Appearances, Alienation, and Hypocrisy Theme Analysis

Hanged by the populace for waiting, hanged by the cardinal for not waiting; either way he could see only the abyss, that is a gallows.

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.

There was something about this spectacle which made the head spin, it had some peculiar power to bewitch and intoxicate hard to convey to a reader of our own day and from our own salons. Picture to yourself a succession of faces displaying all the known geometrical shapes one after the other, from triangle to trapezium, from cone to polyhedron; every known human expression, from anger to lust; every age of man, from the wrinkles of the newly born to the wrinkles of the dying crone; a whole religious phantasmagoria, from Faunus to Beelzebub; every kind of animal profile, from jaws to beaks and from muzzles to snouts. It was as if all those mascarons on the Pont-Neuf, nightmares turned to stone by the hand of Germain Pilon, had taken on life and breath and had come, one by one.

It must be said that a gibbet and pillory, a ‘justice’ and a ‘ladder’ as they were then called, stood permanently side by side in the middle of the paving and helped not a little to avert people’s gaze from that fateful square, where so many human beings full of life and vigor had met their death, and where, fifty years later, ‘Saint-Vallier’s fever’ would be born, that sickness of the terror of the scaffold and the most monstrous of all sicknesses because it comes not from God but from men.

Around her, all eyes were fixed and all mouths agape; and as she danced, to the drumming of the tambourine she held above her head in her two pure, round arms, slender, frail, quick as a wasp, with her golden, unpleated bodice, her billowing, brightly-colored dress, her bare shoulders, her slender legs, uncovered now and again by her skirt, her black hair, her fiery eyes, she was indeed a supernatural creature.

[…] 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.

This was the first taste he had ever had of the delights of vanity. Hitherto, he had known only humiliation, contempt for his condition and disgust for his person. And so, stone deaf though he was, he relished the acclamation of the crowd like a real pope, that crowd which he had detested because he felt it detested him. What did it matter that his people was a pack of fools, cripples, thieves and beggars, it was still a people and he its sovereign. And he took all the ironic applause and mock respect seriously, although it should be said that mixed in with it, among the crowd, went an element of very real fear.

In this city, the boundaries between races and species seemed to have been abolished, as in a pandemonium. Amongst this population, men, women, animals, age, sex, health, sickness, all seemed communal; everything fitted together, was merged, mingled and superimposed; everyone was part of everything.

As you use our kind among you, so we use your kind among us. The law you apply to the truants, the truants apply to you. If it’s a vicious one, that’s your fault. We need now and again to see a respectable face above a hempen collar; it makes the whole thing honorable.

So it was that, little by little, developing always in harmony with the cathedral, living in it, sleeping in it, hardly ever leaving it, subject day in and day out to its mysterious pressure, he came to resemble it, to be incrusted on it, as it were, to form an integral part of it. […] One might almost say that he had taken on its shape, just as the snail takes on the shape of its shell. It was his abode, his hole, his envelope. So deep was the instinctive sympathy between the old church and himself, so numerous the magnetic and material affinities, that he somehow adhered to it like the tortoise to its shell. The gnarled cathedral was his carapace.

‘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.’

In those days they saw everything thus, without metaphysics, without exaggeration, without a magnifying glass, with the naked eye. The microscope had not yet been invented, either for material things or for the things of the spirit.

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.