The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Gringoire was what today we would call a true eclectic, one of those elevated, steady, moderate, calm spirits who manage always to steer a middle course […] and are full of reason and liberal philosophy, while yet making due allowance for cardinals […] They are to be found, quite unchanging, in every age, that is, ever in conformity with the times.

He always went about in the midst of a small court of bishops and abbots of good family, who were bawdy, lecherous and great carousers should need arise; more than once the good worshippers at Saint-Germain d’Auxerre had been shocked, when passing of an evening beneath the lighted windows of the Bourbon mansion, to hear the same voices they had heard chanting vespers during the day intoning, to the clink of glasses, the bacchic proverb of Benedict XII, the pope who added a third wreath to the papal tiara: Bibamus papaliter.

[…] it was lit by the harsh red light of the bonfire, which flickered brightly on the encircling faces of the crowd and on the dark forehead of the girl, while at the far end of the square it cast a pale glimmer, mingled with the swaying of the shadows, on the black and wrinkled old facade of the Maison-aux-Piliers on one side and the stone arms of the gallows on the other.

He realized there were other things in the world besides the speculations of the Sorbonne and the verses of Homerus, that man has need of affection, that without tenderness and love life was just a harsh and mechanical clockwork, in need of lubrication.

‘No,’ said the archdeacon, seizing Compere Tourangeau by the arm, and a spark of enthusiasm rekindling in his lifeless pupils, ‘No, I don’t deny science. I have not crawled all this time on my belly with my nails in the earth, along the countless passages of the cavern without glimpsing, far ahead of me, at the end of the unlit gallery, a light, a flame, something, doubtless the reflection from the dazzling central laboratory where the wise and the patient have taken God by surprise.’

Firstly, it was the thought of a priest. It was the alarm felt by the priesthood before a new agent: the printing-press. It was the terror and bewilderment felt by a man of the sanctuary before the luminous press of Gutenberg. It was the pulpit and the manuscript, the spoken and the written word, taking fright at the printed word; something like the stupor felt by a sparrow were it to see the angel legion unfold its six million wings. It was the cry of the prophet who already hears the restless surge of an emancipated mankind, who can see that future time when intelligence will undermine faith, opinion dethrone belief and the world shake off Rome.

He, who wore his heart on his sleeve, who observed none of the world’s laws except the law of nature, who allowed his passions to escape through his inclinations, and in whom the reservoir of strong emotion was always dry, so many fresh drains did he dig for it each morning, he had no idea of how the sea of human passions rages and ferments and boils once it is refused all outlet, of how it accumulates and increases and flows over, of how it scours the heart and breaks out into inward sobs and dumb convulsions, until it has torn down its dykes and burst its bed. Jehan had always been deceived by Claude Frollo’s austere and icy exterior, that chill surface of precipitous and inaccessible virtue. That this seething, raging lava bubbled deep beneath the snowclad brow of Etna had never occurred to the cheerful student.

When one does evil one must do the whole evil. To be only half a monster is insanity. There is ecstasy in an extreme of crime.