Hunchback of Notre Dame (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (28 page)

“I deny,” said Dom Claude, coldly, “neither drugs nor disease. I deny the physician.”

“Then it is false,” continued Coictier, with warmth, “that gout is an inward eruption, that a cannon-wound may be cured by the application of a roasted mouse, that young blood properly infused restores youth to old veins; it is false to say that two and two make four, and that emprostathonos follows opistathonos.”

The archdeacon quietly replied, “There are certain things which I regard in a certain way.”

Coictier turned red with rage.

“There, there, my good Coictier, don’t be angry!” said Tourangeau. “The archdeacon is our friend.”

Coictier calmed himself, muttering,—

“After all, he’s a madman!”

“Odzooks, Master Claude!” continued Tourangeau, after a pause, “you embarrass me mightily. I had two pieces of advice to ask of you,—one concerning my health, the other concerning my star.”

“Sir,” responded the archdeacon, “if that be your object, you would have done as well not to waste your breath in climbing my stairs. I am no believer in medicine: I am no believer in astrology.”

“Indeed!” said the stranger with surprise.

Coictier laughed a forced laugh.

“You see now that he’s mad,” he whispered to Compere Tourangeau. “He doesn’t believe in astrology.”

“How can any one imagine,” continued Dom Claude, “that every star-ray is a thread which leads to some man’s head!”

“Pray, in what do you believe, then?” exclaimed Tourangeau.

The archdeacon for an instant seemed uncertain, then with a gloomy smile, which seemed to belie his answer, said: “credo in Deum.”

“Dominum nostrum,” added Tourangeau, making the sign of the cross.

“Amen,” said Coictier.

“Reverend sir,” resumed the stranger, “I am delighted to find you so good a Christian. But, great scholar that you are, have you reached such a point that you no longer believe in science?”

“No,” said the archdeacon, seizing Tourangeau by the arm, while a lightning flash of enthusiasm kindled his dull eye,—“no, I do not deny science. I have not crawled flat on my face all these years, digging the earth with my nails, amid the countless mazes of the cavern, without seeing far before me, at the end of the dark tunnel, a light, a flame, something, doubtless the reflection of the dazzling central laboratory where sages and patient souls have taken God by surprise.”

“Come, then,” interrupted Tourangeau, “what do you consider true and certain?”

“Alchemy.”

Coictier cried out: “Good God, Dom Claude! alchemy has its good points, no doubt; but why should you blaspheme against medicine and astrology?”

“Your science of mankind is naught; your science of heaven naught!” said the archdeacon, authoritatively.

“You treat Epidaurus and Chaldea very cavalierly,” replied the doctor with a sneer.

“Hear me, Master Jacques. I speak in good faith. I am not the king’s physician, and his Majesty did not give me the Dædalus garden as a convenient spot whence I might study the constellations. Don’t be angry, and listen to me. What new truth did you ever derive,—I don’t say from medicine, which is far too foolish a matter, but from astrology? Tell me the virtues of the vertical boustrophedon,
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the discoveries of the number Ziruph and the number Zephirod.”

“Would you deny,” said Coictier, “the sympathetic power of the clavicle, and that the Cabala is derived from it?”

“An error, Master Jacques! None of your formulæ lead to reality; while alchemy has its indubitable discoveries. Can you contest such results as these,—ice buried beneath the ground for a thousand years is transformed to rock crystal; lead is the progenitor of all the metals,—for gold is not a metal, gold is light; lead requires but four periods of two hundred years each to pass successively from the state of lead to the state of red arsenic, from red arsenic to tin, from tin to silver? Are these facts or are they not? But to believe in clavicles, planets, and stars is as absurd as to believe with the natives of far Cathay that the golden oriole turns into a mole, and grains of wheat into mollusks of the genus Cypræa!”

“I have studied hermetics,” cried Coictier, “and I affirm—” The fiery archdeacon did not permit him to finish his speech. “And I have studied medicine, astrology, and hermetics. Here alone is truth [as he spoke he took from the press a phial filled with the powder of which we spoke some pages back], here alone is light! Hippocrates is a dream; Urania is a dream; Hermes is a mere idea. Gold is the sun; to make gold, is to become God. This is the only wisdom. I have sounded the depths of medicine and astrology, I tell you. They are naught, naught! The human body is a mere shadow; the stars are shadows!”

