Notre-Dame de Paris/The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
Finished June 13, 2026
I should probably sit with this one a little longer before posting but I feel like if I wait, I’ll want to post even less. So let’s start with some good-natured (?) dissing of Voltaire:
Happily, Voltaire still wrote Candide and was still, of all the men who have succeeded one another in the long sequence of mankind, the one with the most diabolical laugh. Which proves, what is more, that you can be a great genius yet understand nothing of an art which is not your own.
And then we have pages and pages about the printing press and how it will kill architecture as the form of expression:
The invention of the printing-press is the greatest event in history. It was the mother of revolutions. It was the total renewal of man’s mode of expression, the human mind sloughing off one form to put on another, a complete and definitive change of skin by that symbolic serpent which, ever since Adam, has represented the intelligence.
In its printed form, thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile, elusive, indestructible. It mingles with the air. In the days of architecture, thought had turned into a mountain and taken powerful hold of a century and of a place. Now it turned into a flock of birds and was scattered on the four winds, occupying every point of air and space simultaneously.
Not to be too serious here but all of that made me think of the rise of AI and how we’ve given up thought and expression and the beauty of words and ideas only to become so much dumber. It’s the death of revolutions.
Enough being dramatic, now to some quotes actually dealing with the characters/story. Claude Frollo had a lot of quotable pieces but I think this summed him up pretty well:
“When one does evil one must do the whole evil. To be only half a monster is insanity! There is ecstasy in an extreme of crime.”
Gotta hand it to the guy, he stuck to his “whole evil” shtick to the end. Speaking of sticking to a shtick, Phoebus was a treasure trove of bullshit. With La Esmeralda:
“No, no, I shan’t listen to you. Do you love me? I want you to tell me whether you love me.”
“Do I love you, angel of my life!” exclaimed the captain, half kneeling. “My body, my blood, my soul, all are yours, all are for you. I love you and have never loved anyone but you.”
The captain had rehearsed this phrase so many times, in a great many similar situations, that he now delivered it in one breath and word-perfect.
And then with his fiancee:
“Phoebus,” said Fleur-de-Lys suddenly in a low voice, “we are to be married in three months’ time, swear to me you have never loved any other woman but me.”
“I swear it, my angel!” replied Phoebus, and the passionate look he gave her joined with his sincere tone to convince Fleur-de-Lys. He may even have believed it himself at that moment.
The longer this book went on, the more I wondered if the moral of the whole thing is that love is completely stupid. We had Claude Frollo throw away his entire…entire everything the minute a hot sixteen-year-old entered the scene–
He reflected on the folly of eternal vows, on the futility of chastity, science, religion and virtue, on the uselessness of God. He revelled in these thoughts and as he plunged deeper and deeper heard a shout of satanic laughter burst from within him.
–not to mention La Esmeralda, that little nutter, who fell in love with stupid Phoebus at first sight and was spouting some pretty embarrassing crap herself. But all of this life-altering, extremely intense emotion and inescapable “love” between people that didn’t even know each other. was explained:
For love is like a tree, it grows of its own accord, it puts down deep roots into our whole being, and often continues to put out leaves over a heart in ruins.
And what is inexplicable is that the blinder the passion, the more tenacious it is. It is never more solid than when it is unreasonable.
Whatever you say, I guess.
Finishing it all off, this is completely out of the blue but this made me laugh:
“She could have swum across,” answered the recluse, contesting every inch of ground.
“Do women swim?” said the soldier.
Rating: The goat was the smartest “person” in the whole damn thing
Leave a Reply