Hunchback of Notre Dame (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (3 page)

With the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, the cathedral of Notre Dame figures among the most visited monuments of Paris. Famous for its Gothic facade, great portals, rose window, and looming towers, the cathedral—built principally in the twelfth century—is one of the most enduring symbols of the French capital and its medieval heritage. Aiding in the transmission of the cathedral’s symbolic importance is the novel it inspired: Victor Hugo’s 1831
Notre-Dame de Paris:
1482, better known in English as
The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
In it, Hugo brings to life the cathedral of Notre Dame as it existed at the end of the fifteenth century. Many critics and readers have seen the great church as the novel’s true hero, as it takes an active role in the narrative and resides at the core of the ideological message Hugo seeks to project on collective and individual destiny, the passage of time, and the nature of progress. Indeed, Hugo’s novel is perhaps as well known today as the cathedral itself and is, alongside its main characters—Claude Frollo, the fiery priest; Quasimodo, the hideously deformed bell ringer; Phoebus, the golden guardsman; and Esmeralda, the beautiful gypsy girl—firmly implanted in cultural consciousness. From the written page to the stage and screen, the tale has been told and retold countless times, its impact and capacity for reinvention rivaled only by that of another of Hugo’s novels, the ever-popular
Les Miserables
(1862). If the flurry of recent reprintings and adaptations-including two Disney films and a new musical version—are any indication, generations to come will continue to be enthralled by Hugo’s story of love rendered impossible.

Yet did Hugo set out to immortalize Notre Dame? As much myth surrounds the origin and writing of the novel as surrounds the cathedral itself. If the publicly presented version is to be believed,
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
was written from July 1830 to January 1831. This account is furnished in
Victor Hugo raconté par un témoin de sa vie (Victor Hugo: A Life Related by One Who Has Witnessed
It, 1863; henceforth cited as
A Life Related),
a testimonial written by Hugo’s wife, Adèle, with, as it often has been observed, more than a helping hand from her husband. The novel had been under contract with the publisher Gosselin since 1828, but the theatrical success of Hugo’s play
Hernani
(1830) distracted the writer from the project. In April 1830 Hugo still had not begun the novel and was threatened by Gosselin with financial sanctions if he failed to deliver the manuscript. A new deadline of December 1830 was agreed upon but was then jeopardized by the political and social upheaval of July 1830, during which the restored Bourbon monarchy was toppled and Louis-Philippe, duke of Orleans, ascended the throne. Consumed by these events and their impact, and additionally troubled by a book of notes that had “disappeared” during his family’s move to a new apartment, Hugo, who had only begun to compose his novel, lost weeks of writing time. Gosselin grudgingly agreed to another extension, pushing back the due date to February 1, 1831. It was at this point, according to Adèle’s explanation, that her husband entered into his novel as into “a prison,” stopping only to eat and sleep. In one of the most famous anecdotes of
A Life Related,
she recounts how Hugo, upon returning to writing
The Hunchback
, bought a new bottle of ink. He plunged himself into his work, using this bottle alone, which ran out only on the day he completed the manuscript—January 14, 1831—at the precise moment he marked the novel’s final word on the page. As the story goes, Hugo, reflecting on this “remarkable” coincidence, considered renaming his novel “Ce qu‘ilyadans une bouteille d’encre” (What Is Inside a Bottle of Ink).

This tale of the writing process, and particularly the prodigious circumstances surrounding the novel’s completion, cannot, however, be taken at face value. Even in the early years of his career, Hugo was a master shaper of his own image and rarely failed to seize the opportunity to market himself, to spin reality into legend. The truth behind the composition of
The Hunchback
is in all likelihood more complex, and is certainly less of a good story. What is clear is that Hugo had a difficult time beginning the novel. Gosselin’s threats were genuine: Hugo had engaged in a contract with the publisher and had received a sizable advance, yet in spite of the rather extensive research he undertook, the manuscript did not materialize. What is also clear is that his recent triumph in the theater kept his attention elsewhere: Not only was
Hernani
an overwhelming success, but by 1830 Hugo was widely considered the leader of the growing Romantic movement in France. The preface he wrote to his 1827 historical play
Cromwell
was nothing short of a manifesto that boldly sought to redefine the aesthetics of French theater; it raised the Romantic flag against the constraining tenets of classical drama.
Hernani
, with its revolutionary use of poetic language and mixture of dramatic modes, put this new vision to the test, and the spectacular polemic that swirled around the play brought Hugo, despite past failures such as
Amy Robsart
(1828), to the forefront of the theater scene. In addition, poetry (the genre in which Hugo had first distinguished himself by winning, at age seventeen, a prestigious award for his ode on the re-erection of a statue of Henri IV, and which put bread on his table with one of the last royal pensions in the 1820s) continued to occupy him, as did the literary criticism in which he increasingly engaged.

