Part 1

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Victor Hugo

NOTRE-DAME DE PARIS--1482

(1831)

Table of Contents

PREFACE NOTE ADDED TO THE DEFINITIVE EDITION (1832).

BOOK THE FIRST.

I THE GREAT HALL. II GRINGOIRE. III MONSIEUR THE CARDINAL. IV MASTER JACQUES COPPENOLE. V QUASIMODO. VI LA ESMERALDA.

BOOK THE SECOND.

I FROM CHARYBDIS TO SCYLLA. II THE PLACE DE GRÈVE. III «BESOS PARA GOLPES». IV THE INCONVENIENCES OF FOLLOWING A PRETTY WOMAN IN THE STREETS AT NIGHT. V CONTINUATION OF THE INCONVENIENCES. VI THE BROKEN JUG. VII A WEDDING NIGHT.

BOOK THE THIRD.

I NOTRE-DAME. II PARIS AS SEEN FROM THE BIRD'S-EYE VIEW.

BOOK THE FOURTH.

I GOOD SOULS. II CLAUDE FROLLO. III «IMMANIS PECORIS CUSTOS IMMANIOR IPSE». IV THE DOG AND HIS MASTER. V CONTINUATION OF CLAUDE FROLLO. VI UNPOPULARITY.

BOOK THE FIFTH.

I «ABBAS BEATI MARTINI». II THIS WILL KILL THAT.

BOOK THE SIXTH.

I AN IMPARTIAL GLANCE AT THE ANCIENT MAGISTRACY II THE RAT-HOLE. III THE STORY OF A CORN-BREAD CAKE. IV A TEAR FOR A DROP OF WATER. V END OF THE STORY OF THE CAKE.

BOOK THE SEVENTH.

I OF THE DANGER OF ENTRUSTING ONE'S SECRET TO A GOAT. II HOW A PRIEST AND A PHILOSOPHER ARE TWO DIFFERENT THINGS. III THE BELLS. IV _ANANKÊ_ V THE TWO MEN DRESSED IN BLACK. VI THE EFFECT THAT SEVEN OATHS CAN PRODUCE IN THE OPEN AIR. VII THE SURLY MONK. VIII THE USEFULNESS OF WINDOWS OVERLOOKING THE RIVER.

BOOK THE EIGHTH.

I THE COIN CHANGED INTO A DRY LEAF. II CONTINUATION OF THE COIN CHANGED INTO A DRY LEAF. III END OF THE COIN CHANGED INTO A DRY LEAF. IV «LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZAI». V THE MOTHER. VI THREE HUMAN HEARTS MADE DIFFERENTLY.

BOOK THE NINTH.

I FEVER. II HUNCHBACK, ONE-EYED, LAME. III DEAF. IV SANDSTONE AND CRYSTAL. V THE KEY TO THE RED DOOR. VI CONTINUATION OF THE KEY TO THE RED DOOR.

BOOK THE TENTH.

I GRINGOIRE HAS SEVERAL GOOD IDEAS IN SUCCESSION IN THE RUE DES BERNARDINS. II BECOME A TRUAND. III LONG LIVE MIRTH! IV AN AWKWWARD FRIEND. V THE RETREAT WHERE MONSIEUR LOUIS OF FRANCE TELLS HIS HOURS VI A LITTLE FLAME IN BAGUENAUD. VII CHATEAUPERS TO THE RESCUE!

BOOK THE ELEVENTH.

I THE LITTLE SHOE. II «LA CREATURA BELLA BIANCO VESTITA» (DANTE). III PHOEBUS'S WEDDING. IV QUASIMODO'S WEDDING.

NOTES.

PREFACE

Some years ago, while visiting, or rather while rummaging, Notre-Dame, the author of this book found, in an obscure corner of one of the towers, this word, carved by hand upon the wall:

_ANANKÊ_[1].

These Greek capitals, black with age and rather deeply cut into the stone, with I know not what signs peculiar to Gothic calligraphy imprinted in their forms and attitudes, as if to reveal that it was a hand of the Middle Ages that had written them there, and above all the gloomy and fatal meaning they enclose, struck the author vividly.

He asked himself, he sought to guess what soul in torment could not have wished to leave this world without leaving this stigma of crime or misfortune upon the brow of the old church.

Since then the wall has been whitewashed or scraped (I no longer know which), and the inscription has disappeared. For such is the way men have acted for nearly two hundred years with the marvelous churches of the Middle Ages. The mutilations come to them from all sides, from within as from without. The priest whitewashes them, the architect scrapes them, then the people come along and demolish them.

