Notre-Dame de Paris · Chapter
The Rat-Hole explained
The chapter returns to the Place de Grève the morning after the festival, describing the debris and the bustling crowd.
What happens
The chapter returns to the Place de Grève the morning after the festival, describing the debris and the bustling crowd. It then focuses on the ancient Tour-Roland house and its peculiar cell, known as 'The Rat-Hole,' originally built by Madame Rolande de la Tour-Roland for perpetual penance. The narrative explains the history and purpose of such recluses in medieval Paris, emphasizing the cell's inscription 'Tu, ora' and the public's indifferent acceptance of this form of religious devotion.
Themes in this chapter
Religion and Hypocrisy
The chapter details the pious but harsh practice of voluntary immurement, highlighting the public's lack of empathy and the mechanical acceptance of religious sacrifice.
Architecture and Preservation
The description of the Tour-Roland house and the Rat-Hole cell illustrates medieval architecture and the preservation of such structures as historical and religious artifacts.
Characters to notice
- Madame Rolande de la Tour-Roland
Founder of the cell, who immured herself after her father's death in the Crusades.
Key passages
“The afflicted damsel had, in fact, waited twenty years for death in this premature tomb, praying night and day for the soul of her father, sleeping in ashes, without even a stone for a pillow, clothed in a black sack, and subsisting on the bread and water which the compassion of the passersby led them to deposit on the ledge of her window, thus receiving charity after having bestowed it.”
The grieving woman spent twenty years in a self-imposed tomb, constantly praying for her father's soul, living in extreme austerity on bread and water donated by passersby, having given away her wealth to the poor and to God.
Describes Madame Rolande's extreme penance and the public's role in sustaining her.
“And all the reflections which that strange spectacle would awaken in us today; that horrible cell, a sort of intermediary link between a house and the tomb, the cemetery and the city; that living being cut off from the human community, and thenceforth reckoned among the dead; that lamp consuming its last drop of oil in the darkness; that remnant of life flickering in the grave; that breath, that voice, that eternal prayer in a box of stone; that face forever turned towards the other world; that eye already illuminated with another sun; that ear pressed to the walls of a tomb; that soul a prisoner in that body; that body a prisoner in that dungeon cell, and beneath that double envelope of flesh and granite, the murmur of that soul in pain;—nothing of all this was perceived by the crowd.”
The narrator reflects on how modern observers would see the cell as a grim, liminal space between life and death, but the medieval crowd saw none of this suffering, accepting it without analysis or pity.
Contrasts modern and medieval perceptions of religious reclusion.