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V . The Bell - Ringer and the Priest Sixteen years before the Feast of Fools , on a fine Sunday morning after Easter , a small living thing was left on the wooden bed for unwanted children at the door of Notre - Dame . In those days poor parents sometimes left a baby there , and kind people came and took it home . That morning a group of old women stood round the bed , but none of them wanted to take this child . It was a boy of about four , and he was very ugly . He had one eye , a hump on his back and crooked legs , and he screamed so loudly that the women covered their ears . “ It is a monster , ” said one of them . “ It is the child of a witch and the devil , ” said another . “ They should burn it . ” Just then a young priest came out of the church . He looked at the child for a long time without a word . Then he picked it up , wrapped it in his robe and carried it away . The women thought that he must be a wizard . The young priest was Claude Frollo . He came from a good family . As a boy he had been sent to study for the Church . He had learned Latin , Greek and Hebrew , law and medicine , and by the age of eighteen he knew more than most old teachers in Paris . Then , in the hot summer of 1466 , the plague came to the city and killed his father and mother . Claude was left alone with his baby brother , Jehan . He loved the little boy with all his heart . When he saw the ugly child on the bed , he thought of Jehan . “ If I die , ” he said to himself , “ perhaps God will be kind to my brother because I was kind to this poor child . ” He gave the boy the name Quasimodo , because he had found him on Quasimodo Sunday , the first Sunday after Easter . The name also means “ almost ” in Latin . The boy was almost a human being , but not quite . When Claude became archdeacon of Notre - Dame , he made Quasimodo the bell - ringer . The boy grew up inside the great cathedral and almost never left it . The cathedral was his home , his country and his whole world . He knew every stone of it . He climbed up and down its walls and towers like a lizard . The stone kings and monsters on the roof were his friends , and they did not laugh at him . But he loved the bells most of all , and especially the biggest one , which was called Marie . When he rang her , he jumped onto the great bell and rode it through the air . He shouted with joy while the whole tower shook under him . The bells gave him his greatest happiness . They also took away his hearing . By the age of fourteen he was completely deaf . After that , he hardly ever spoke , because he knew that people laughed at his voice . He did not trust people , and people did not trust him . When he went out into the streets , old women crossed themselves and children threw stones at him . He answered them with angry looks . He was not wicked by nature , but he had met so little kindness that he had become wild .
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