ving there, sleeping there, hardly ever leaving it,
subject every hour to the mysterious impress, he came to resemble it, he
incrusted himself in it, so to speak, and became an integral part of it.
His salient angles fitted into the retreating angles of the cathedral
(if we may be allowed this figure of speech), and he seemed not only its
inhabitant but more than that, its natural tenant. One might almost
say that he had assumed its form, as the snail takes on the form of
its shell. It was his dwelling, his hole, his envelope. There existed
between him and the old church so profound an instinctive sympathy, so
many magnetic affinities, so many material affinities, that he adhered
to it somewhat as a tortoise adheres to its shell. The rough and
wrinkled cathedral was his shell.

It is useless to warn the reader not to take literally all the
similes which we are obliged to employ here to express the singular,
symmetrical, direct, almost consubstantial union of a man and an
edifice. It is equally unnecessary to state to what a degree that
whole cathedral was familiar to him, after so long and so intimate a
cohabitation. That dwelling was peculiar to him. It had no depths to
which Quasimodo had not penetrated, no height which he had not scaled.
He often climbed many stones up the front, aided solely by the uneven
points of the carving. The towers, on whose exterior surface he was
frequently seen clambering, like a lizard gliding along a perpendicular
wall, those two gigantic twins, so lofty, so menacing, so formidable,
possessed for him neither vertigo, nor terror, nor shocks of amazement.

To see them so gentle under his hand, so easy to scale, one would have
said that he had tamed them. By dint of leaping, climbing, gambolling
amid the abysses of the gigantic cathedral he had become, in some sort,
a monkey and a goat, like the Calabrian child who swims before he walks,
and plays with the sea while still a babe.

Moreover, it was not his body alone which seemed fashioned after the
Cathedral, but his mind also. In what condition was that mind? What
bent had it contracted, what form had it assumed beneath that knotted
envelope, in that savage life? This it would be hard to determine.
Quasimodo had been born one-eyed, hunchbacked, lame. It was with
great difficulty, and by dint of great patience that Claude Frollo had
succeeded in teaching him to talk. But a fatality was attached to the
poor foundling. Bellringer of Notre-D