Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

The case was simple enough. Claude Frollo had rescued him, had adopted him, fed him, brought him
up. When he was little, it was between Claude Frollo’s knees that he sought refuge from the children and
the dogs that ran yelping after him. Claude Frollo had taught him to speak, to read, to write. Finally, it
was Claude Frollo who made him bell-ringer of Notre Dame; and to give the great bell in marriage to
Quasimodo was giving Juliet to Romeo.
And in return, Quasimodo’s gratitude was deep, passionate, and boundless; and although the
countenance of his adopted father was often clouded and severe, although his speech was habitually
brief, harsh, imperious, never for one single moment did that gratitude falter. In Quasimodo the
Archdeacon possessed the most submissive of slaves, the most obedient of servants, the most vigilant of
watch-dogs. When the poor bell-ringer became deaf, between him and Claude Frollo there had been
established a mysterious language of sings, intelligible to them alone. In this way, then, the Archdeacon
was the sole human being with whom Quasimodo had preserved a communication. There were but two
things in this world with which he had any connection: Claude Frollo and the Cathedral.
The empire of the Archdeacon over the bell-ringer, and the bell-ringer’s attachment to the Archdeacon,
were absolutely unprecedented. A sign from Claude, or the idea that it would give him a moment’s
pleasure, and Quasimodo would have cheerfully cast himself from the top of Notre Dame. There was
something remarkable in all that physical force, so extraordinarily developed in Quasimodo, being placed
by him blindly at the disposal of another. In it there was doubtless much filial devotion, of the attachment
of the servant; but there was also the fascination exercised by one mind over another; it was a poor,
feeble, awkward organism standing with bent head and supplicating eyes in the presence of a lofty,
penetrating, and commanding intellect. Finally, and before all things, it was gratitude—gratitude pushed
to such extreme limits that we should be at a loss for a comparison. That virtue is not one of those of
which the brightest examples are to be found in man. Let us then say that Quasimodo loved the
Archdeacon as never dog, never horse, never elephant loved his master.
V. Further Particulars of Claude Frollo
IN 1482 Quasimodo was about twenty, Claude Frollo about thirty-six. The one had grown up, the other
had grown old.
Claude Frollo was no longer the simple-minded scholar of the Torchi college, the tender guardian of a
little child, the young and dreamy philosopher, who knew many things, but was ignorant of more. He
was a priest—austere, grave, morose—having a cure of souls; Monsieur the Archdeacon of Josas; second
acolyte to the Bishop; having the charge of the two deaneries of Montlhéry and Châteaufort, and of a
hundred and seventy-four rural clergy. He was an imposing and sombre personage, before whom the
chorister boys in alb and tunic, the brethren of Saint-Augustine, and the clerics on early morning duty at
Notre Dame, quailed and trembled, when he passed slowly under the high Gothic arches of the
choir—stately, deep in thought, with folded arms, and his head bent so low upon his breast that nothing
was visible of his face but his high bald forehead.
Dom 48 Claude Frollo, however, had abandoned neither science nor the education of his young
brother—the two occupations of his life. But in the course of time some bitterness had mingled with
these things he once had thought so sweet. With time, says Paul Diacre, even the best bacon turns rancid.
Little Jehan Frollo, surnamed “of the Mill” from the place where he had been nursed, had not grown in
the direction in which Claude would have wished to train him. The elder brother had counted on a pious