by Hugo, Victor
The accumulation of specific details about the period, authenticated by quotations of the kind just mentioned from Sauval and similar collections of curious facts, is an effective way of presenting the reader, however ignorant of history, with a series of insights into the quite alien culture of the waning Middle Ages. Perhaps equally effective are the chapters devoted to synthesis of a particular theme. Such subjects as the administration of justice, the bird’s-eye view of Paris, the physical description of the cathedral, the place of anchorites in medieval urban society, are more important for Hugo’s sense of history than are chronological accuracy or the reconstruction of political situations. The hideous description (Book Ten, Ch. V) of the cage in the Bastille in which the Bishop of Verdun is incarcerated, the details of its construction and cost, the king’s indifference to human suffering and anger at wasteful expenditure, all tell the reader more than could any historical discussion of the prisoner’s alleged treachery. On a less elevated plane, the animated dialogue attributed to the students in the opening chapters is full of allusions, plays on words, and gibes at authority, much of which must have been as obscure to most readers in Hugo’s day as to those of today, but such exchanges set the scene and convey something of the atmosphere of Paris in the late fifteenth century.
All these details are so much décor; for the deeper philosophy of history to which Hugo subscribed one must turn to the chapters of Book Five which were omitted from the first published version. In narrative terms the chapter describing the visit of the transparently disguised Louis XI, in the company of his physician Coictier, is vaguely assigned to ‘about the same time’ as Claude Frollo’s refusal to meet the king’s daughter, Madame de Beaujeu, when she came on a visit to Notre-Dame in December 1481. This refusal is linked to what is stated to be an intensified misogyny pushed to the point of obsession, linked with a similarly obsessive campaign against gypsies, especially dancers. The reader does not have to be particularly alert to see in this development the sign that Frollo’s passion for Esmeralda has finally unhinged his reason. Thus, when in the chapter describing the king’s clandestine visit, Frollo’s successive denunciations of medicine and astrology as futile provoke Coictier’s furious asides ‘He’s mad!’, we already know this to be the case, but for reasons of which Coictier is quite unaware. Coictier’s hold over the king, who is in genuinely bad health as well as incurably superstitious, depends on his own expertise in medicine and astrology; Frollo appeals to an equally powerful feature of Louis’s notoriously avaricious character by indicating that the quest for gold, though long and arduous, is ultimately worth pursuing: ‘to make gold is to be God. That is the only science.’ (p. 187.) Thus far the course of the conversation is consistent with what has already been revealed, and which in Book Seven is to be confirmed, that the hermetic science of such men as Nicolas Flamel had long held Frollo’s interest and that numerous architectural features, in the cathedral of Notre-Dame and elsewhere in Paris, pointed the way to the hidden treasure—indeed Sauval lists these clues, as we have already noted. It comes therefore as no surprise when Frollo tells the king that if, at his age, he really wants to learn the rudiments of the hermetic science, it is from these local buildings that he can be taught the alphabet. What is novel is the list of ancient and distant buildings which Frollo has not seen himself, but which he associates with the book of true wisdom. The king then asks the crucial question: ‘What are these books of yours?’, which is answered by Frollo who points to the vast bulk of the cathedral all around them, and then enigmatically remarks, with one hand indicating Notre-Dame and the other a printed book on his table: ‘This will kill that.’ The curfew puts an end to the interview, but not before the king concedes to Coictier that Frollo may indeed be mad, though we are told that he formed so good an opinion of him that they subsequently often met again.
The following chapter, entitled ‘This Will Kill That’, abandons the narrative for an essay on the respective roles of architecture and printing in the history of mankind, with Hugo addressing the reader directly. According to him, from the beginning of human history until the fifteenth century, architecture was the book of mankind, evolving from single standing stones (letters of the alphabet), to groups (such as dolmens) making up syllables, to complexes like that of Carnac, representing whole sentences. Then came buildings, and he cites Indian temples of marble, Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem, and the temples of Egypt. Not only temples arose, for ‘Every civilization begins with theocracy and ends with democracy.’ Passing rapidly to the Middle Ages, Hugo contrasts Romanesque architecture, representative of the dogmatic authority of the Church, with the pointed arch brought back from the Crusades,—’a great popular movement’—through which the feudal nobles challenged the power of the Church, and were soon followed by the people claiming their share of power. Thus he sees Gothic architecture as coming to embody all the main ideas of a people, rather than of a caste, perpetuated in stone.
