ood works, which he was effecting in the name of his young brother;
it was a stock of good works which he wished to amass in advance for
him, in case the little rogue should some day find himself short of that
coin, the only sort which is received at the toll-bar of paradise.

He baptized his adopted child, and gave him the name of Quasimodo,
either because he desired thereby to mark the day, when he had found
him, or because he wished to designate by that name to what a degree the
poor little creature was incomplete, and hardly sketched out. In fact,
Quasimodo, blind, hunchbacked, knock-kneed, was only an "almost."

CHAPTER III. _IMMANIS PECORIS CUSTOS, IMMANIOR IPSE_.

Now, in 1482, Quasimodo had grown up. He had become a few years
previously the bellringer of Notre-Dame, thanks to his father by
adoption, Claude Frollo,--who had become archdeacon of Josas, thanks
to his suzerain, Messire Louis de Beaumont,--who had become Bishop of
Paris, at the death of Guillaume Chartier in 1472, thanks to his patron,
Olivier Le Daim, barber to Louis XI., king by the grace of God.

So Quasimodo was the ringer of the chimes of Notre-Dame.

In the course of time there had been formed a certain peculiarly
intimate bond which united the ringer to the church. Separated forever
from the world, by the double fatality of his unknown birth and his
natural deformity, imprisoned from his infancy in that impassable double
circle, the poor wretch had grown used to seeing nothing in this world
beyond the religious walls which had received him under their shadow.
Notre-Dame had been to him successively, as he grew up and developed,
the egg, the nest, the house, the country, the universe.

There was certainly a sort of mysterious and pre-existing harmony
between this creature and this church. When, still a little fellow, he
had dragged himself tortuously and by jerks beneath the shadows of
its vaults, he seemed, with his human face and his bestial limbs, the
natural reptile of that humid and sombre pavement, upon which the shadow
of the Romanesque capitals cast so many strange forms.

Later on, the first time that he caught hold, mechanically, of the
ropes to the towers, and hung suspended from them, and set the bell to
clanging, it produced upon his adopted father, Claude, the effect of a
child whose tongue is unloosed and who begins to speak.

It is thus that, little by little, developing always in sympathy with
the cathedral, li