The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Notre-Dame de Paris)

Summary

Notre-Dame de Paris, known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, is set in Paris in 1482, in the last years of Louis XI. It opens on the Feast of Fools, 6 January, when the poet Pierre Gringoire's mystery play in the Palace of Justice is drowned out by the crowd, who elect as Pope of Fools the most hideous face in Paris: Quasimodo, the deaf, one-eyed, hunchbacked bell-ringer of Notre-Dame. In the Place de Grève a young gypsy dancer, La Esmeralda, performs with her trained goat Djali. That night Quasimodo, on the orders of his master, the archdeacon Claude Frollo, tries to seize her, and she is rescued by Captain Phoebus de Châteaupers of the royal archers. Gringoire, lost in the Court of Miracles, the kingdom of the Paris beggars under Clopin Trouillefou, is saved from hanging when Esmeralda takes him as husband in name only. Hugo then turns to the cathedral itself, with a long description of Notre-Dame and a bird's-eye view of medieval Paris, and to Frollo, a learned and austere priest who adopted the abandoned infant Quasimodo, taught him to speak, and studies alchemy in his cell. In the chapter This Will Kill That, Frollo's remark that the book will kill the edifice leads Hugo into an essay on how printing displaced architecture as the great record of human thought. Quasimodo is flogged in the pillory for the attempted abduction, and only Esmeralda brings him water. Frollo, consumed by desire for her, follows Esmeralda to a rendezvous with Phoebus and stabs the captain. She is accused of witchcraft and murder, tortured with the boot until she confesses, and condemned; Phoebus recovers and keeps silent. As she does penance before the cathedral, Quasimodo swings down on a rope and carries her inside, crying sanctuary. In the bell tower he cares for her tenderly, while Frollo, unable to master himself, attempts to force himself on her and is driven off. When Parliament resolves to remove her from sanctuary, the beggars storm the cathedral to free her; Quasimodo, not understanding their purpose, defends it with stones and molten lead and kills Frollo's brother Jehan, and the king's troops crush the attack. Frollo and Gringoire spirit Esmeralda away by boat; she refuses Frollo, who hands her to the recluse Sister Gudule, who discovers by a little embroidered shoe that the girl is the daughter stolen from her fifteen years before. Soldiers seize Esmeralda, and she is hanged. Watching from the tower, Frollo laughs, and Quasimodo hurls him down. Years later, two skeletons are found in the vault of Montfaucon, one misshapen, embracing the other. Charles Gosselin published the novel in March 1831, and an enlarged edition of 1832 added three chapters, including This Will Kill That.

Plot or Argument

• Book First: The Feast of Fools

  On 6 January 1482 Gringoire's mystery play fails before Flemish envoys and an impatient crowd; Quasimodo is crowned Pope of Fools and Esmeralda is glimpsed dancing outside.

• Book Second: Gringoire's night

  Gringoire follows Esmeralda, witnesses Quasimodo's attempted abduction and Phoebus's rescue, stumbles into the Court of Miracles, and is saved from the gallows by a broken-jug marriage to Esmeralda.

• Book Third: Notre-Dame and Paris

  Hugo describes the cathedral as a work of centuries, mourns its mutilations, and offers a panorama of fifteenth-century Paris seen from the towers.

• Book Fourth: Claude Frollo and Quasimodo

  The history of the foundling left on Quasimodo Sunday, adopted by the young scholar-priest Frollo, made bell-ringer and deafened by the bells; Frollo's learning and his growing unpopularity.

• Book Fifth: Abbas beati Martini and This Will Kill That

  Louis XI, disguised, and his physician Jacques Coictier visit Frollo's cell; Frollo's saying that the book will kill the edifice opens Hugo's essay on printing and architecture.

• Book Sixth: The pillory

  A deaf judge condemns deaf Quasimodo; Sister Gudule, walled in the Rat-Hole, curses gypsies; Quasimodo is flogged and Esmeralda alone gives him water.

• Book Seventh: The goat, the bells and the stabbing

  Djali spells Phoebus's name before Fleur-de-Lys; Frollo, haunted by the word ἈΝÁΓΚΗ (fate), shadows Phoebus to his rendezvous with Esmeralda and stabs him.

• Book Eighth: Trial and sanctuary

  Esmeralda is tried for sorcery and murder, tortured into confession and condemned; Frollo declares his passion in her dungeon; at the public penance Quasimodo snatches her into the church.

• Book Ninth: In the towers

  Frollo wanders in delirium; Quasimodo shelters and serves Esmeralda, sensing his ugliness beside her; Frollo's night attempt on her is stopped by Quasimodo's whistle and grip.

