Arrived in the lofty cage of the bells, Quasimodo gazed for some time with a sorrowful shake of the head at his six singing birds, as if he mourned over something alien that had come between him and his old loves. But when he had set them going, when he felt the whole cluster of bells move under his hands, when he saw—for he could not hear it—the palpitating octave ascending and descending in that enormous diapason, like a bird fluttering from bough to bough—when the demon of music, with his dazzling shower of stretti, trills, and arpeggios, had taken possession of the poor deaf creature, then he became happy once more, he forgot his former woes, and as the weight lifted from his heart his face lit up with joy.
To and fro he hurried, clapped his hands, ran from one rope to the other, spurring on his six singers with mouth and hands, like the conductor of an orchestra urging highly trained musicians.
“Come, Gabrielle,” said he, “come now, pour all thy voice into the Place, to-day is high festival. Thibauld, bestir thyself, thou art lagging behind; on with thee, art grown rusty, sluggard? That is well—quick! quick! let not the clapper be seen. Make them all deaf like me. That’s the way, my brave Thibauld! Guillaume! Guillaume! thou art the biggest, and Pasquier is the smallest, and yet Pasquier works better than thou. I warrant that those who can hear would say so too. Right so, my Gabrielle! louder, louder! Hey! you two up there, you sparrows, what are you about? I do not see you make the faintest noise? What ails those brazen beaks of yours that look to be yawning when they should be singing? Up, up, to your work! ’Tis the Feast of the Annunciation. The sun shines bright, and we’ll have a merry peal. What, Guillaume! Out of breath, my poor fat one!”
He was entirely absorbed in urging on his bells, the whole six of them rearing and shaking their polished backs like a noisy team of Spanish mules spurred forward by the cries of the driver.
Happening, however, to glance between the large slate tiles which cover, up to a certain height, the perpendicular walls of the steeple, he saw down in the square a fantastically dressed girl spreading out a carpet, on which a little goat came and took up its position and a group of spectators formed a circle round. This sight instantly changed the current of his thoughts, and cooled his musical enthusiasm as a breath of cold air congeals a stream of flowing resin. He stood still, turned his back on the bells, and crouching down behind the slate eaves fixed on the dancer that dreamy, tender, and softened look which once already had astonished the Archdeacon. Meanwhile the neglected bells suddenly fell silent, to the great disappointment of lovers of carillons who were listening in all good faith from the Pont-au-Change, and now went away as surprised and disgusted as a dog that has been offered a bone and gets a stone instead.
Chapter 4 - Fate
One fine morning in this same month of March—it was Saturday, the 29th, St. Eustache’s Day, I think—our young friend, Jehan Frollo of the Mill, discovered, while putting on his breeches, that his purse gave forth no faintest chink of coin. “Poor purse!” said he, drawing it out of his pocket, “what, not a single little parisis? How cruelly have dice, Venus, and pots of beer disembowelled thee! Behold thee empty, wrinkled, and flabby, like the bosom of a fury! I would ask you, Messer Cicero and Messer Seneca, whose dogeared volumes I see scattered upon the floor, of what use is it for me to know better than any master of the Mint or a Jew of the Pont-au-Changeurs, that a gold crown piece is worth thirty-five unzain at twenty-five sous eight deniers parisis each, if I have not a single miserable black liard to risk upon the double-six? Oh, Consul Cicero! this is not a calamity from which one can extricate one’s self by periphrases—by quemadmodum, and verum enim vero!”
He completed his toilet dejectedly. An idea occurred to him as he was lacing his boots which he at first rejected: it returned, however, and he put on his vest wrong side out, a sure sign of a violent inward struggle. At length he cast his cap vehemently on the ground, and exclaimed: “Be it so! the worst has come to the worst—I shall go to my brother. I shall catch a sermon, I know, but also I shall catch a crown piece.”
He threw himself hastily into his fur-edged gown, picked up his cap, and rushed out with an air of desperate resolve.
He turned down the Rue de la Harpe towards the City. Passing the Rue de la Huchette, the odour wafted from those splendid roasting-spits which turned incessantly, tickled his olfactory nerves, and he cast a lustful eye into the Cyclopean kitchen which once extorted from the Franciscan monk, Calatigiron, the pathetic exclamation: “Veramente, queste rotisscrie sono cosa stupenda!” But Jehan had not the wherewithal to obtain a breakfast, so with a profound sigh he passed on under the gateway of the Petit-Chatelet, the enormous double trio of massive towers guarding the entrance to the City.