Thus, except for the fragile memory consecrated to it here by the author of this book, nothing remains today of the mysterious word graven in the dark tower of Notre-Dame, nothing of the unknown destiny it so melancholy summed up. The man who wrote that word upon that wall has been effaced, several centuries ago, from among the generations; the word in its turn has been effaced from the wall of the church; the church itself will soon perhaps be effaced from the earth.

It is upon that word that this book has been made.

February 1831.

NOTE ADDED TO THE DEFINITIVE EDITION (1832)

It is by error that this edition has been announced as being augmented by several _new_ chapters. It should have been said _unpublished_. In fact, if by new one means _newly made_, the chapters added to this edition are not _new_. They were written at the same time as the rest of the work, they date from the same period and came from the same thought, they have always formed part of the manuscript of _Notre-Dame de Paris_. Moreover, the author would not understand how one could afterward add new developments to a work of this kind. That is not done at will. A novel, according to him, is born, in a somehow necessary fashion, with all its chapters; a drama is born with all its scenes. Do not believe that there is anything arbitrary in the number of parts of which this whole is composed, this mysterious microcosm that you call drama or novel. Grafting or soldering takes poorly upon works of this nature, which must spring forth in a single jet and remain as they are. Once the thing is done, do not change your mind, do not retouch it. Once the book is published, once the sex of the work, virile or not, has been recognized and proclaimed, once the child has uttered its first cry, it is born, there it is, it is thus made, father and mother can do nothing more, it belongs to the air and the sun, let it live or die as it is. Is your book a failure? Too bad. Do not add chapters to a failed book. Is it incomplete? It should have been completed in the begetting. Is your tree gnarled? You will not straighten it. Is your novel consumptive? your novel is not viable? You will not give it back the breath it lacks. Is your drama born lame? Believe me, do not put a wooden leg on it.

The author therefore attaches a particular importance to the public's knowing well that the chapters added here were not made expressly for this reprint. If they were not published in the previous editions of the book, it is for a very simple reason. At the time when _Notre-Dame de Paris_ was first being printed, the folder containing these three chapters was mislaid. It was necessary either to rewrite them or to do without them. The author considered that the only two of these chapters which had any importance by their extent were chapters of art and history that in no way cut into the foundation of the drama and the novel, that the public would not notice their disappearance, and that he alone, the author, would be in the secret of this gap. He took the course of going on without them. And then, if all must be confessed, his laziness recoiled before the task of rewriting three lost chapters. He would have found it shorter to make a new novel.

Today the chapters have been found again, and he seizes the first occasion to put them back in their place.

Here then is now his whole work, such as he dreamed it, such as he made it, good or bad, durable or fragile, but such as he wishes it.

Doubtless these recovered chapters will have little value in the eyes of persons, otherwise very judicious, who have sought in _Notre-Dame de Paris_ only the drama, only the novel. But there are perhaps other readers who have not found it useless to study the aesthetic and philosophical thought hidden in this book, who have kindly, in reading _Notre-Dame de Paris_, taken pleasure in disentangling beneath the novel something other than the novel, and in following, allow us these somewhat ambitious expressions, the system of the historian and the aim of the artist through the creation such as it is of the poet.

It is for these especially that the chapters added to this edition will complete _Notre-Dame de Paris_, admitting that _Notre-Dame de Paris_ is worth the trouble of being completed.

The author expresses and develops in one of these chapters, upon the present decay of architecture and upon the death, according to him today almost inevitable, of this king of arts, an opinion unfortunately deeply rooted in him and well reflected. But he feels the need to say here that he ardently desires that the future give him the lie one day. He knows that art, under all its forms, may hope everything from the new generations whose genius, still in germ, one hears welling up in our workshops. The grain is in the furrow, the harvest will certainly be beautiful. He only fears, and one may see why in the second volume of this edition, that the sap has withdrawn from this old soil of architecture which for so many centuries was the best ground of art.

Yet there is today in the artistic youth so much life, power and so to speak predestination, that, in our schools of architecture in particular, at this hour, the professors, who are detestable, have, not only without their knowledge, but even quite in spite of themselves, excellent pupils; quite contrary to that potter of whom Horace speaks, who meditated amphorae and produced pots. _Currit rota, urceus exit._

But in all cases, whatever the future of architecture, however our young architects may one day resolve the question of their art, in waiting for the new monuments, let us preserve the ancient monuments. Let us inspire, if it be possible, in the nation the love of national architecture. This, the author declares, is one of the principal aims of this book; this is one of the principal aims of his life.

