The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo (1831)

The main concerns here are repetition and romance. By repetition I mean that some of the central relationships go through tests over and over again; same motivation, same result, nothing learnt. By romance I mean that tendency toward blushing inaccuracy - events often occur at the height of possibility: Paris squares are so littered with dead that they are impassable (even though a remnant escape from within them, a soldiery invade them to counter), blood flows in rivers, corpses are piled up, injuries so sickeningly significant etc etc in such a way that one would swear, if Hugo were being attentive to actuality, there could be no more action. Yet somehow, an impassable square is traversed, the invaders don't get blood-soaked trouser-cuffs, and the horrifically injured resurrect magnificently and fight on very effectually. Now, I'm not saying that some tendency of this kind isn't par for the course in adventuresome nineteenth century fiction; it's just that Hugo takes it to a completely new level, and it does get a bit tiresome nearing the end. The repetition is also patience-testing. Quite how many experiences of brick-wall-hitting confrontation Claude Frollo would have needed to finally understand that Esmeralda didn't want him, given that he had stayed alive, is anyone's guess. I guess it's a mercy for him, and us, that he dies. I certainly don't think I could have abided yet another puzzled, insight-lacking attempt to convince her. I won't retail a great deal about the plot, but I think it's worthwhile to comment on what seems to be one of Hugo's main concerns - what Paris was like in the late fifteenth century. I'm guessing that this is a part of this book which would get a lot of negative attention; we get a lot on architecture, layout, social systems within those, which is unapologetically essayesque in construction, and which I didn't mind on the whole. The colour is phenomenal and the action is dramatic; both are over-egged. A reasonably enjoyable, if somewhat frustrating, hyperbolic panorama.

Commonplace Book

'...He stirred up in the depths of his heart all his hatred, all his malevolence; and he discovered with the cool eye of a physician examining a patient, that this hatred, this malevolence, were but vitiated love[;] that love, the source of every virtue in man, turned to horrible things in the heart of a priest, and that a man constituted as he was, by making himself a priest, made himself a demon. Then he laughed frightfully, and suddenly became pale again, in contemplating the worst side of his fatal passion, of that corroding, venomous, malignant, implacable love, which had driven one of them to the gibbet, the other to hell-fire; her to condemnation, him to damnation.'

from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo (Chapter 43)

Commonplace Book

'...From his very first intercourse with men he had felt, and then had seen, himself repulsed, branded, despised. Human speech had never been to him aught but mockery and curses. As he grew up, he had found around him nothing but hatred. What wonder that he should have caught it! He had contracted it - he had but picked up the weapon that had wounded him.'

from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo (Chapter 18)

Commonplace Book

'...That magnificent art which the Vandals had produced, the academies have murdered. To the work of centuries and of revolutions, which, at least, devastate with impartiality and grandeur, has been added that cloud of school-trained architects licensed, privileged and patented, degrading with all the discernment and selection of bad taste - substituting the gingerbread-work of Louis XV for the Gothic tracery, to the greater glory of the Parthenon. This is the kick of the ass at the dying lion. 'Tis the old oak, in the last stage of decay, stung and gnawed by caterpillars.'

from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo (Chapter 14)

Commonplace Book

'...throughout the life of the wisest man his destiny keeps his philosophy in a state of siege.'

from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo (Chapter 9)