Notre-Dame of Paris by Victor Hugo

Author:Victor Hugo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

TWO

The Difference between a Priest and a Philosopher

THE priest whom the girls had observed on top of the north tower, leaning over the square and so intent on the gypsy’s dancing, was in fact the archdeacon, Claude Frollo.

Our readers will not have forgotten the mysterious cell he had reserved for himself in this tower. (It might, let me say in passing, be the same one whose interior can still be seen today, through a small, square window facing east at eye-level, on the platform from which the towers spring: a garret, now bare, empty and dilapidated, whose badly plastered walls are, at the time of writing, ‘adorned’ here and there with a few wretched yellowed engravings showing the fronts of cathedrals. This hole is, I imagine, inhabited concurrently by bats and spiders, so that a double war of extermination on flies is waged in it.)

Each day, one hour before sunset, the archdeacon used to climb the staircase to the tower and shut himself up in his cell, where he sometimes spent the whole night. On this particular day, just as he reached the low door to his den and was inserting into the lock the intricate small key he always carried on him in the wallet hanging at his side, the sound of a tambourine and of castanets reached him. It came from the square in front of the cathedral. The cell, as we have said, had only one window, overlooking the rear of the church. Claude Frollo hurriedly recovered his key and a moment later he was on top of the tower, in that attitude of sombre concentration in which the young ladies had noticed him.

He stood there, grave and unmoving, absorbed in a look and a thought. The whole of Paris lay at his feet, with the countless spires of its buildings and its circular horizon of gently undulating hills, with the river snaking beneath its bridges and the population rippling through the streets, with its clouds of smoke and the mountain-range of its roofs, pressing in on Notre-Dame like chain-mail. But in that whole town, the archdeacon had eyes for only one point: the Place du Parvis; in that whole crowd, for only one figure: the gypsy.

It would have been hard to say what kind of look it was, and whence the flame came that sprang from it. It was a fixed look, yet full of anxiety and turmoil. And so utterly motionless was his whole body, though stirred imperceptibly now and again by an involuntary tremor, like a tree in the wind, so rigid were his elbows, more marmoreal than the balustrade on which they were propped, so petrified was the smile that contracted his features, that it seemed as if the only part of Claude Frollo which was still alive was his eyes.

The gypsy was dancing. She spun her tambourine round the tip of one finger and tossed it into the air as she danced sarabands from Provence; nimble, light of foot, joyous, she felt nothing of the weight of that formidable stare falling perpendicularly down on her head.

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