The fifteenth century put an end to this, he maintains, with the arrival of printing. The death of Gothic architecture and—a familiar theme—the decadence of all that came after was balanced by the overwhelming growth of the printing press, a second tower of Babel reaching far into the heavens, ceaselessly raised ever higher by the whole of mankind working together: popular, because so much cheaper than buildings, more durable, because no longer dependent on single, perishable manuscripts, available to all because numerous copies could be produced. Hugo stresses that ancient literary monuments, such as the work of Homer, the Vedas, and the Nibelungen, are also beneficiaries of printing, having now been made secure for posterity. ‘The invention of printing is the greatest event in history. It is the mother of revolutions’ (p. 200). Thus unambiguously Hugo nails his colours to the mast.
Frollo’s gloomy vision, for it is his priestly dominion that will suffer most, may well have seemed madness in 1482, but Hugo’s interpretation of ‘this will kill that’ is, with its social implications, offered as retrospective fact. The attack on the cathedral by the truands, marginalized members of society, is a vivid fictional representation of a challenge to established authority of a very different kind from that which won independence for the first Swiss confederation. In France the spark of rebellion from below was as yet nothing compared to the savage repression exercised by central authority; but by 1482 feudalism had run its course, and a new, though not necessarily better, system was to come.
In the original 1831 version the reader was led directly from Gringoire’s disconsolate wanderings on the evening of the fiasco of his play to the Court of Miracles and his ‘marriage’ to Esmeralda, and on to a Book Three combining a description of Notre-Dame and the panoramic view of Paris with what is now Book Four, except for the last brief chapter. In other words the building and its setting lead straight on to chapters describing in turn the 4-year-old foundling soon to be christened Quasimodo, his adoptive father Claude Frollo, and Claude’s baby brother Jehan, sole object of the already austere and learned priest’s human affection. The sixteen years between the two opening books, set in 1482, and the evolution of these three characters, and their relationship to each other and to the outside world, are thus seen in reverse order. The mischievous and unruly Jehan du Moulin, the deaf and deformed Quasimodo, Pope of Fools, the sinister archdeacon, mad enough to attempt abduction of the gypsy girl by whom he is obsessed, are given a personal history only when the reader knows what they have become. In 1831 what followed was the present Book Six, composed in fact before the chapters in Books Three and Four just mentioned.
In real time the whole of Book Six takes place the morning after the events of the opening books, but a story told by a provincial visitor, from Reims, neatly links topography (the Place de Grève) with history. The farcical trial of Quasimodo for the affray caused by the attempted abduction of Esmeralda the night before consigns him to the pillory in the Grève that morning; the sachette is introduced only after a chapter describing the Rat-hole; and on the way to see this as one of
the local sights, mention of a gypsy girl sets off a train of ideas linking fear of the gypsies as child-stealers, the sachette’s fear of gypsies, and finally the tale related by Mahiette, the visitor from Reims.
This story has as its fixed point the coronation of Louis XI at Reims in 1461, when the girl Paquette la Chantefleurie was 14 years old and had begun her brief career of shame. In 1466 she gave birth to a daughter on whom she doted, but before the baby Agnès was a year old, gypsies stole her, substituting a monster child, about 4 years old. All Paquette had left of her own child was a little embroidered shoe she had made herself. In the best Romantic tradition, the mother disappeared soon afterwards; whether she fled to Paris or committed suicide by drowning no one quite knew. As for the little monster, he was sent to Paris for the foundlings’ bed, and thus can be identified as Quasimodo. Moments after ending her story Mahiette is able to identify the sachette as the vanished Paquette, as soon as she catches sight of the little shoe at which the recluse is gazing. At this point, half-way through the narrative, the exposition is at last complete, and dramatic irony intensifies. The sachette, immured in her cell, wildly curses Esmeralda as a child-stealer, when she is in fact the child stolen; Quasimodo, borne only the day before to the Place de Grève in triumphant procession as Pope of Fools, is flogged and pilloried in the same place for an offence ordered by his master, Claude Frollo, who puts in an appearance, but makes no attempt to help him; the gypsy, alone of the crowd, answers the wretched Quasimodo’s plea for a drink of water, when it was she whom he had tried to seize the previous night; while the sachette only curses the girl the more, predicting a shameful end for her on that same ladder.
