The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo [98]
“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.”bv
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.
CHAPTER II
The One Will Kill the Other
Our 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,