by Hugo, Victor
Hymbercourt… Hugonet: executed in 1477 by the citizens of Ghent in defiance of Mary, for supposed double-dealing with France.
vera …: Virgil, Aeneid, i. 405.
Timanthes: a Greek painter of the fourth century BC.
Germain Pilon: a sculptor (1537–90).
David Teniers: the younger, a painter (1610–70).
Salvator Rosa: a painter (1615–73).
Sauveur… Biot: Joseph Sauveur (1653–1716), physicist and acoustics specialist; J.-B. Biot (1774–1862), pioneer of electromagnetism.
great man: the name of Napoleon figures clearly in the manuscript, but not in the final version.
douzain: a (then) newly introduced silver coin worth a sou.
Naso: the poet P. Ovidius Naso, Ovid, died in exile on the Black Sea coast.
May bundle: like the maypole, a festive rather than a seasonal object, essentially a bundle of sticks.
Boccador: Italian architect who died in Paris c. 1549. The Hôtel de Ville was destroyed by the Commune of 1871.
Saint-Vallier. Jean de Poitiers, comte de Saint-Vallier, father of Diane, mistress of the future Henri II, was condemned to death for conspiracy against François I in 1524, but later reprieved.
Besos para Golpes: bad Spanish for ‘kisses for blows’; the linguistic oddities throughout the chapter indicate that Hugo deliberately put ‘para’ for ‘por’.
salamander: a creature whose natural element was fire.
Bacchante from Mount Maenalus: the Bacchantes, or Maenads, danced in a frenzy inspired by Bacchus; Mount Maenalus is sacred to Pan, and the first syllable has nothing to do with Bacchus. One of countless examples of Gringoire’s wide and inaccurate erudition.
grands blancs etc.: see Note on Money.
sachette: explained later from the fact that she wore a sack.
camichon: apparently a version of cramiche, a kind of bun or cake; cf. cramique, a sort of fruit-loaf, in Belgium today.
‘Un cofre … echar’: ‘A chest of great value/They found in a pillar/Inside new banners/With frightening figures/Arab riders/Sitting immobile/With swords, and round their necks/Crossbows which shot well.’ The poem comes from a collection of Spanish Romanceros published in 1821 by Abel Hugo, Victor’s brother.
courtauds … dogs: the list and definitions of these sturdy beggars comes from Sauval, writing nearly two hundred years later. It should be taken to represent what Hugo was happy to pass on, rather than as historically accurate. A fuller description follows in the text, pp. 96–8.
courtauds—winter beggars; coquillarts—alleged pilgrims wearing their badge of scallop shells; hubins—persons bitten by rabid dogs seeking a cure at Saint-Hubert; sabouleux—supposed epileptics, foaming at the mouth with soap; calots—ringworm sufferers; francs-mitoux—wearing bandages round their heads; polissons—thieving children; piètres—beggars on crutches; capons—cutpurses; malingreux—fakers of running sores or dropsy; rifodçs—supposedly made homeless through fire; marcandiers—supposed victims of theft; narquois—supposed wounded soldiers; archisuppôts, cagoux—the chief officers, often hooded for anonymity; coesre—Argot word for their King.
Galilee: the association of clerks from the counting-house.
basoche: those from the High Court of Parliament.
Sainte-Geneviève: patron of Paris, whose reliquary was borne in procession round the city in times not only of plague but of flood, storm, or any other disaster.
balafos: an African percussion instrument.
re-la-mi: the reference is to the hexachord associated with Guido d’Arezzo in the eleventh century. It was a very restrictive form, and by the time of the Renaissance was replaced by the system more familiar today.
Celestine: a monastic order, part of the Benedictine family, much in honour in France in the fifteenth century, but defunct since the eighteenth (before the Revolution). An oblate is a lay associate.
archers … King’s troop: these troops were first formed by Charles VII as the nucleus of a standing army, and provided mounted patrols for the watch in Paris. Originally bowmen, they kept the name all though the ancien régime long after they adopted other arms, and ‘archer’ became a synonym for policeman.
gendarme: literally ‘man of war’, a mounted soldier.
‘and what… but dream?’: quotation from La Fontaine’s fable The Hare and the Frog.
Maître Nicolas: the celebrated alchemist Nicolas Flamel: see Book Four, Ch. V, below.
Belieforêt, Father Le Juge, and Corrozet: François de Belleforêt, Pierre Le Juge, and Gilles Corrozet published contributions to the history of Paris in 1580, 1586, and 1532 respectively.
Sainte-Opportune: the church did not survive the Revolution.
