From The Hunchback of Notre Dame - anthology.

« If then we were to attempt to penetrate through this thick and obdurate bark to the soul of Quasimodo; if we could sound the depths of this bungling piece oforganization; if we were enabled to hold a torch behind these untransparent organs, to explore the gloomy interior of this opaque being, to illumine its obscure cornersand its unmeaning cul-de-sacs, and to throw all at once a brilliant light upon the spirit enchained at the bottom of this den; we should doubtless find the wretch in some miserable attitude, stunted and rickety, like the prisoners under the leads of Venice, who grow old, doubled up in a box of stone, too low to stand up and tooshort to lie down in. It is certain that the spirit pines in a misshapen form.

Quasimodo scarcely felt within him the blind movements of a soul made in his own image.

The impressions ofobjects underwent a considerable refraction before they reached the seat of thought.

His brain was a peculiar medium: the ideas which entered it came out quitetwisted.

The reflection resulting from this refraction was necessarily divergent and devious.

Hence a thousand optical illusions, a thousand aberrations of judgment, athousand byways into which his sometimes silly, sometimes crazy, imagination would wander. The first effect of this vicious organization was to confuse the view which he took of things.

He received scarcely a single direct perception.

The exterior worldappeared to him at a greater distance than it does to us.

The second result of his misfortune was that it rendered him mischievous.

He was, in truth, mischievousbecause he was savage; he was savage because he was ugly.

There was logic in his nature, as there is in ours.

His strength, developed in a most extraordinarymanner, was another cause of his propensity to mischief.

Malus puer robustus, says Hobbes.

We must nevertheless do him justice: malice was probably not innate in him.

From his earliest intercourse with men he had felt, and afterward he had seen, himself despised, rejected, cast off.

Human speech had never been to him aughtbut a jeer or a curse.

As he grew up he had found nothing but hatred about him.

He had adopted it.

He had acquired the general malignity.

He had picked up theweapon with which he had been wounded. After all, he turned toward mankind with reluctance: his cathedral was enough for him.

It was peopled with figures of marble, with kings, saints, bishops, who at leastdid not laugh in his face, and looked upon him only with an air of tranquillity and benevolence.

The other statues, those of monsters and demons, bore no maliceagainst him.

They were too like him for that.

Their raillery was rather directed against other men.

The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were hisfriends, and guarded him; he would therefore pass whole hours crouched before one of these statues, and holding solitary converse with it.

If anyone came by hewould run off like a lover surprised in a serenade. The cathedral was not only his society but his world—in short, all nature to him.

He dreamed of no other trees than the painted windows, which were always inblossom; of no other shades than the foliage of stone adorned with birds in the Saxon capitals; of no other mountains than the colossal towers of the church; of noother ocean than Paris which roared at their feet. But that which he loved most of all in the maternal edifice, that which awakened his soul and caused it to spread its poor wings, otherwise so miserably folded up inits prison, that which even gave him at times a feeling of happiness, was the bells.

He loved them, he caressed them, he talked to them, he understood them—from thechimes in the steeple of the transept to the great bell above the porch.

The belfry of the transept and the two towers were like three immense cages, in which the birdsthat he had reared sang for him alone.

It was these same birds, however, which had deafened him: but mothers are often fondest of the child which has caused themthe greatest pain.

It is true that theirs were the only voices he could still hear.

On this account the great bell was his best beloved.

He preferred her before all the othersisters of this noisy family, who fluttered about him on festival days.

The name of this great bell was Mary.

She was placed in the southern tower, along with hersister Jacqueline, a bell of inferior size, enclosed in a cage of less magnitude by the side of her own.

This Jacqueline was called after the wife of Jehan Montague, whogave her to the church; a gift which, however, did not prevent his losing his head at Montfaucon.

In the second tower were six other bells; and, lastly, the six smallestdwelt in the steeple of the transept, with the wooden bell, which was only rung between noon on Holy Thursday and the morning of Easter Eve.

Thus Quasimodo hadfifteen bells in his seraglio, but big Mary was his favourite. It is impossible to form a conception of his joy on the days of the great peals.

The instant the Archdeacon let him off, and said 'Go,' he ran up the winding staircase ofthe belfry quicker than another could have gone down.

He hurried, out of breath, into the aerial chamber of the great bell, looked at her attentively and lovingly for amoment; then began to talk kindly to her, and patted her with his hand, as you would do a good horse which you are going to put on his mettle.

He would pity her forthe labour she was about to undergo.

After these first caresses he shouted to his assistants in a lower story of the tower to begin.

They seized the ropes, the windlasscreaked, and slowly and heavily the enormous cone of metal was set in motion.

Quasimodo, with heaving bosom, watched the movement.

The first shock of theclapper against the wall of brass shook the woodwork upon which it was hung.

Quasimodo vibrated with the bell.

'Vah!' he would cry, with a burst of idiot laughter.Meanwhile the motion of the bell was accelerated, and as the angle which it described became more and more obtuse the eye of Quasimodo glistened and shone outwith a more phosphoric light.

At length the grand peal began: the whole tower trembled; rafters, leads, stones, all groaned together, from the piles of the foundation tothe trefoils of the parapet.

Quasimodo then boiled over with delight; he foamed at the mouth; he ran backward and forward; he trembled with the tower from head tofoot.

The great bell, let loose, and, as it were, furious with rage, turned its enormous throat first to one side and then to the other side of the tower, and thence issued aroar that might be heard four leagues round.

Quasimodo placed himself before this open mouth; he crouched down and rose up, as the bell swung to and fro, inhaledits boisterous breath, and looked by turns at the abyss two hundred feet deep below him, and at the enormous tongue of brass which came ever and anon to bellow in. »