After this, and because he was more than ever immersed in his beloved books, which he only left to hasten for an hour to the mill, this union of wisdom and austerity, so rare at his age, had speedily gained him the respect and admiration of the cloister. From the cloister his fame for erudition had spread to the people, by whom, as frequently happened in those days, it had been converted in some sort into a reputation for necromancy.

It was just as he was returning on Quasimodo-Sunday from celebrating mass for the sluggards at their altar—which was beside the door in the choir leading into the nave, on the right, near the image of the Virgin—that his attention had been arrested by the group of old women chattering round the foundling.

He accordingly drew nearer to the poor little creature, the object of so much abhorrence and ill-will. The sight of its distress, its deformity, its abandonment, the remembrance of his young brother, the horror that suddenly assailed him at the thought that if he were to die his beloved little Jehan might thus be miserably exposed upon the selfsame bed—all this rushed into his mind at once, and, moved by an impulse of profound compassion, he had carried away the child.

When he took the child out of the sack, he found it was indeed ill-favoured. The poor little wretch had a great wart over the left eye, its head was sunk between its shoulders, the spine arched, the breastbone protruding, the legs bowed. Yet he seemed lively enough; and although it was impossible to make out the language of his uncouth stammerings, his voice evidenced a fair degree of health and strength. Claude’s compassion was increased by this ugliness, and he vowed in his heart to bring up this child for love of his brother; so that, whatever in the future might be the faults of little Jehan, this good deed, performed in his stead, might be accounted to him for righteousness. It was a sort of investment in charity effected in his brother’s name, a stock of good works laid up for him in advance, on which the little rogue might fall back if some day he found himself short of that peculiar form of small change—the only kind accepted at the Gate of Heaven.

He christened his adopted child by the name of Quasimodo, either to commemorate thereby the day on which he found him, or to indicate by that name how incomplete and indefinite of shape the unfortunate little creature was. And, in truth, one-eyed, humpbacked, bow-legged, poor Quasimodo could hardly be accounted more than “quasi” human.