Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

four faculties. Life for this young man seemed to have but one aim and object—knowledge.
It was just about this time that the excessive heat of the summer of 1466 caused the outbreak of that
great pestilence which carried off more than forty thousand people in the jurisdiction of Paris, among
others, says Jean de Troyes, “Maître Arnoul, the King’s astrologer, a right honest man, both wise and
merry withal.” The rumour spread through the University that the Rue Tirechappe had been specially
devastated by the malady. It was here, in the middle of their fief, that Claude’s parents dwelt. Much
alarmed, the young student hastened forthwith to his father’s house, only to find that both father and
mother had died the previous day. An infant brother, in swaddling-clothes, was still alive and lay wailing
and abandoned in the cradle. This was all that remained to Claude of his family. The young man took the
child in his arms and went thoughtfully away. Hitherto he had lived only in the world of Learning; now
he was to begin living in the world of Life.
This catastrophe was a turning point in Claude Frollo’s existence. An orphan, an elder brother, and the
head of his house at nineteen, he felt himself rudely recalled from the reveries of the school to the
realities of the world. It was then that, moved with pity, he was seized with a passionate devotion for this
infant brother. How strange and sweet a thing this human affection to him, who had never yet loved
aught but books!
This affection waxed strong to a singular degree; in a soul so new to passion, it was like a first love.
Separated since his childhood from his parents whom he had scarcely known; cloistered and immured, as
it were, in his books, eager before all things to study, to learn; attentive hitherto only to his intellect
which expanded in science, to his imagination which grew with his literary studies, the poor scholar had
not yet had time to feel that he had a heart. This young brother, without mother or father, this helpless
babe, suddenly fallen from the skies into his arms, made a new man of him. He perceived for the first
time that there were other things in the world besides the speculations of the Sorbonne and the verses of
Homer; that Man has need of the affections; that life without tenderness and without love is a piece of
heartless mechanism, insensate, noisy, wearisome. Only, he imagined, being as yet at the age when one
illusion is replaced merely by another illusion, that the affections of blood and kindred were the only
ones necessary, and the love for a little brother was sufficient to fill his whole existence.
He threw himself, therefore, into the love of his little Jehan with all the passion of a character already
profound, ardent, and concentrated. The thought of this poor, pretty, rosy, golden-haired creature, this
orphan with another orphan for its sole support, moved him to the heart’s core, and like the earnest
thinker that he was, he began to reflect upon Jehan with a sense of infinite compassion. He lavished all
his solicitude upon him as upon something very fragile, very specially recommended to his care. He
became more than a brother to the babe: he became a mother.
Little Jehan having still been at the breast when he lost his mother, Claude put him out at nurse. Besides
the fief of Tirechappe, he inherited from his father that of Moulin, which was held of the square tower of
Gentilly. It was a mill standing upon rising ground, near the Castle of Winchestre, the present Bicêtre.
The miller’s wife was suckling a fine boy at the time; the mill was not far from the University, and
Claude carried his little Jehan to her himself.
Thenceforward, feeling he had a heavy responsibility on his shoulders, he took life very seriously. The
thought of his little brother not only became his recreation from study, but the chief object of those
studies. He resolved to devote himself wholly to the future of that being for whom he was answerable
before God, and never to have any other spouse, any other child than the happiness and welfare of his