The only character of any importance still to be integrated into the story is the handsome young officer who rescued Esmeralda from abduction, and about whom she has been dreaming ever since. He was the last character Hugo introduced, and though he is clearly a type his creator despised, from Book Seven on he is the unwitting instrument of Esmeralda’s destruction, while remaining the object of her blind adoration. It is ironic that the murder with witchcraft of which she is accused later should be that of a man whom she actually sees alive as she is taken to the scaffold for the first time, when Quasimodo snatches her into sanctuary at the last moment, and the sight of whom causes her to betray herself fatally in the end only minutes after being reunited with her mother after a lifetime’s separation. Vain and shallow as Phoebus is, he represents the absence of any moral or rational justification for the dreadful consequences of Esmeralda’s obsession with him. There are no star-crossed lovers, no Romeo and Juliet or Tristram and Iseult, in this story, only the endless irony of human beings unable to match their uncontrollable passions to the reality of the world around them. The alchemists’ quest for gold, their belief that a sunbeam could be buried and gold extracted from it, which had animated Frollo until his obsession with the gypsy girl drove all other interests from his mind—that vain hope is no more real than the girl’s pathetic belief that her sun, her Phoebus, her protector, would rescue her.
The first four chapters of Book Seven see the tragic knot tied. Esmeralda’s command performance in the Gondelaurier mansion marks her out as a kind of circus freak beyond the social pale, until the goat’s betrayal of her secret brands her as a witch. Gringoire’s interview with Frollo, and his revelation that in the eyes of the truands he is married to Esmeralda for the next four years, though in name only, just serves to inflame the priest’s passion, while his explanation of the goat’s apparently magic tricks proves both girl and goat innocent of sorcery. It is the fourth chapter, with its title ’ANÁΓKH, set in Frollo’s secret laboratory, that takes the reader back to the introductory Note at the very beginning.
It was at that point that Hugo paused in his narrative to compose the two chapters that became Book Five. Once he had completed the chapter describing the king’s visit (to his cell in the cloister, not the laboratory in the tower), followed by the chapter ‘This Will Kill That’, he was able very rapidly to go back to the visit of Charmolue, already expected when brother Jehan inconveniently arrives and has to hide, and amplify the sense of the inscription Frollo has just carved on the wall. Irony is yet again evident: Charmolue reports that the case against Esmeralda is already prepared, and despite Gringoire’s full explanation of a day or two before that witchcraft has nothing to do with her act, there can be no doubt that the charge will be taken as proved in the sort of society where Quasimodo’s deafness earns him extra punishment from a deaf judge. At this point the inscription is reflected in the little drama of the spider and the fly. The web, several times compared to a rose-window, exemplifies the inevitability of what Frollo sees as the fate of the girl and himself. Part of that fatality is the victim’s helpless struggle when caught in the trap. Only a few hours later, through a series of coincidences, Frollo witnesses as a voyeur the amorous scene between the mysterious Phoebus, whom he at last identifies, and the girl, and in a fit of jealous frenzy stabs his rival, fatally, as he believes, and escapes to let the girl pay the price for his crime.