And he fell back upon his seat in a striking and imposing attitude. Tourangeau watched him in silence. Coictier forced himself to sneer, shrugged his shoulders slightly, and repeated in a low voice,—

“A madman!”

“And,” said Tourangeau suddenly, “the splendid goal,—have you attained that? Have you made gold?”

“Had I made it,” replied the archdeacon, pronouncing his words slowly, like a man who is reflecting, “the King of France would be called Claude, and not Louis.”

The stranger frowned.

“What do I say?” added Dom Claude with a scornful smile. “What would the throne of France avail me when I could reconstruct the Empire of the East?”

“Well, well,” said the stranger.

“Oh, poor fool!” muttered Coictier.

The archdeacon went on, apparently replying to his own thoughts only:—

“But no, I still crawl; I bruise my face and knees on the sharp stones of the subterranean way. I see dimly; I do not behold the full splendor! I do not read; I spell!”

“And when you can read,” asked the stranger, “shall you make gold?”

“Who can doubt it?” said the archdeacon.

“In that case, Notre-Dame knows that I am in great need of money, and I would fain learn to read your books. Tell me, reverend master, is your science hostile or displeasing to Notre-Dame?”

To this question from the stranger Dom Claude merely answered with a quiet dignity,—

“Whose archdeacon am I?”

“True, my master. Well; will it please you to initiate me? Let me spell with you.”

Claude assumed the majestic and pontifical attitude of a Samuel.

“Old man, it needs more years than still remain to you to undertake the journey through mysterious things. Your head is very grey! None ever leave the cavern without white hairs, but none enter save with dark hair. Science is skilled in furrowing, withering, and wrinkling human faces; it needs not that old age should bring to her faces ready wrinkled. Yet if you long to submit yourself to discipline at your age, and to decipher the dread alphabet of sages, come to me; it is well: I will try what I can do. I will not bid you, you poor old man, go visit the sepulchres in the Pyramids, of which ancient Herodotus speaks, nor the brick tower of Babylon, nor the huge white marble sanctuary of the Indian temple of Eklinga. Neither I nor you have seen the Chaldean edifices constructed after the sacred form of Sikra, or the Temple of Solomon, which is destroyed, or the stone doors of the tomb of the kings of Israel, which are shattered. We will be content with the fragments of the book of Hermes which we have at hand. I will explain to you the statue of Saint Christopher, the symbolism of the sower, and that of the two angels at the door of the Sainte-Chapelle, one of whom has his hand in a vase and the other in a cloud—”

“Here Jacques Coictier, who had been disconcerted by the archdeacon’s spirited replies, recovered himself, and interrupted in the triumphant tone of one wise man setting another right:
”Erras, amice Claudi.
The symbol is not the number. You take Orpheus for Hermes.”

“It is you who err,” gravely answered the archdeacon. “Dædalus is the basement; Orpheus is the wall; Hermes is the building itself,—is the whole. Come when you will,” he added, turning to Tourangeau; “I will show you the particles of gold remaining in the bottom of Nicolas Flamel’s crucible, and you may compare them with the gold of Guillaume de Paris. I will teach you the secret virtues of the Greek word
peristera.
But first of all, you must read in turn the marble letters of the alphabet, the granite pages of the book. We will go from the porch of Bishop Guillaume and of Saint-Jean le Rond to the Sainte-Chapelle, then to the house of Nicolas Flamel in the Rue Marivault, to his tomb, which is in the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents, to his two almshouses in the Rue Montmorency. You shall read the hieroglyphics which cover the four great iron andirons in the porch of the Hospice Saint-Gervais, and those in the Rue de la Fer ronnerie. We will spell over together once more the façades of Saint-Côme, Sainte-Geneviève des Ardents, Saint-Martin, Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie—”

For some time Tourangeau, intelligent though his appearance was, had seemed as if he failed to follow Dom Claude. He now interrupted him with the words,—

“Odzooks! What sort of books can yours be?”

“Here is one of them,” said the archdeacon.