• Book Tenth: The assault on the cathedral

  Gringoire rouses the beggars to rescue Esmeralda; Quasimodo, alone, defends the church and kills Jehan Frollo; Louis XI in the Bastille sends troops against the revolt.

• Book Eleventh: The little shoe and the two marriages

  Gudule finds her lost daughter in Esmeralda just before the soldiers take her; Esmeralda is hanged, Quasimodo throws Frollo from the tower, Phoebus marries, and Quasimodo's skeleton is found clasping hers at Montfaucon.

Characters

• Quasimodo, bell-ringer of Notre-Dame

  A deaf, one-eyed, hunchbacked foundling, devoted to Frollo and to the cathedral, who comes to love Esmeralda.

• La Esmeralda, street dancer

  A young dancer raised among the gypsies, generous and trusting, in love with Phoebus; in fact Agnès, the stolen daughter of Paquette.

• Claude Frollo, archdeacon of Josas

  A learned, ascetic priest and alchemist, Quasimodo's adoptive father, undone by obsessive desire for Esmeralda.

• Phoebus de Châteaupers, captain of the royal archers

  A handsome, shallow officer betrothed to Fleur-de-Lys, who trifles with Esmeralda and lets her be condemned.

• Pierre Gringoire, poet and philosopher

  A penniless playwright, Esmeralda's husband in name only, who cares most for himself and the goat.

• Djali, Esmeralda's goat

  A trained white goat with gilded horns whose tricks are taken as proof of sorcery.

• Sister Gudule, recluse of the Rat-Hole

  Paquette la Chantefleurie, walled in for grief over her stolen baby, who hates gypsies until she recognizes her daughter.

• Jehan Frollo, Frollo's younger brother

  A dissolute student who joins the assault on the cathedral and is killed by Quasimodo.

• Clopin Trouillefou, king of the beggars

  Ruler of the Court of Miracles who leads the attack to free Esmeralda.

• Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier, Phoebus's betrothed

  A noble young lady whose jealousy is roused by Esmeralda and her goat.

• Louis XI, King of France

  A shrewd, frugal, ailing king who visits Frollo in disguise and orders the revolt crushed.

• Jacques Coictier, the king's physician

  Louis XI's well-paid doctor, who accompanies him to Frollo's cell.

Lessons

• The building as a book

  Hugo treats Notre-Dame as a work of many generations and as the stone book of the Middle Ages, in which every thought had its page. In This Will Kill That he argues that printing, cheaper and more lasting, took over architecture's role as the record of the human mind. The novel was written in part to stir his contemporaries to value and preserve medieval buildings.

  • What does Frollo mean when he says the book will kill the edifice?
  • According to Hugo, what did a medieval cathedral record that books later recorded instead?
  • Is Hugo's claim about printing and architecture true of later centuries?

• Mercy to the despised

  On the pillory, flogged and jeered by the crowd, Quasimodo begs for water and receives it only from Esmeralda, the girl he tried to abduct. Her act wins his lifelong devotion and his first tear. Hugo shows how one small mercy can change a soul that has known only mockery.

  • Why does no one else in the crowd give Quasimodo water?
  • Why is it significant that Esmeralda, of all people, is the one who does it?
  • How does Quasimodo repay her later in the novel?

• Learning without self-command

  Claude Frollo has mastered law, medicine, theology and languages and lives in strict austerity, yet he cannot govern his desire for Esmeralda, and it drives him to spying, stabbing, false witness and cruelty. Hugo presents a learned man whose knowledge gives him no rule over his passions, and who blames fate rather than himself.

  • What has Frollo studied, and how has his learning shaped him?
  • Why does Frollo write and repeat the word for fate?
  • Is Frollo a victim of fate or the author of his own fall?

• Appearance and worth

  The handsome Phoebus is vain and faithless; the monstrous Quasimodo is loyal unto death. Esmeralda loves the captain's looks and fears the bell-ringer's face. The novel sets outward beauty against inward faithfulness without making either simple.

  • How does Phoebus behave after he recovers from his wound?
  • What does Quasimodo say about his own ugliness when he speaks to Esmeralda in the tower?
  • Why can Esmeralda not return Quasimodo's love?

Context

Hugo set the novel in 1482, near the end of Louis XI's reign, just as printing was spreading through Europe, and filled it with researched detail about the Paris of the late Middle Ages: the Palace of Justice, the Place de Grève, the Court of Miracles, the gibbet of Montfaucon, the right of sanctuary and the procedures of ecclesiastical and royal justice. He wrote at a time when many medieval churches in France had been damaged in the Revolution or altered and neglected, and he had already published a pamphlet against their demolition. The novel belongs to the French Romantic movement, with its taste for the medieval, the grotesque and the sublime that Hugo had theorized in the preface to Cromwell.

