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Updated: May 27, 2025
The austere and glacial envelope of Claude Frollo, that cold surface of steep and inaccessible virtue, had always deceived Jehan. The merry scholar had never dreamed that there was boiling lava, furious and profound, beneath the snowy brow of AEtna.
Claude Frollo taught him to speak, to read, and to write, and had made him bell-ringer at Notre Dame. Quasimodo grew up in Notre Dame. Cut off from the world by his deformities, the church became his universe, and his gratitude was boundless when he was made bell-ringer.
The archdeacon had in Quasimodo the most submissive slave, the most docile lackey, the most vigilant of dogs. When the poor bellringer became deaf, there had been established between him and Claude Frollo, a language of signs, mysterious and understood by themselves alone. In this manner the archdeacon was the sole human being with whom Quasimodo had preserved communication.
Claude Frollo had been destined from infancy, by his parents, to the ecclesiastical profession. He had been taught to read in Latin; he had been trained to keep his eyes on the ground and to speak low. While still a child, his father had cloistered him in the college of Torchi in the University. There it was that he had grown up, on the missal and the lexicon.
Claude Frollo, holding the first printed book he had seen in one hand, and pointing with the other to the gigantic mass of Notre Dame, dark against the sunset, prophesied “Ceci tuera cela.” One might to-day paraphrase the sentence which Victor Hugo put into his archdeacon’s mouth, and pointing to the elaborately appointed dinner-tables of our generation, assert that the Dinner was killing the Drama.
He knew well, by divers letters, the loss and the mischief done by Arthur and his host. Frollo had no mind tamely to watch the Romans lose their heritage. The tribune summoned to his aid all the men abiding in the province who carried arms and owned fealty to Rome. He assembled these together, ordaining a great company, clad in harness and plenteously supplied with stores.
He voluntarily tied that tongue which Claude Frollo had taken so much pains to unloose. Hence, it came about, that when necessity constrained him to speak, his tongue was torpid, awkward, and like a door whose hinges have grown rusty.
As possessor of this fief, Claude Frollo was one of the twenty-seven seigneurs keeping claim to a manor in fee in Paris and its suburbs; and for a long time, his name was to be seen inscribed in this quality, between the Hotel de Tancarville, belonging to Master Francois Le Rez, and the college of Tours, in the records deposited at Saint Martin des Champs.
But this explanation fails many times to fit the facts: for the great romantic characters, like Leatherstocking, Don Quixote, Monte Cristo, Claude Frollo, are just as vividly drawn as the great characters of realism; and the great events of realistic novels, like Rawdon Crawley's discovery of his wife with Lord Steyne, or Adam Bede's fight with Arthur Donnithorne, are just as thrilling as the resounding actions of romance.
And while some condemned themselves to an almost sepulchral regularity and seclusion, others fled the schools, swaggered in the street "with their thumbs in their girdle," passed the night in riot, and behaved themselves as the worthy forerunners of Jehan Frollo in the romance of "Notre Dame de Paris." Villon tells us himself that he was among the truants, but we hardly needed his avowal.
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