And opening the window of his cell, he pointed to the vast Church of Notre-Dame, which, with its two towers outlined in black against a starry sky, its stone sides and monstrous hip-roof, seemed like some huge double-headed sphinx crouching in the heart of the town.

The archdeacon silently gazed at the gigantic edifice; then with a sigh, stretching his right hand towards the printed book which lay open on the table, and his left hand towards Notre-Dame, with a melancholy glance from book to church, he said, “Alas! the one will kill the other.”

Coictier, who had eagerly approached the book, could not repress the words, “Why! But what is there so terrible about this:
‘Glossa in epistolas D. Pauli. Norimbergæ, Antonius Koburger.

1474.‘ This is nothing new. It is a book by Pierre Lombard, the Master of Maxims. Is it because it is printed?”

“That’s it,” replied Claude, who seemed absorbed in deep meditation, and stood with his forefinger on the folio from the famous presses of Nuremberg. Then he added these mysterious words: “Alas! alas! Small things overcome great ones: the Nile rat kills the crocodile, the swordfish kills the whale, the book will kill the building.”

The convent curfew rang just as Doctor Jacques once more whispered in his comrade’s ear his perpetual refrain: “He is mad.” To which his comrade now made answer, “I believe he is.”

No stranger was allowed to linger in the convent at this hour. The two visitors withdrew. “Master,” said Compere Tourangeau as he took leave of the archdeacon, “I like scholars and great minds, and I hold you in singular esteem. Come tomorrow to the Palace of the Tournelles, and ask for the Abbot of Saint-Martin de Tours.”

The archdeacon returned to his cell in amazement, realizing at last who this Compere Tourangeau really was, and calling to mind this passage from the cartulary of Saint-Martin de Tours:
“Abbas beatti Martini,
SCILICET REX FRANCIÆ,
est canonicus de consuetudine et habet parvam præbendam quam habet sanctus Venantius et debet sedere in sede thesaurarii.”
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It is said that from this time forth the archdeacon held frequent meetings with Louis XI, when his Majesty came to Paris, and that Dom Claude’s credit much eclipsed that of Oliver le Daim and Jacques Coictier, the latter of whom, as was his custom, roundly reproached the king on this score.

O
ur fair readers will pardon us for pausing a moment to search for the hidden meaning of those enigmatical words of the archdeacon: “The one will kill the other. The book will kill the building.”

In our opinion this thought had two phases. In the first place it was the thought of a priest. It was the terror of a true ecclesiastic at sight of a new agents,—printing. It was the fear and confusion of the man of the sanctuary at sight of Gutenberg’s light-giving press. It was the pulpit and the manuscript, the spoken word and the written word, taking fright at the printed word; something similar to the stupor of a sparrow who should see the angel Legion spread his six million wings. It was the cry of the prophet who already hears the busy noise and stir of humanity set free, who sees in the future intellect undermining faith, opinion superseding belief, the world shaking off the yoke of Rome; the presage of the philosopher who sees human ideas, volatilized by the press, evaporated from the theocratic receiver; the dread of the soldier who examines the iron battering-ram and says: The tower must fall. It meant that one power was about to succeed another power. It meant: The press will kill the church.

But underlying this idea, doubtless the first and simplest, there was, to our thinking, another and more recent one, a corollary of the first, less easily seen and more easily contested; a point of view quite as philosophic, but not that of the priest alone,—that of the scholar and the artist as well. It was the presentiment that human thought, in changing its form, would also change its mode of expression; that the leading idea of each generation would no longer be written with the same material and in the same fashion; that the book of stone, so solid and so enduring, must make way for the book of papers still more solid and enduring. Looked at in this light, the archdeacon’s vague statement had another meaning; it meant that one art would dethrone another art. It meant: Printing will destroy architecture.

Indeed, from the beginning of things down to the fifteenth century of the Christian era inclusive, architecture was the great book of humanity, the chief expression of man in his various stages of development, whether as force or as intellect.

When the memory of the earliest races became surcharged, when mankind’s burden of recollections became so great and so bewildering that mere speech, naked and winged, was in danger of losing a part on the road, men wrote them upon the ground in the way which was at once plainest, most enduring, and most natural. Every tradition was sealed beneath a monument.