to render him malicious.

He was malicious, in fact, because he was savage; he was savage because
he was ugly. There was logic in his nature, as there is in ours.

His strength, so extraordinarily developed, was a cause of still greater
malevolence: "_Malus puer robustus_," says Hobbes.

This justice must, however be rendered to him. Malevolence was not,
perhaps, innate in him. From his very first steps among men, he had felt
himself, later on he had seen himself, spewed out, blasted, rejected.
Human words were, for him, always a raillery or a malediction. As he
grew up, he had found nothing but hatred around him. He had caught the
general malevolence. He had picked up the weapon with which he had been
wounded.

After all, he turned his face towards men only with reluctance;
his cathedral was sufficient for him. It was peopled with marble
figures,--kings, saints, bishops,--who at least did not burst out
laughing in his face, and who gazed upon him only with tranquillity
and kindliness. The other statues, those of the monsters and demons,
cherished no hatred for him, Quasimodo. He resembled them too much for
that. They seemed rather, to be scoffing at other men. The saints were
his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends and guarded
him. So he held long communion with them. He sometimes passed whole
hours crouching before one of these statues, in solitary conversation
with it. If any one came, he fled like a lover surprised in his
serenade.

And the cathedral was not only society for him, but the universe, and
all nature beside. He dreamed of no other hedgerows than the painted
windows, always in flower; no other shade than that of the foliage of
stone which spread out, loaded with birds, in the tufts of the Saxon
capitals; of no other mountains than the colossal towers of the church;
of no other ocean than Paris, roaring at their bases.

What he loved above all else in the maternal edifice, that which aroused
his soul, and made it open its poor wings, which it kept so miserably
folded in its cavern, that which sometimes rendered him even happy, was
the bells. He loved them, fondled them, talked to them, understood them.
From the chime in the spire, over the intersection of the aisles and
nave, to the great bell of the front, he cherished a tenderness for them
all. The central spire and the two towers were to him as three great
cages, whose birds, reared by himself, sang for him alone. Yet it was
t