Composition

Hugo contracted for the novel with the publisher Charles Gosselin in 1828 and, after delays during the revolution of July 1830, wrote most of it between September 1830 and January 1831. Gosselin published it in March 1831 as Notre-Dame de Paris. The 1832 edition published by Eugène Renduel added three chapters, Unpopularity and the two chapters of Book Fifth, Abbas beati Martini and This Will Kill That, which Hugo said had been mislaid. The English title The Hunchback of Notre-Dame comes from Frederic Shoberl's 1833 translation. The library text is the complete translation by the American translator Isabel F. Hapgood (1888), which keeps the title Notre-Dame de Paris and includes the restored chapters.

Reception

The novel was a great popular success and helped spark interest in Gothic architecture and the preservation of medieval monuments in France; the extensive restoration of Notre-Dame led by Jean-Baptiste Lassus and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc began in the 1840s. It has been adapted many times for opera, ballet, stage and film, including Louise Bertin's opera La Esmeralda (1836), with a libretto by Hugo, a 1923 silent film with Lon Chaney, a 1939 film with Charles Laughton, and an animated film in 1996. Critics have debated whether the long architectural chapters are digressions or the heart of the book; Hugo himself placed the cathedral at the center of his title.

Comparisons

• les-miserables

  Hugo's later novel returns to Paris, to the outcast and to the force of law, but where Notre-Dame ends in fatality and death, Les Misérables turns on the bishop's mercy and Valjean's redemption.

• the-phantom-of-the-opera

  Leroux's disfigured Erik, hidden beneath another great Paris building, loves a young singer who cannot return his love, a pattern that closely echoes Quasimodo and Esmeralda in the towers.

• the-house-of-the-seven-gables

  Hawthorne also makes a building the central presence of a romance, and both writers use an old structure to carry the weight of the past into the present.

• frankenstein

  Both novels follow a being made monstrous in the eyes of others who longs for love, and both pair him with a learned man whose solitary studies lead to ruin.

• beaumont-beauty-and-the-beast

  The fairy tale lets Beauty see through the Beast's form to his goodness; Hugo's novel tells the same encounter as tragedy, where Esmeralda pities Quasimodo but cannot love him.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The Greek word for fate in the preface, and where it reappears in Frollo's cell in Book Seventh.
• Hugo's long chapters on the cathedral and on printing in Books Third and Fifth; they explain why the book is named for a building.
• The water Esmeralda gives Quasimodo on the pillory in Book Sixth, and how he repays it in Book Eighth.
• The little embroidered shoe, first in Sister Gudule's cell and again in Book Eleventh.
• The novel includes judicial torture, public executions, a stabbing, and Frollo's obsessive pursuit of Esmeralda, including an attempted assault in Book Ninth; Hugo narrates these without explicit detail.

Key terms and names

ἈΝÁΓΚΗ (Ananke)

Greek for fate or necessity; Hugo finds it carved in the tower and Frollo writes it on his wall.

Feast of Fools

The 6 January festival of misrule on which Quasimodo is crowned mock pope.

Court of Miracles

The quarter of Paris beggars and thieves, so called because the lame and blind there were said to be cured each night.

Sanctuary

The medieval right of refuge in a church, which protects Esmeralda until Parliament votes to suspend it.

This Will Kill That

Frollo's saying, and Hugo's chapter, that the printed book will replace the cathedral as the record of human thought.

Montfaucon

The great gibbet outside Paris, where executed bodies were laid in a vault, and where Quasimodo's skeleton is found.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension How does Quasimodo come to be Pope of Fools, and why does the crowd mock him?
2. Comprehension How did Claude Frollo come to raise Quasimodo, and how did Quasimodo become deaf?
3. Comprehension Why is Esmeralda condemned, and who actually stabbed Phoebus?
4. Interpretation Why does Hugo devote whole chapters to the cathedral and to printing in the middle of a love story?
5. Interpretation Quasimodo defends the cathedral against the beggars who came to save Esmeralda. What does this misunderstanding say about his isolation?
6. Interpretation Frollo blames fate. Does the novel agree with him, or does it hold him responsible?
7. Big Question Can learning and religious office protect a person from his own passions?
8. Big Question Does a new technology of knowledge change what a society believes, or only how it records it?

