Chapter 25 Notre Dame de Paris (2) Volume 4 Kind People (3)

The Shepherd of the Three Beasts himself is fiercer But, by 1482, Quasimodo was a grown man.Under the protection of his adoptive father, Claude Frollo, he has been the bell ringer of Notre-Dame for several years.And his adoptive father also relied on the recommendation of his benefactor Louis de Beaumont, who became the vicar of Joza; , Olivier the Buck, who, by the grace of God, was the barber to King Louis XI, was promoted to Bishop of Paris. Quasimodo thus became the bell ringer of Notre Dame. In the course of the years a certain indescribable intimacy had formed between the ringer and the cathedral.Unknown, ugly body, this double fate doomed him to be isolated from the world forever, this poor poor man was imprisoned in this double insurmountable circle since he was a child, relying on the adoption and protection of the church, he had no fear of the world outside the church walls. Seeing nothing, this has long been a habit.As he grows up, Notre Dame is successively the egg, the nest, the home, the motherland, and the universe to him.

Indeed, there is a pre-determined understanding between this man and this building.He was still a little boy, he walked crookedly, tossed about, crawled around in the shadow of the church vault, and his human face and animal body seemed to be really a natural reptile, in the Romanesque style. Crawling and wriggling on the damp and dark flagstone floor where the bucket arches cast many oddly shaped shadows. Later, when he inadvertently grabbed the rope on the bell tower for the first time, hung himself on the rope, and shook the big clock, his adoptive father, Claude, looked at it and felt as if a child had loosened his tongue and started to speak. up.

In this way, Quasimodo has always followed the main church and gradually grew up, living in the main church, sleeping in the main church, almost never stepping out of the main church, bearing the mysterious pressure of the main church all the time, and finally resembling the main church, Embedding yourself in the church can be said to become an integral part of the main church.The protruding corners of his body—permit us to use this analogy—fit into the concave corners of the building, so that he seems to be more than a resident of the cathedral. And it is its natural connotation.It might almost be said that he had the form of the cathedral, as the snail has its shell.The cathedral is his dwelling, his cave, his shell.There was an instinctive connection between him and this ancient church, so profound, and so strong a magnetic and material affinity, that he stuck to the cathedral in a way, as if The turtle sticks to the shell like that.This uneven Notre-Dame is his carapace.

We have to use these rhetorical devices here, nothing more than to express this strange, symmetrical, direct, almost homogeneous combination between a person and a building, so there is no need to tell the audience not to take it literally. These parables.At the same time, it is needless to say that during such a long and intimate cohabitation, he already knew the whole cathedral like the back of his hand.The apartment was his own, and there was not a deep corner in it that Quasimodo had not entered, and there was not a high place in which he had not climbed.Again and again he climbed several steps up the cathedral facade, relying only on the uneven surface of the carvings.He is often seen climbing the faces of the two bell towers like a gecko crawling on the walls of a pen stand.These two huge twin buildings were so tall, so menacing, and so daunting. He climbed up and down without dizziness, fear, or swaying from panic.Just look at the submissiveness and ease with which these two towers are under his hands, and you can't help feeling that he has tamed them.As he was always jumping, climbing, and playing in the abyss of the great cathedral, he became more or less an ape, an antelope, like a child of Calabria, who could not walk. He can swim, and a little doll plays with the sea.

Besides, not only his body seemed to have been fashioned after the cathedral, but his soul too.What is the state of this soul?It is difficult to determine what folds and shapes it has formed under this wrapping and this rough life.Quasimodo was born with one eye, a hunchback, and a limp.Claude Frollo, with great difficulty and patience, managed to teach him to speak.However, bad luck always followed the poor abandoned baby.The bell striker of Notre Dame got another disability when he was fourteen years old. The sound of the bell broke his eardrum, and he became deaf.The only door that nature had opened to the objective world was suddenly closed forever.

① The name of a region in southern Italy. The closing of this portal cut off the only ray of joy and the only ray of light that had still penetrated Quasimodo's soul.The soul suddenly fell into the deep night.The wretched man was full of grief, as was the deformity of his body, and this grief was beyond reproach and incurable.We must add one more thing: once he was deaf, he was also, to a certain extent, dumb.For, in order not to be laughed at, from the moment he discovered that he was deaf, he had made up his mind to remain silent, unless he occasionally broke the silence when he was alone.His tongue, which Claude Frollo had labored so hard to loosen, was now willingly ligated.Then, when he had to speak, his tongue was numb and clumsy, like a door with rusted hinges.

If we now manage to pierce through this hard and thick hide all the way to Quasimodo's soul, if we can probe the depths of his monstrosity, if it is possible for us to light a torch and see his opaque behind the organs of this opaque creature, probe into its dark corners and absurd blind pipes, and suddenly illuminate his mind locked at the bottom of this den with a strong light, then we may and find the unfortunate soul in some stunted, rickety state, like the prisoner in the Venetian lead mines, always bent in two in that box-like pit too low and too short. , will soon grow old. The body is incomplete, and the spirit must be atrophied.Quasimodo could hardly feel any soul molded in his image, moving blindly in his body.Impressions of external things have to go through a huge refraction before they can reach the depths of his thoughts.His brain is a special medium, and the thoughts generated through the brain are all distorted.The thinking that comes from this kind of refraction is bound to be messy and inconsistent, and deviate from the right path.

From this arise a multitude of visual hallucinations, errors of judgment, deviations of thought, wild thoughts, now madness, now dementia. The first consequence of this preordained physical structure is that his gaze on things is disturbed.He receives little immediate perception of things.The outside world seemed to him farther than ours.