He had fallen to his knees, and gazed upon her with an eye of fire.
"Dost thou hear? I love thee!" he repeated.
"Ah! What love!" exclaimed the unhappy creature, shuddering.
"The love of the damned," he replied.-- Notre-Dame de Paris
We meet him in the year 1482 -- Dom Claude Frollo, the Archdeacon of Josas, second chaplain to the Bishop. He is a grave, austere, somber man. At thirty-six years old, he is already almost completely bald; "but in his deep-sunk eyes there was an expression of extraordinary youth, ardent life, and profound passion." On the surface, Claude Frollo is cold and imperious; but stoicism does not come easily to him, and at every keen or penetrating word he pales, he flushes, he shudders; he grapples in vain with his composure. It is difficult at times to discern exactly what emotion he is at such pains to suppress, but the struggle itself bears no doubt. The Archdeacon is miserable, and it seems that even his God disdains to take pity.
But whence this misery? Or, in the more expressive words of Hugo, "Whence was that broad bald brow, that head always bent down, that bosom forever heaved by sighs? What secret thought caused his lips to smile with such a bitter expression, at the very moment when his knitted brows approached one another like two bulls preparing for the fight? Why was the remnant of his hair already gray? What inward fire was it that at times burst from his eyes, so as to make them look like holes perforated in the wall of a furnace?" Dom Claude had not always been such a desperate and tormented soul; in fact, he was for many years nothing more than a solemnly thoughtful philosopher, learned, to be sure, but still in some measure innocent. What had changed?
From boyhood, Claude Frollo was destined by his parents for the church; they placed him in the Collège de Torchi, where he studied with exceptional alacrity. "The first scholar whom the Abbé of Saint-Pierre-de-Val, at the moment of commencing his lecture on the canon law, received invariably stationed opposite to his chair [...] was Claude Frollo, provided with his ink-horn, chewing his pen, scribbling upon his knee, and in winter blowing his fingers. The first auditor whom Messire Miles d'Isliers, doctor in divinity, saw entering every Monday morning, quite out of breath, on opening the door of the school of Chef-Saint-Denis, was Claude Frollo." He studied theology and philosophy; medicine and the liberal arts; Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. "It seemed to the young man as if life had but one object, namely, to learn."
In 1466, Claude's parents died, and he was left the sole relative of his infant brother Jehan, whom he gladly took in. "Moved with pity, he conceived a passionate fondness for this helpless infant brother -- a strange and delightful thing, this human affection, to him who heretofore had loved nothing but books." He devoted himself to raising Jehan, and also to his clerical vocation on Jehan's behalf; at twenty he was a priest. As the youngest of the chaplains of Notre-Dame, he performed the late Mass, the altare pigrorum.
It was also for Jehan's sake that Claude adopted Quasimodo, the deformed child abandoned at the bed of the foundlings. "Its distress, its deformity, its destitution, the thought of his young brother, the idea which suddenly flashed across his mind, that if he were to die his poor little Jehan too might perhaps be mercilessly thrown upon the same spot, assailed his heart all at once: it melted with pity, and he carried away the boy." "It was a humane act, placed, as it were, to the account of his brother, one of the little stock of good works which he determined to lay up for him beforehand, in case the young rogue should some day run short of that kind of coin, the only one taken at the toll-gate of Paradise."
Claude Frollo raised the foundling child, taught him to speak, to read, and to write. He was patient and dedicated, and, it seems, every bit a father. "It was between Claude Frollo's legs that, when quite small, [Quasimodo] had been accustomed to seek refuge when teased by boys or barked at by dogs"; "the first time that [Quasimodo] mechanically grasped the rope in the tower, and, hanging to it, set the bell in motion, the effect upon his foster-father was like that produced upon a parent by the first articulate sounds uttered by his child." When, sometime after becoming the bell-ringer at Notre-Dame, Quasimodo lost his hearing, Claude Frollo alone continued to communicate with him, by a kind of sign language. Quasimodo was timid and bitter toward the world, but he adored Claude Frollo.
Jehan, meanwhile, proved more in need of Claude's proxy piety than his brother had expected; he was constantly in some trouble, and the Archdeacon was obliged again and again to lecture him on the evil of his ways. "He was a downright devil, who often made Dom Claude knit his brow, but full of shrewdness and drollery, which as often made him laugh." Claude's human affections being in such an unfavorable condition, he threw himself all the more fervidly into his studies. "Thus he became more and more learned, and at the same time, by a natural consequence, more and more rigid as a priest, and more and more gloomy as a man."
But Dom Claude had studied already all that was proper and lawful in the realm of science, and there was no place left for his learning to go but into the unlawful -- "that mysterious table of the alchemists and astrologers." He kept a cell near the top of the bell tower, to which he always retired an hour before sunset and in which he often passed whole nights, and from whose single small window issued sometimes a strange red light, leading the goodwives to murmur among themselves that he was a sorcerer. At the same time, he was nevertheless the most fearsome enemy and accuser of all sorcery, all magic, black or white -- Hugo declines, however, to impart to the reader "whether this horror was sincere or merely the game played by the rogue who is the first to cry, 'Stop theif!'" Claude Frollo was also perfectly chaste, although not without great inner struggle; it was only through much fasting and prayer that he maintained mastery over his passions. Yet he succeeded: "at the mere rustling of a silk petticoat his hood was over his eyes." He kept to his books, and let woman alone.
That is, until 1482, when La Esmeralda appeared dancing in the Place de Grève, below his window. Seeing her there, Claude Frollo became transfixed; "The creature before me," he later recounts, "possessed that super-human beauty which can proceed only from heaven or from hell. She was not a mere girl, molded of common clay, and faintly lighted within by the flickering ray of woman's soul. It was an angel, but an angel of darkness -- of fire, not of light." At this moment, the good priest is ruined. His desire overwhelms him, and try as he may to forget La Esmeralda, he cannot: he feels that he must have her, though hell be the price.
This is where we meet our Archdeacon, despairing between the torment of hell -- of betraying his God -- and the torment of arriving in Paradise having never tasted that forbidden fruit, the touch of a girl whose merest smile is of greater worth to him than all the orders of angels. He wants her more than for all his eloquence he is able to expound. And she is in love with someone else.
There you have him, then: Claude Frollo, a statue of a priest, burning from the inside out; jaded; despairing. Nothing is to be lauded about his madness; he is among neither the strongest nor the bravest of men. But consider the magnitude of his adversary. Perhaps it is too much to forgive him, for his errors were tremendous -- but perhaps it is not too much to take compassion. It is but few men, after all, who are asked in life to play the parts both of Faustus and of Job.
Read Notre-Dame de Paris online