Salve: one of the most ancient and popular hymns to the Virgin Mary is ‘Ave maris stella’, dating from the ninth century; hardly less famous is the antiphon ‘Salve Regina’ of the eleventh century; neither is part of the litany. Gringoire’s Classical erudition has already been shown to be unreliable; his knowledge of liturgy is clearly no better.
buona mancia: the usual meaning is in fact ‘tip’ in Italian.
Señor …: to show the reader that from Italian we have switched to Spanish.
Vendidi…: a fair measure of Gringoire’s, rather than Cicero’s, Latin!
Michelangelo … Callot: the first lived from 1475 to 1564, Jacques Callot, a prolific and realistic engraver, especially of low life, from 1592 to 1635.
God’s leg: because it brings in a good income. Rabelais in the Fourth Book of Pantagruel confirms (and condemns) the expression (ch. 1).
Benserade: the poet Isaac de Benserade (1612–91) was a regular producer of court entertainments.
petite flambe: a small curved knife used for cutting purses; the Argoteers collectively were the people of the petite flambe and the word comes in the password mentioned in Book Ten.
franche-bourgeoisie: that is, exempt from taxes. The modern rue des Francs-Bourgeois commemorates a poorhouse set up in the early fifteenth century, but Trouillefou is clearly not thinking of anything so charitable.
Burington: more correctly Daines Barrington, Observations on the Statutes … (1766).
Despréaux: the name by which the poet Boileau, friend of Racine and Molière, was known. Boileau’s Satire X on women (1692) no doubt earned him this description.
Raphael: 1483–1520.
Quando …: another fragment from Abel Hugo’s Romanceros.
Micromegas: eponymous giant hero of Voltaire’s tale (1752).
Charlemagne … Philip Augustus: Charlemagne reigned 742–814, Philip-Augustus 1180–1223.
Tempus edax …: the quotation is adapted from Ovid, Metamorphoses, xv.
quae mole …: the chronicler is Du Breul.
Childebert: son of Clovis, reigned AD 511–58.
Hercandus: Bishop of Paris in Charlemagne’s time; Louis XIII had vowed to repair the altar, but it was completed only sixty years later by his son Louis XIV.
Constable de Bourbon’s treason: this time Charles de Bourbon, who joined the Imperial forces against France in 1523 and died during the sack of Rome in 1527.
Catherine … Dubarry’s boudoir: Catherine de’ Medici, wife of Henri II, died 1589; Madame Dubarry, mistress of Louis XV, executed 1793.
Vitruvius: Roman architect of the first century BC, the most important authority on the art for the Renaissance.
Vignolo: died 1573, author of an authoritative treatise on the five orders of architecture. Note that ‘Goths and Vandals’ were often bracketed together by the humanists, while only the latter term has retained its original pejorative sense.
Erostratus: an otherwise obscure Ephesian who set fire to the temple there so that his name would live for ever. The quotation comes from Du Breul.
Gregory VII: Pope 1073–85.
pendent opera interrupta: Virgil, Aeneid, iv. 88.
The note is by Hugo, the quotation from Ovid, Metamorphoses, ii.
Julian the Apostate: about the mid-fourt
h century AD.
‘Le mur …: ‘the wall ringing Paris makes Paris ring with murmuring.’
Bernardins: another name for the Cistercians, whose important college was situated in the place indicated.
Place Royale: now Place des Vosges, and site of the Victor Hugo Museum.
unfinished: not even begun until 1508.
guilloched: a form of ornamentation consisting of intersecting curved bands.
Saint-Ladre: or Saint-Lazare.
Montfaucon: for a detailed description, see the last chapter of the novel.
Voltaire … four fine monuments: what he actually wrote, in the introduction to his Siècle de Louis XIV., was ‘did not possess four fine monuments’, and in ch. xxxii he particularly praises the new Louvre and the Luxembourg Palace.
Mignards: Pierre Mignard (1612–75) was a portrait painter loaded with honours by Louis XIV.
Year III... Messidor style: in the Revolutionary calendar, year III ran from 1796 to 1797, Messidor, the tenth month, from late June to late July.
stretta: a compression and acceleration announcing the end of a piece of music; there is also stretto, essentially a device at the end of a fugue where parts overlap rather than follow each other.
Ave-Maria: a Franciscan house founded by Louis XI in 1471, near the Hôtel de Ville, from which the Angelus was rung three times a day.
Haudry: Étienne Haudry founded this charitable institution for women in 1306, whence the familiar name haudriettes. The other details come via Sauval and Du Breul from authentic documents.
Laetare Sunday: mid-Lent or Refreshment Sunday, that is, five weeks earlier than Low or Quasimodo Sunday.
Phlegethon: river of flame in Hades.
Collège de Torchi: or Torci, better known as Collège de Lisieux.