He did not even take time to throw the customary stone at the dishonoured statue of that Perinet Leclerc who betrayed the Paris of Charles VI to the English, a crime which his effigy, its face all battered with stones and stained with mud, expiated during three centuries at the corner of the streets de la Harpe and de Bussy, as on an everlasting pillory.
Having crossed the Petit-Pont and walked down the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, Jehan de Molendino found himself in front of Notre-Dame. Then all his indecision returned, and he circled for some minutes round the statue of “Monsieur Legris,” repeating to himself with a tortured mind:
“The sermon is certain, the florin is doubtful.”
He stopped a beadle who was coming from the cloister. “Where is Monsieur the Archdeacon of Josas?”
“In his secret cell in the tower, I believe,” answered the man; “but I counsel you not to disturb him, unless you come from some one such as the Pope or the King himself.”
Jehan clapped his hands.
“Bédiable! what a magnificent chance for seeing the famous magician’s cave!”
This decided him, and he advanced resolutely through the little dark doorway, and began to mount the spiral staircase of Saint-Gilles, which leads to the upper stories of the tower.
“We shall see!” he said as he proceeded. “By the pangs of the Virgin! it must be a curious place, this cell which my reverend brother keeps so strictly concealed. They say he lights up hell’s own fires there on which to cook the philosopher’s stone. Bédieu! I care no more for the philosopher’s stone than for a pebble; and I’d rather find on his furnace an omelet of Easter eggs in lard, than the biggest philosopher’s stone in the world!”
Arrived at the gallery of the colonnettes, he stopped a moment to take breath and to call down ten million cartloads of devils on the interminable stairs. He then continued his ascent by the narrow doorway of the northern tower, now prohibited to the public. A moment or two after passing the belfry, he came to a small landing in a recess with a low Gothic door under the vaulted roof, while a loophole opposite in the circular wall of the staircase enabled him to distinguish its enormous lock and powerful iron sheeting. Any one curious to inspect this door at the present day will recognise it by this legend inscribed in white letters on the black wall: “J’adore Coralie, 1823. Signé, Ugène.” (This signé is included in the inscription.)
“Whew!” said the scholar; “this must be it.”
The key was in the lock, the door slightly ajar; he gently pushed it open and poked his head round it.
The reader is undoubtedly acquainted with the works of Rembrandt—the Shakespeare of painting. Among the many wonderful engravings there is one etching in particular representing, as is supposed, Doctor Faustus, which it is impossible to contemplate without measureless admiration. There is a gloomy chamber; in the middle stands a table loaded with mysterious and repulsive objects—death’s heads, spheres, alembics, compasses, parchments covered with hieroglyphics. Behind this table, which hides the lower part of him, stands the Doctor wrapped in a wide gown, his head covered by a fur cap reaching to his eyebrows. He has partly risen from his immense arm-chair, his clenched fists are leaning on the table, while he gazes in curiosity and terror at a luminous circle of magic letters shining on the wall in the background like the solar spectrum in a camera obscura. This cabalistic sun seems actually to scintillate, and fills the dim cell with its mysterious radiance. It is horrible and yet beautiful.
Something very similar to Faust’s study presented itself to Jehan’s view as he ventured his head through the half-open door. Here, too, was a sombre, dimly lighted cell, a huge arm-chair, and a large table, compasses, alembics, skeletons of animals hanging from the ceiling, a celestial globe rolling on the floor, glass phials full of quivering gold-leaf, skulls lying on sheets of vellum covered with figures and written characters, thick manuscripts open and piled one upon another regardless of the creased corners of the parchment; in short, all the rubbish of science—dust and cobwebs covering the whole heap. But there was no circle of luminous letters, no doctor contemplating in ecstasy the flamboyant vision as an eagle gazes at the sun.
Nevertheless the cell was not empty. A man was seated in the arm-chair, leaning over the table. Jehan could see nothing but his broad shoulders and the back of his head; but he had no difficulty in recognising that bald head, which nature seemed to have provided with a permanent tonsure, as if to mark by this external sign the irresistible clerical vocation of the Archdeacon.
Thus Jehan recognised his brother; but the door had been opened so gently that Dom Claude was unaware of his presence. The prying little scholar availed himself of this opportunity to examine the cell for a few minutes at his ease. A large furnace, which he had not remarked before, was to the left of the arm-chair under the narrow window. The ray of light that penetrated through this opening traversed the circular web of a spider, who had tastefully woven her delicate rosace in the pointed arch of the window and now sat motionless in the centre of this wheel of lace. On the furnace was a disordered accumulation of vessels of every description, stone bottles, glass retorts, and bundles of charcoal. Jehan observed with a sigh that there was not a single cooking utensil.
