Notre-Dame de Paris (Oxford World’s Classics) by Victor Hugo

Author:Victor Hugo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1999-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

II

A PRIEST AND A PHILOSOPHER ARE TWO DIFFERENT THINGS

THE priest whom the girls had noticed on top of the north tower, leaning out over the square and so intently watching the gypsy’s dance, was indeed archdeacon Claude Frollo.

Readers will not have forgotten the mysterious cell that the archdeacon had reserved for himself in that tower. (I am not sure, be it said in passing, that it is not the same into which you can still look today through a little square window, open to the east at a man’s height, on the platform from which the towers spring: a squalid chamber, at present bare, empty and dilapidated, the peeling plaster of the walls decorated here and there at the moment with a few sorry engravings of cathedral façades. I assume that this hole is jointly inhabited by bats and spiders, and is consequently the scene of a double war of extermination against flies.)

Every day, an hour before sunset, the archdeacon would climb the tower stairs and shut himself up in this cell, sometimes staying there all night. On that day, just as he arrived outside the low door of the cubby-hole and was inserting in the lock the intricate little key which he always carried with him in the wallet hanging by his side, the sound of tambourine and castanets reached his ear. That sound came from the Place du Parvis. The cell, as already mentioned, had only one window, giving on to the rear of the church. Claude Frollo hurriedly extracted the key, and a moment later was standing on top of the tower in the attitude of sombre meditation in which the young ladies had noticed him.

He stood there grave and motionless, absorbed by one look and one thought. The whole of Paris lay at his feet, with the countless spires of its buildings and its circle of gentle hills on the horizon, with its river winding under the bridges and its people flowing through the streets, with the cloud of smoke rising from its chimneys, with its steep roofs pressing round Notre-Dame in a close-knit chain. But in this whole town the archdeacon was looking at a single point on the ground: the Place du Parvis; in all that crowd, at a single figure: the gypsy girl.

It would be hard to say what kind of look it was, or the source of the flame that sprang from it. The look was fixed, yet turbulent and stormy. And seeing the profound stillness of his whole body, barely stirring at intervals in an involuntary shudder, like a tree in the breeze, his elbows, set more stiffly than the marble on which they rested, the petrified smile contorting his features, one would have said that nothing was still alive in Claude Frollo except his eyes.

The gypsy danced. She whirled her tambourine round on her fingertips, threw it into the air as she danced Provençal sarabands; nimble, light, and joyous, unaware of the fearful look plunging so heavily straight down on to her head.

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