Deus
The Hunchback had seen everything. Dom Frollo's entire scheme had been revealed to Quasimodo. Atop the Cathedral of Notre-Dame they both stood, Dom Frollo laughing as La Esmeralda was put to death.
Full of rage, Quasimodo reached for Dom Frollo. Once he had a hold of him, the furious hunchback pushed the man he had once loved as a father off the Cathedral.
Dom Frollo, taken by surprise, instinctively held unto one of the Cathedral's stone gargoyles in order to salvage himself from a great and fatal fall.
Although he managed to avoid his fall, Dom Frollo dangled dangerously from a great height. Beneath him was the whole of Paris, the city he had called home all his life. Above him was the son who had coldly betrayed him by casting him from the Cathedral. Before him was the gruesome stone gargoyle whose face Dom Frollo's hands struggled to hold on to.
Dom Frollo remained in this mid-air purgatory for what felt to him like an eternity. He attempted to climb towards the Cathedral in order to reach safety, but to no avail. His fingers grew tired from supporting his weight and slowly, they slipped from the gargoyle's face as he lost his grip.
Freefall. Dom Frollo no longer had anything left to hold on to. Nothing could impede his demise.
Terrified, he prayed under his breath as he fell. Claude had always feared death, and now it approached him on swift wings. At any moment, Dom Frollo knew, he would die.
He knew it and he dreaded it with all his heart. His black robe fluttered in the wind as his fall progressed, giving him the appearance of a jet-black falling star.
Dom Frollo's mind was racing as his life flashed before his very eyes. His childhood home. His lonely days as a schoolboy studying Latin and Aristotle. The dusty alchemical texts that were so dear to him. His parents' deaths. His mirthful and carefree brother Jehan.
It all seemed like a senseless blur. Pointless.
His entire life, he thought, had brought him nothing but sorrow. Seemingly infinite, it had been but a pathetic and brief moment in time.
His studies brought him no satisfaction. On the contrary, they left him thirstier than before, forever wanting more. Jehan had wandered off with gypsies shortly before his own demise, forever disappointing him. His own parents had, without regard for his desires, surrendered him to the priesthood in his childhood…
Yet amidst this sea of cruel disappointment and bitter sorrow was the joyous face of a young gypsy girl, the only being who had ever made bliss blossom in his rueful heart.
La Esmeralda. She was the girl whose dance had awakened the dormant passions within him, the girl who would meet her fate because of his ardent love of her, and the girl whose rejection of him had killed Dom Frollo many times before his death.
Still, he loved her until his dying hour, with the sinful kind of love which is only capable of festering inside the heart of a condemned priest.
He had thought her an angel when the whole city thought her a witch. He had wished for her to love him, only that. He had wanted, above all else, to hold her frail figure in his arms. For this, he would, and had, killed. He had killed her.
A tear ran down his weary eyes at this painful thought, for it was true. His love of her had been the force which had sent the gypsy dancer to her death. His passion put an end to the gaiety of her dance.
"Oh, how she danced…" was Claude Frollo's dying thought.
An image of his dancing nymph appeared for an instant before evanescing into the past's oblivion. Then, Quasimodo's deformed face appeared, dark and vengeful. That, too, would disappear as a white light made all his memories fade from view…
~*****~
There was nothing of the past now. No Notre-Dame, no Quasimodo. Death appeared to have claimed Claude Frollo at once.
Claude found himself in a foreign place. There was nothing behind him save the seemingly endless and barren ground. There was nothing in sight aside from a straight and narrow path.
"This must be the path to God," Dom Frollo thought as he walked.
The straight and narrow path led him to a dark cave. There was nothing particularly exceptional about this cave. It was as any other cave, with the exception that above its entrance hung a sign which read: "le mystère éternel".
"This cave must be where God is," Dom Frollo concluded, as there was nothing else beyond that point. Bravely, he plunged into the darkness of that cave, searching for God.
Frollo treaded carefully, as there was not a light inside the cave.
He found, however, that the straight and narrow path continued within the cave as well and followed it.
As he walked, Claude Frollo wondered what God would be like, how Heaven would look, and who would inhabit the place. Surely, Christ's apostles would be there, faithfully accompanying their Great Teacher as they had done in life.
"All but one," he muttered. "For Judas, as a murderer, would surely be condemned to…"
His heart skipped a beat at this horrible thought. Dom Frollo began to sweat a cold sweat, for he feared more than anything the everlasting fires of Hell, reserved for the Devil and his angels.
"I must be on the path to Heaven," Dom Frollo said in an attempt to reassure himself of his salvation. "There is no fire or brimstone to be found in here…for it is dark and cold. Surely, fire would have the adverse effect, so this cannot be Hell. Therefore, this must be the path to God."
He walked further.