‘Master of the Sentences’: Peter Lombard; the ‘sentences’ in question formed the basis for theological study for most of the Middle Ages. The remainder of the list includes the collection of civil statutes known as the Capitularies, Gratian’s twelfth-century work on canon law, the Decretum, and various collections of decretals, that is rulings on canon law given by popes, which then had the force of law.
Jacques d’Espars … Richard Hellain: actual members of the medical faculty at the time.
all four faculties: Arts, and the three higher faculties—Theology, Law, and Medicine.
Jean de Troyes: Jean de Roye; see p. 13.
age of 20: officially he should have waited until 25, the age of legal majority.
more or less: Quasimodo in Latin means rather ‘as it were’.
Immanis …: the chapter heading is an adaptation from Virgil, Bucolics, v. 44, replacing the original ‘formosi’ (‘comely’) with its opposite, ‘immanis’.
Josas: one of three archdeaconries of Paris, Josas lay to the south-west.
Hobbes: Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), English philosopher who wrote in Latin and English.
Montagu: beheaded in 1409.
Astolfo: a brave and amiable character in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, who travels far and wide on the hippogriff, a winged horse with a griffin’s head.
tarasques: the tarasque was a dragon reputedly slain at Tarascon in Provence by St Martha, sister of Lazarus; like the dogs and wyverns, a gargoyle.
machicots: full-time singers at Notre-Dame, lay clerks.
Paul the Deacon: an eighth-century Lombard historian, also known as Warnefrid.
classic: there is a pun on ‘classic’ and the Latin for trumpet, ‘classicum’.
rue de Glatigny: the street of recognized brothels.
Claude Pernelle: wife of Nicolas Flamel.
Pacifique: a Capuchin friar of the seventeenth century.
Legris: ‘Mr Grey’.
Régnier …: he had in fact not written ‘songbirds’ (fauvettes) but ‘screech-owls’ (chouettes).
Claudius…: the name ‘Claudius’ in Latin is etymologically connected with the word ‘claudus’, lame or limping, and provides an obvious pun.
powder of projection: a sort of alchemist’s catalyst, supposedly able to turn metals on to which it was cast into gold.
ABRI-COTIER: means apricot-tree, and is yet another pun, formed from abri = shelter and cotier, a recognizable variant of Coictier.
livres …: see Note on Money.
Compère: means something like ‘good friend’ and was well known as Louis XI’s usual form of address to his intimates. The mysterious stranger’s identity would be immediately spotted by any reader, but it is typical of Hugo to make a pseudo-mystery of it until the end of the chapter,
Aesculapius: the Greek god of medicine, used here for a medical authority.
JAMBLICHUS: neo-Platonist of the fourth century AD, author of a life of Pythagoras.
emprosthotonos … opisthotonos: violent muscular contractions bending the body forwards after it has been bent backwards.
Credo… Dominum nostrum: ‘I believe in God, Our Lord …’
Epidaurus … Chaldea: referring to medicine and astrology respectively.
boustrophedon … ziruph … zephirod: terms from the Kabbala, referring to ways of deciphering the Hebrew alphabet.
Clavicula: magic book attributed to King Solomon.
cyprinidae: carp, goldfish, etc.
Eklinga: in Sanskrit means the ‘one, or unique, lingam’. in Hindu mythology the linga(m) was the phallic symbol representing the generative power of the god Siva; there is a temple of some importance with the same name near Udaipur, built by a Rajput prince, but nothing to show what Hugo may have read or believed.
Sikra: the summit or crest of a pagoda.
peristera: the word normally means ‘dove, pigeon’, but it also seems to have referred to the sacred plant verbena, used in peace-making rituals.
Moses: according to Exodus 20: 25, it was forbidden to use ‘hewn stone’ for altars.
Gregory VII: this pope, mentioned several times, humbled the Emperor by obliging him to do penance at Canossa (1077).
Jacqueries, Pragueries, Leagues: the first was a peasants’ revolt in the fourteenth century, used by analogy for other peasant risings; the second a revolt against Charles VII, in which his son, the future Louis XI, took part, so called because of a recent revolt in Prague by the Hussites; the League was the party of extreme Catholics, led by the Guise family and supported by Spain, in the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion in France.
Quia … leo: the quotation is from Phaedrus’ Fables.
Guillaume de Paris: previous references are here made clear by the mention of the thirteenth century. Guillaume is also known as Guillaume d’Auvergne. Bishop of Paris from 1228 until his death in 1249, he was a prolific and important writer on theology and philosophy.
testudo: ‘tortoise’: the Roman formation of shields overlapping like scales to give the soldiers underneath maximum protection.
