaking his head. He seemed to consider for a moment, and then resumed: “Compère Tourangeau—since that is your name—turn your head. You will find my answer written on the wall.”
Tourangeau did as he was bid, and read the following inscription on the wall, above his head: “Medicine is the daughter of dreams.—Iamblichus.”
Doctor Jacques Coictier had listened to his companion’s question with a vexation which Dom Claude’s answer only served to increase. He now leaned over to Tourangeau and whispered, too low for the Archdeacon’s ear: “Did I not warn you that he was a crack-brained fool? You were set upon seeing him.”
“But it might very well be that he is right in his opinion, this madman, Doctor Jacques,” returned his friend in the same tone, and with a bitter smile.
“Just as you please,” answered Coictier dryly. “You are very quick in your decision, Dom Claude, and Hippocrates apparently presents no more difficulties to you than a nut to a monkey. Medicine a dream! I doubt if the apothecaries and doctors, were they here, could refrain from stoning you. So you deny the influence of philters on the blood, of unguents on the flesh? You deny the existence of that eternal pharmacy of flowers and metals which we call the World, created expressly for the benefit of that eternal invalid we call Man!”
“I deny the existence,” answered Dom Claude coldly, “neither of the pharmacy nor the invalid. I deny that of the physician.”
“Then, I presume it is not true,” Coictier went on with rising heat, “that gout is an internal eruption; that a shot-wound may be healed by the outward application of a roasted mouse; that young blood, injected in suitable quantities, will restore youth to aged veins; it is not true that two and two make four, and that emprosthotonos follows upon opisthotonos?”
“There are certain matters about which I think in a certain way,” the Archdeacon replied unmoved.
Coictier flushed an angry red.
“Come, come, my good Coictier, do not let us get angry,” said Compère Tourangeau, “the reverend Archdeacon is our host.”
Coictier calmed down, but growled to himself: “He’s a madman, for all that.”
“Pasque Dieu!” resumed Tourangeau, after a short silence; “you put me in a very embarrassing position, Ma?tre Claude. I looked to obtaining two opinions from you, one as to my health, the other as to my star.”
“Monsieur,” returned the Archdeacon, “if that is your idea, you would have done better not to waste your health in mounting my stairs. I do not believe in medicine, and I do not believe in astrology.”
“Is that so?” exclaimed the good man in surprise.
Coictier burst into a forced laugh.
“You must admit now that he’s mad,” he said in low tones to Tourangeau; “he does not believe in astrology.”
“How can any one possibly believe,” continued Dom Claude, “that every ray of a star is a thread attached to a man’s head?”
“And what do you believe in then?” cried Tourangeau.
The Archdeacon hesitated for a moment, then, with a sombre smile which seemed to give the lie to his words, he answered, “Credo in Deum.”
“Dominum nostrum,” added Tourangeau, making the sign of the cross.
“Amen,” said Coictier.
“Reverend sir,” resumed Tourangeau, “I am charmed to my soul to find you so firm in the faith. But, erudite scholar that you are, have you reached the point of no longer believing in science?”
“No!” cried the Archdeacon, grasping Tourangeau’s arm, while a gleam of enthusiasm flashed in his sunken eye; “no, I do not deny science. I have not crawled so long on my belly with my nails dug in the earth through all the innumerable windings of that dark mine, without perceiving in the far distance—at the end of the dim passage—a light, a flame, a something; the reflection, no doubt, from that dazzling central laboratory in which the patient and the wise have come upon God.”
“And finally,” interrupted Tourangeau, “what do you hold for true and certain?”
“Alchemy!”
Coictier exclaimed aloud, “Pardieu, Dom Claude, there is doubtless much truth in alchemy, but why blaspheme against medicine and astrology?”
“Null is your science of man, your science of the heavens null,” said the Archdeacon imperiously.
“But that’s dealing hardly with Epidaurus and Chaldea,” returned the physician with a sneering laugh.
“Listen, Messire Jacques. I speak in all good faith. I am not physician to the King, and his Majesty did not give me a Labyrinth in which to observe the constellations. Nay, be not angry, but listen to what I say: what truths have you extracted from the study—I will not say of medicine, which is too foolish a matte—but from astrology? Explain to me the virtues of the vertical boustrophedon,3 or the treasures contained in the numeral ziruph, and in those of the numeral zephirod.”
“Will you deny,” said Coictier, “the sympathetic influence of the clavicula, and that it is the key to all cabalistic science?”
“Errors, Messire Jacques! None of your formulas have anything definite to show, whereas alchemy has its actual discoveries. Can you contest such results as these, for instance—ice, buried underground for two thousand years, is converted into rock crystal; lead is the progenitor of all metals (for gold is not a metal, gold is light); lead requires but four periods of two hundred years each to pass successively from the condition of lead to that of red arsenic, from red arsenic to tin, from tin to silver. Are these facts, or are they not? But to believe in the clavicula, in the mystic significance of the junction of two lines, in the stars, is as ridiculous as to believe, like the inhabitants of Cathay, that the oriole changes into a mole, and grains of wheat into carp-like fish.”
“I have studied hermetics,” cried Coictier, “and I affirm—”