"No, this cannot be purgatory either," He uttered to himself. "If it was, I would have come across Aristotle, Plato, Homer, or Caesar… the greats from the times before Christ."
He halted for a moment, absorbing the full gravity of his statements before declaring:
"Therefore, this must be the path to Heaven!"
He had uttered these words with such staggering certainty one would have thought the priest was declaring one of St. Thomas Aquinas' five proofs.
After his passionate declaration, Claude Frollo's thoughts returned once more to the subject of God.
Throughout his life, Claude Frollo had longed for, and feared, the God he worshipped. To him, God was a monumental force capable of creating and destroying everything in what would seem to mere humans as an instant.
As a young boy, Claude Frollo had learned of the merciful and wrathful nature of God. As a priest, Dom Frollo knew that God was the father of all things, the grand designer. He was the redeemer of souls, the punisher of sins, and the lover of mankind. Men were fashioned in his image, and upon their deaths, into his image they would gaze. Upon their reaching of Heaven, God's truth would be self-evident and his love would warm all hearts.
Aside from what had been taught to him in his childhood and his priesthood, Dom Frollo knew one additional thing about God: God was the only being who had never left him. God lived in his heart as fear, as joy, as the greatest of pains. Yet he knew not what God was. God was ever present in his life without being so, as a sort of sinister phantasm, a puppet master in this world whose affairs, Claude Frollo strongly believed, were dictated by Fate, by that which overpowered man. He had always regarded this as God.
These were great truths to Dom Frollo, who presently searched for Heaven and for God in the darkness of the mysterious cave.
Suddenly, the cave was no longer immersed in obscurity. The ground, at least, was dimly visible. It was as though a ray of clarity had cast a dim light upon that cave.
Claude Frollo noticed this change at once, for in life he had the habit of constantly looking down as he walked.
The priest, still looking at the dirt ground, realized that he must have reached the end of the cave. He concluded that he must have finally reached God!
The time had come to gaze upon God's image, to come face-to-face with that ultimate and self-evident truth. Claude's heart began to race as he looked up, wide-eyed, and found, after his long, blind search for God in the darkness…
…That the cave was empty. In the clarity of his present circumstance, Claude Frollo found absolutely nothing save a cold and impenetrable wall of stone.
There was, in fact, no evidence whatsoever that anyone or anything had ever dwelt inside this cave before Dom Frollo's arrival. This was the sole self-evident truth, the chilling and fatal truth.
Claude Frollo's world turned upside down as he realized that there never was a God. He thought of all the times he prayed to God for hope, for mercy, for guidance. He thought of mass, of the Eucharist, of transubstantiation, of the ridiculousness of it all. That which had long been regarded as sacred and untouchable signified nothing all along.
His fear of death, his dread of Hell, his longing for God…those feelings left him hollow now that he knew the truth.
Religion, he now understood, had kept him caged, a blind man in the darkness. 'The Church' had created a world of dreams and nightmares to control all who believed in what they said, to keep the wretched fools inside their eggs, living and leaving their lives as though they had never been born.
He sank down on his knees, despaired; mourning the life he never lived. What he would give to return to it on swift wings, now that he knew the truth, now that he was free from religion's prison. He would do anything for the freedom to experience that Joie de Vivre which lights the hearts of men and makes womankind glow…
Closing his eyes, Dom Frollo cried, for his heart remained dark and empty. He cried, above all else, because La Esmeralda would never glow with that youthful joy again.
Claude opened his eyes, only to find that he was still alive and it had all been some sort of strange vision. Unfortunately, he also found that he was still falling from the Cathedral.
He devoted his final moments to contemplating what he had just experienced. His final thought was of La Esmeralda, his beloved gypsy dancer. He cried bitter tears for her and for the life she never got to live. More sublime a sight there never was, than when Claude Frollo wept for his fallen nymph.
When his body finally hit the cold, stone ground, the impact of his great and fatal fall killed him instantly.
Motionless upon the ground, the priest's body bled profusely as a horrified crowd of spectators gathered around him and prayed for his soul. The bells of Notre-Dame, rung by a distraught Quasimodo, accompanied their prayers with ruefully melodic rings.
A man from the crowd, dressed in soldier's clothing, gasped at the sight of the fallen priest. He recognized those eyes, half-open and surrounded by the moisture of fresh tears, as the coal-black eyes of the surly monk whom he had once encountered. He bent down to close the deceased Archdeacon's eyes, as he could not bear to look at their haunting lifelessness. A young blonde woman clutched his arm, looking at the ghastly cadaver with horror.
As they prayed, the citizens of Paris were unaware of the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the Archdeacon of Josas' death. They only knew that two deaths had occurred that day: the death of La Esmeralda and the death of the Archdeacon Claude Frollo. One was a sacrifice of innocence upon the bloodstained altar of superstitious medieval society. The other was a tragic end to a tragic life.