Faith Connections

• Matthew 25:35-40 (Scripture)

  I was thirsty and ye gave me drink: Esmeralda's gourd of water to the flogged Quasimodo is the novel's clearest act of mercy to the least regarded.

• James 1:14-15 (Scripture)

  Desire conceived brings forth sin, and sin, when finished, death: the course of Frollo's passion from secret longing to stabbing, false witness and ruin.

• 1 Samuel 16:7 (Scripture)

  Man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart: the contrast between handsome, faithless Phoebus and misshapen, loyal Quasimodo.

• Dante, Inferno III (Great Conversation)

  Hugo titles the chapter of Esmeralda's dungeon with the words over Dante's gate of Hell, Leave all hope behind, ye who enter here, where Frollo comes to her.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Human beings are bound by a fate they help to forge: the crowd's cruelty, Phoebus's vanity and above all Frollo's ungoverned desire combine to destroy Esmeralda, while the stones of the cathedral, the one shelter and the one book of that age, are themselves passing away before the printed word.

Rhetorical device: antithesis. Hugo sets the grotesque beside the sublime throughout: the hideous Pope of Fools beside the beautiful dancer, the cathedral beside the gibbet, and in This Will Kill That the book against the edifice.

Debate: Resolved: that Hugo's chapters on architecture are essential to the novel rather than a digression.

Memory Work

This will kill that. The book will kill the edifice.

Oh! all that I have ever loved!

Writing Prompts

Essay: Is fate or choice responsible for the deaths at the end of the novel? Argue from the preface's Greek word, Frollo's actions in Books Seventh and Eleventh, and Phoebus's silence.

Comparison with Les Misérables: Compare Claude Frollo and Bishop Myriel as Hugo's two great portraits of churchmen: how does each use learning and authority, and what follows from it?

Medical Lens

Quasimodo is described with unusual physical precision: hunchback, a wart covering one eye, crooked legs and teeth, and deafness acquired at fourteen from ringing the great bells, which in turn makes him nearly mute. The episode is an early literary account of noise-induced hearing loss, though Hugo frames it as fatality rather than pathology. Frollo's career includes medicine; Book Fourth records that he studied herbs, unguents, fevers, contusions, sprains and abscesses to the level of a physician and surgeon, and in Book Fifth he meets Louis XI's physician Jacques Coictier, a historical figure, and dismisses medicine with an inscription calling it the daughter of dreams. Frollo's progressive fixation on Esmeralda, his delirium after her condemnation in Book Ninth, Chapter I, and his laughter at her execution are drawn as a passion that becomes a kind of madness; readers have described it in terms of obsession, but the book itself speaks of fate and desire. Sister Gudule's fifteen years of self-immured grief for her stolen child, and the judicial torture of Esmeralda with the boot, give the novel's other bodily and mental extremes; the torture scene shows how the late medieval procedure treated a confession extracted by pain as proof.

• Book Fourth, Chapter III

  Quasimodo's deformities and his deafness caused by the cathedral bells at fourteen, and the near-silence he adopts afterward.

  Disability Deformity
• Book Fourth, Chapter II

  Frollo's studies in medicine and surgery, herbs, fevers and wounds, alongside law and theology.

  Physicians Doctors
• Book Fifth, Chapter I, Abbas beati Martini

  The king's physician Jacques Coictier and the disguised Louis XI consult Frollo; medicine is dismissed as the daughter of dreams.

  Physicians Doctors
• Book Eighth, Chapters II–IV

  Esmeralda's trial, her torture with the boot until she confesses, and Frollo's visit to her dungeon.

  Pain
• Book Ninth, Chapter I, Delirium

  Frollo flees Paris after the condemnation and wanders in a fevered, half-mad state through the countryside.

  Obsession Monomania Madness Psychosis
• Book Sixth, Chapter III, and Book Eleventh, Chapter I

  Paquette's grief for her stolen infant, her walling-up as Sister Gudule, and her recognition of her daughter through the little shoe.

  Grief

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Defend or challenge Hugo's claim in This Will Kill That that printing replaced architecture as the book of humanity. Use the chapter's argument and one building you know.

• Fiction

  Write the scene on the pillory from Quasimodo's point of view, from the first lash to the moment Esmeralda raises the gourd.

• Classroom

  Make a guided tour of Notre-Dame using Book Third: label the facade, the towers, the bells, the Gallery of Kings and the cell where Frollo works, with the scene that happens at each.

Further Reading

• Les Misérables, Victor Hugo

  Hugo's great later novel of Paris.

• Victor Hugo, Graham Robb

  A full modern biography.

• Notre-Dame of Paris, Allan Temko

  A history of the cathedral's building and later fortunes.