What is less evident in Adèle’s account of
The Hunchback’s
composition are the events of Hugo’s personal life, which undoubtedly had an effect on his concentration—be they salutary, such as the birth of the couple’s second daughter, Adèle, in late July 1830, or troubling, such as problems in the Hugo marriage that stemmed from his wife’s nascent affair with Hugo’s close friend, the poet and literary critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve. Equally unaddressed—or at the very least underaddressed—is a certain hesitancy on Hugo’s part regarding the genre of the novel. Although writing
The Hunchback
was appealing in that it would bring money to the growing family’s coffer, Hugo was keenly aware that the novel was generally considered a frivolous literary form. Even as it was already showing by its suppleness to be the genre perhaps best suited to reflect the concerns of the new society born of the French Revolution, and in spite of efforts in the form undertaken in the first decades of the nineteenth century by respected writers such as Benjamin Constant, François-Rene de Chateaubriand, and Madame de Staël, the novel was nonetheless still perceived in the 1820s as a minor genre and lagged in importance far behind poetry and theater, which were both steeped in classical tradition and prestige.

Prior to
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hugo had already written and published three novels—Han
d‘Islande
(
Han
of Iceland, 1823),
Bug-Jargal
(1826), and Le
Dernier Jour d’un condamne
à
mort (The Last Day of a Condemned
Man, 1829). Yet each of these examples was more a response to personal or growing social preoccupations than an effort to practice or elevate the genre:
Han of Iceland,
a Gothic tale of thwarted young lovers, plays out Hugo’s own love story with Adèle (he once said that she was the only person who was meant to understand it).
Bug-Jargal,
which centers on an episode from the then recent past—a violent 1791 slave revolt in Santo Domingo (present-day Haiti)—had its origins in a school bet in which Hugo was challenged to compose a novel in a period of two weeks.
The Last Day of a Condemned Man,
a first-person narrative that follows a man through prison to the guillotine, was a polemically charged effort to bring awareness to the horrors of the death penalty. Hugo’s first novelistic endeav ors can be understood as rather isolated attempts to give voice to private or socially oriented concerns. One unifying influence on Hugo’s early novel writing is, however, indisputable—that of the Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott, author of
Waverley
(1814),
Rob Roy
(1818),
Ivanhoe
(1819), and
Quentin Durward
(1823). Scott’s mastery of the historical novel brought the genre quickly into vogue and helped, in the 1820s, to advance the merits of the novel as a literary form. Staunch and fervent admirers—among them Honoré de Balzac, the future author of
La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy
)—declared themselves, and French historical novels, such as Alfred de Vigny’s
Cinq-Mars
(1826) and Prosper Mérimée’s
Chronique du règne de Charles IX (Chronicle of the Reign of Charles the Ninth,
1829), began to appear and garner attention. In the same way that nature inspired introspection and reflection in Romantic poetry, history served as the fertile terrain of the Romantic novel. Whether this renewed interest in French history was the result of reawakened national sentiment or sought to exalt and glorify the ideals of the distant past in an effort to soothe the still-open wounds of the Revolution, the historical backdrop and content lent legitimacy and weight to the form, and was the push the novel needed to propel it forward.

Both
Han
of
Iceland
and
Bug-Jargal
drew heavily on Scott’s expansive vision and his techniques of novel writing, adopting in particular his trademark use of couleur
locale
—local color—to bring the depiction of the historical period alive through attention to the picturesque. The 1823 preface to
Han of Iceland
playfully points out the care that went into reproducing the atmosphere of the tale’s exotic location, down to the near-abusive use of the letters k, y, h, and w in the characters’ names. In
Bug-Jargal
the island of Santo Domingo is also replete with an exoticism produced by vivid details, from the extremes of the tropical landscape to the mysterious language (a mixture of Spanish and Creole) spoken by the rebelling slaves. In a review of Scott’s
Quentin Durward
that appeared in the July 1823 issue of
La Muse française
(a periodical Hugo helped found), Hugo openly lauded Scott’s epic and colorful conception of the novel, hailing him as the catalyst of a literary renaissance and praising him for his all-encompassing exploration of the past, for the truth behind his fiction, and for his ability to diffuse a didactic message artfully. Yet Hugo stops short of extolling Scott’s achievements as the apogee of the form; instead he uses his approbation of Scott as a spring-board to elaborate his own conception of the novel. Indeed, despite the critical failure of
Han of Iceland,
Hugo was in no way deterred from introducing and promoting his idea(1) of a yet non-existent form of the novel: “After the picturesque but prosaic novel of Walter Scott, there remains another novel to be created, more beautiful and still more complete. This novel is at once drama and epic, is picturesque but is also poetic, is real, yet also ideal, is true, but also grand—it will enshrine Walter Scott in Homer” (see, in “For Further Reading,” Victor
Hugo, Oeuvres complètes,
vol. 5, p. 131; translation mine).