Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

pupil, docile, studious, and honourable. But the younger brother, like those young trees which baffle the
efforts of the gardener, and turn obstinately towards that side from which they derive most air and
sunshine—the younger brother increased and waxed great, and sent forth full and luxuriant branches only
on the side of idleness, ignorance, and loose living. He was an unruly little devil, which made Dom
Claude Knit his brows, but also very droll and very cunning, at which the elder was fain to smile. Claude
had consigned him to that same Collége de Torchi in which he himself had passed his earliest years in
study and seclusion; and it grieved him sorely that this retreat, once edified by the name of Frollo, should
be so scandalized by it now. He would sometimes read Jehan long and stern lectures on the subject,
under which the latter bore up courageously—after all, the young rascal’s heart was in the right place, as
all the comedies declare; but the sermon over, he calmly resumed the evil tenor of his ways. Some times
it was a béjaune, or yellow-beak, as they called the newcomers at the University—whom he had
thoroughly badgered as a welcome—a valuable custom which has been carefully handed down to our
day; now he had been the moving spirit of a band of scholars who had thrown themselves in classical
fashion on a tavern, quasi classico excitati, then beaten the tavern-keeper “with cudgels of offensive
character,” and joyously pillaged the tavern, even to staving in the hogsheads of wine. And the result was
a fine report drawn up in Latin, brought by the sub-monitor of the Torchi College to Dom Claude, with
piteous mien, the which bore the melancholy marginal remark, Rixa; prima causa vinum optimum
potatum. 49 Finally, it was said—horrible in a lad of sixteen—that his backslidings frequently extended
to the Rue de Glatigny. 50
In consequence of all this, Claude—saddened, his faith in human affection shaken—threw himself with
frenzied ardour into the arms of science, that sister who at least never laughs at you in derision, and who
always repays you, albeit at times in somewhat light coin, for the care you have lavished on her. He
became, therefore, more and more erudite, and, as a natural consequence, more and more rigid as a
priest, less and less cheerful as a man. In each of us there are certain parallels between our mind, our
manners, and our characters which develop in unbroken continuity, and are only shaken by the great
cataclysms of life.
Claude Frollo, having in his youth gone over the entire circle of human knowledge, positive, external,
and lawful, was under the absolute necessity, unless he was to stop ubi defuit orbis, 51 of going farther
afield in search of food for the insatiable appetite of his mind. The ancient symbol of the serpent biting
its tail is especially appropriate to learning, as Claude Frollo had evidently proved. Many trustworthy
persons asserted that, after having exhausted the fas of human knowledge, he had had the temerity to
penetrate into the nefas, had tasted in succession all the apples of the Tree of Knowledge, and, whether
from hunger or disgust, had finished by eating of the forbidden fruit. He had taken his seat by turns, as
the reader has seen, at the conferences of the theologians at the Sorbonne, at the disputations of the
decretalists near the image of Saint-Martin, at the meetings of the Faculty of Arts near the image of
Saint-Hilary, at the confabulations of the physicians near the bénitier of Notre Dame, ad cupam
Nostræ-Dominæ all the viands, permitted and approved which those four great kitchens, called the four
Faculties, could prepare and set before the intelligence, he had devoured, and satiety had come upon him
before his hunger was appeased. Then he had penetrated farther afield, had dug deeper, underneath all
that finit, material, limited knowledge; he had risked his soul, and had seated himself at that mystic table
of the Alchemists, the Astrologers, the Hermetics of which Averroës, Guillaume de Paris, and Nicolas
Flamel occupy one end in the Middle Ages, and which reaches back in the East, under the rays of the
seven-branched candlestick, to Solomon, Pythagoras, and Zoroaster.