In any case there was no fire in the furnace, nor did any appear to have been lighted there for a long time. A glass mask which Jehan noticed among the alchemistic implements, used doubtless to protect the archdeacon’s face when he was engaged in compounding some deadly substance, lay forgotten in a corner, thick with dust. Beside it lay a pair of bellows equally dusty, the upper side of which bore in letters of copper the motto: “Spiro, spero.”1
Following the favourite custom of the hermetics, the walls were inscribed with many legends of this description; some traced in ink, others engraved with a metal point; Gothic characters, Hebrew, Greek and Roman, pell-mell; inscribed at random, overlapping each other, the more recent effacing the earlier ones, and all interlacing and mingled like the branches of a thicket or the pikes in a mêlée. And, in truth, it was a confused fray between all the philosophies, all the schemes, the wisdom of the human mind. Here and there one shone among the others like a banner among the lanceheads, but for the most part they consisted of some brief Latin or Greek sentence, so much in favour in the Middle Ages, such as: “Unde? Inde?—Homo homini monstrum.—Astra, castra.—Nomen, numen.— Mega biblion, mega kakon.—Sapere aude.—Flat ubi vult,” etc.2 Or sometimes a word devoid of all meaning as 'Alagcofagia which perhaps concealed some bitter allusion to the rules of the cloister; sometimes a simple maxim of monastic discipline set forth in a correct hexameter: “C?lestem Dominum, terrestrem dicite domnum.”3 Here and there, too, were obscure Hebrew passages, of which Jehan, whose Greek was already of the feeblest, understood nothing at all; and the whole crossed and recrossed in all directions with stars and triangles, human and animal figures, till the wall of the cell looked like a sheet of paper over which a monkey has dragged a pen full of ink.
Altogether the general aspect of the study was one of complete neglect and decay; and the shocking condition of the implements led inevitably to the conclusion that their owner had long been diverted from his labours by pursuits of some other kind.
The said owner, meanwhile, bending over a vast manuscript adorned with bizarre paintings, appeared to be tormented by some idea which incessantly interrupted his meditations. So at least Jehan surmised as he listened to his musing aloud, with the intermittent pauses of a person talking in his dreams.
“Yes,” he exclaimed, “Manou said it, and Zoroaster taught the same! the sun is born of fire, the moon of the sun. Fire is the soul of the Great All, its elementary atoms are diffused and constantly flowing by an infinity of currents throughout the universe. At the points where these currents cross each other in the heavens, they produce light; at their points of intersection in the earth, they produce gold. Light—gold; it is the same thing—fire in its concrete state; merely the difference between the visible and the palpable, the fluid and the solid in the same substance, between vapour and ice—nothing more. This is no dream; it is the universal law of Nature. But how to extract from science the secret of this universal law? What! this light that bathes my hand is gold! All that is necessary is to condense by a certain law these same atoms dilated by certain other laws! Yes; but how? Some have thought of burying a ray of sunshine. Averro?s—yes, it was Averro?s—buried one under the first pillar to the left of the sanctuary of the Koran, in the great Mosque of Cordova; but the vault was not to be opened to see if the operation was successful under eight thousand years.”
“Diable!” said Jehan to himself, “rather a long time to wait for a florin!”
“Others have thought,” continued the Archdeacon musingly, “that it were better to experiment upon a ray from Sirius. But it is difficult to obtain this ray pure, on account of the simultaneous presence of other stars whose rays mingle with it. Flamel considers it simpler to operate with terrestrial fire. Flamel! there’s predestination in the very name! Flamma! yes, fire—that is all. The diamond exists already in the charcoal, gold in fire— But how to extract it? Magistri affirms that there are certain female names which possess so sweet and mysterious a charm, that it suffices merely to pronounce them during the operation. Let us see what Manou says on the subject: ’Where women are held in honour, the gods are well pleased: where they are despised, it is useless to pray to God. The mouth of a woman is constantly pure; it is as a running stream, as a ray of sunshine. The name of a woman should be pleasing, melodious, and give food to the imagination—should end in long vowels, and sound like a benediction.’ Yes, yes, the sage is right; for example, Maria—Sophia—Esmeral— Damnation! Ever that thought!”