From then on to the end of the book one misunderstanding after another provokes some of the most striking scenes in the book, alternating horror with hope. The trial, the torture, the death sentence, the condemned cell in the bowels of the prison, finally the grim spectacle of the liturgy and amende honorable at the door of the cathedral, follow their inexorable course up to the point when Quasimodo intervenes to snatch the girl to sanctuary. All he wants is to make her happy and keep her safe. Thus, when Frollo comes one night to her sanctuary cell and tries to take her by force, he is stopped by Quasimodo and all but stabbed by the girl. From that moment on Frollo is jealous of the hunchback, who for the first time wavers between his loyalty to master and to idol.
After the momentary lull of sanctuary comes the last act of the drama, a set piece so spectacular, occupying some hundred pages, that it is easy to see why film producers have been repeatedly attracted to it, but which is also dense with misunderstanding. The tempo of the narrative changes with the revelation that the judicial authorities propose to breach sanctuary (unusual, but not unknown) and that less than three days remain to take the girl to a secret and safer refuge. It is Gringoire, meeting Frollo by chance, who proposes using the truands to create a diversion under cover of which she can be removed to a new sanctuary. Frollo assents to the plan, and is so absorbed by it that for the first time he dismisses his brother’s plea for money (though he relents at the last moment) and even his threat to become a truand. They never meet again.
The description of the truands’ tavern, their silent march on Notre-Dame at midnight, the gathering momentum of the action, all takes place in the dark, and latterly even the moon disappears behind the clouds. The whole set piece is typical of the chiaroscuro so dear to the Romantics, but leads to a fatal misunderstanding. Keeping watch for the girl’s safety, all that Quasimodo knows is that he is surrounded by an armed crowd attempting to break in, and thus, as he supposes, hostile to Esmeralda. His heroic and single-handed defence is based so utterly on this mistake that when the king’s men turn up to put down the insurrection and seize the alleged witch he hails them as rescuers.
However, before Phoebus and his men arrive to crush the truands, they have to be sent there. Once again the king holds the stage, but this time not at all incognito. In his royal fortress of the Bastille, busily dispatching affairs of State, his presence tacitly invites the reader of Hugo’s day to look into what was an indefinite future in 1482 but an immediate past in 1831. The usual themes are all there: the king’s obsessive concern for cheeseparing in expenses, the casual infliction of torture on objects of his displeasure, the superstition. All are as much trademarks of Louis XI as his pet oath ‘Pasquedieu!’ and his false bonhomie in addressing members of his entourage as ‘Compère’. All this, of course, runs parallel in time with the preparation and mounting of the truands’ assault, and leaves the reader uncertain about what will happen. News of the insurrection re
aches the king in bits; at first it is his physician, Coictier, who reports a popular uprising against the bailiff of the Palais. The news that the people are helping to bring about Louis’s ambition to curb the power of the numerous feudal lords in favour of centralized royal government gives him a momentary explosion of delight, which lasts long enough to save Gringoire, arrested and brought in as a suspected truand, from execution.
Throughout the chapter, witnessing all that takes place, including the visit to the cage, are two of the men from Ghent, Guillaume Rym and Jacques Coppenole, part of the Flemish embassy described at length at the beginning of the book, and here presented as agents of Louis’s policy. By now the fire lit by Quasimodo is clearly visible from the Bastille, and Louis leads the Flemings into a discussion on revolution. Coppenole, rather than the more cautious Rym, speaks his mind. He reminds the king that only six years earlier Swiss peasants had defeated the flower of Burgundian nobility at Grandson, so class has nothing to do with victory. Louis objects that the Swiss were fighting a battle, whereas this is a popular insurrection which he can crush whenever he chooses. Coppenole replies that if this is so, the hour of the people in France has not yet struck. Pressed by the king, and speaking in and of the fortress whose destruction gave the name Bastille a different resonance for ever on 14 July 1789, he answers firmly in prophetic terms. Pressed to explain how to organize a revolt, he, who had already humiliated the Lady of Flanders by having two of her highest dignitaries publicly executed at Ghent, speaks of finding a popular grievance and then exploiting it. As always he speaks as a man of the people who knows how they feel. Louis’s remedy for everything is repression, and he cannot believe that the common people can ever defeat central authority. The irony of such sentiments in 1831 hardly needs comment.
