ame at the age of fourteen, a new
infirmity had come to complete his misfortunes: the bells had broken the
drums of his ears; he had become deaf. The only gate which nature had
left wide open for him had been abruptly closed, and forever.

In closing, it had cut off the only ray of joy and of light which still
made its way into the soul of Quasimodo. His soul fell into profound
night. The wretched being's misery became as incurable and as complete
as his deformity. Let us add that his deafness rendered him to some
extent dumb. For, in order not to make others laugh, the very moment
that he found himself to be deaf, he resolved upon a silence which he
only broke when he was alone. 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.

If now we were to try to penetrate to the soul of Quasimodo through that
thick, hard rind; if we could sound the depths of that badly constructed
organism; if it were granted to us to look with a torch behind those
non-transparent organs to explore the shadowy interior of that opaque
creature, to elucidate his obscure corners, his absurd no-thoroughfares,
and suddenly to cast a vivid light upon the soul enchained at the
extremity of that cave, we should, no doubt, find the unhappy Psyche in
some poor, cramped, and ricketty attitude, like those prisoners beneath
the Leads of Venice, who grew old bent double in a stone box which was
both too low and too short for them.

It is certain that the mind becomes atrophied in a defective body.
Quasimodo was barely conscious of a soul cast in his own image, moving
blindly within him. The impressions of objects underwent a considerable
refraction before reaching his mind. His brain was a peculiar medium;
the ideas which passed through it issued forth completely distorted.
The reflection which resulted from this refraction was, necessarily,
divergent and perverted.

Hence a thousand optical illusions, a thousand aberrations of judgment,
a thousand deviations, in which his thought strayed, now mad, now
idiotic.

The first effect of this fatal organization was to trouble the glance
which he cast upon things. He received hardly any immediate perception
of them. The external world seemed much farther away to him than it does
to us.

The second effect of his misfortune was