_Notre-Dame de Paris_ has perhaps opened some true perspectives upon the art of the Middle Ages, upon that marvelous art until now unknown to some, and what is worse, misrecognized by others. But the author is far from considering as accomplished the task he has voluntarily imposed upon himself. He has already pleaded in more than one occasion the cause of our aged architecture, he has already loudly denounced many profanations, many demolitions, many impieties. He will not grow weary. He has engaged to return often to this subject, he will return to it. He will be as indefatigable in defending our historic edifices as our iconoclasts of schools and academies are bent upon attacking them. For it is an afflictive thing to see into what hands the architecture of the Middle Ages has fallen and in what fashion the plasterers of the present mangle the ruin of that great art. It is even a shame for us, intelligent men, who see them act and content ourselves with hooting them. And we do not speak here only of what passes in the provinces, but of what is done in Paris, at our door, beneath our windows, in the great city, in the lettered city, in the city of the press, of speech, of thought. We cannot resist the need to signal, to terminate this note, some of those acts of vandalism which every day are projected, debated, begun, continued and peaceably brought to completion before our eyes, before the eyes of the artistic public of Paris, face to face with criticism, whom so much audacity disconcerts. They have just demolished the archbishop's palace, a building of poor taste, the harm is not great; but together with the archbishop's palace they have demolished the bishop's residence, rare remnant of the fourteenth century, which the demolishing architect did not know how to distinguish from the rest. He tore up the tare with the wheat; it is all one. They speak of razing the admirable chapel of Vincennes, to make with the stones I know not what fortification, of which Daumesnil had nevertheless had no need. While they repair at great cost and restore the Bourbon palace, that hovel, they let the magnificent stained-glass windows of the Sainte-Chapelle cave in under the equinox winds. There has been, for some days, a scaffolding upon the tower of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie; and one of these mornings the pickax will go to work there. There was found a mason to build a little white house between the venerable towers of the Palais de Justice. There was found another to emasculate Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the feudal abbey with the three bell-towers. There will be found another, doubt it not, to throw down Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois. All those masons call themselves architects, are paid by the prefecture or by the menus, and have green coats. All the harm that false taste can do to true taste, they do it. At the hour where we write, deplorable spectacle! one of them holds the Tuileries, one of them gashes Philibert Delorme right in the middle of the face, and it is certainly not one of the mediocre scandals of our time to see with what effrontery the heavy architecture of this gentleman comes to sprawl right across one of the most delicate façades of the renaissance!

Paris, 20 October 1832.

BOOK THE FIRST

I

THE GREAT HALL

Today it is three hundred forty-eight years, six months and nineteen days since the Parisians awoke to the sound of all the bells ringing full peal within the triple enclosure of the Cité, the Université and the Ville.

It is nevertheless not a day whose memory history has kept that the 6th of January 1482. Nothing notable in the event that thus set in motion, from the morning, the bells and the burghers of Paris. It was neither an assault by Picards or Burgundians, nor a reliquary borne in procession, nor a revolt of scholars in the vineyard of Laas, nor an _entry of our said most redoubted lord monsieur the king_, nor even a fine hanging of thieves and thievestresses at the Justice of Paris. It was not either the arrival, so frequent in the fifteenth century, of some embroidered and plumed embassy. It was scarcely two days since the last cavalcade of that kind, that of the Flemish ambassadors charged with concluding the marriage between the dauphin and Margaret of Flanders, had made its entry into Paris, to the great annoyance of M. the cardinal of Bourbon, who, to please the king, had had to put a good face on all that rustic rabble of Flemish burgomasters, and regale them, in his hotel of Bourbon, with a _right fair morality, sotie and farce_, while a beating rain flooded his magnificent tapestries at his door.

The 6th of January, that which _put in emotion all the common people of Paris_, as says Jehan de Troyes, was the double solemnity, united since time immemorial, of the Day of Kings and the Feast of Fools.

That day, there was to be a bonfire at the Grève, a maypole planting at the chapel of Braque and a mystery at the Palais de Justice. The cry had been made the day before to sound of trumpet in the crossroads, by the men of M. the provost, in fine camelot violet jerkins, with great white crosses upon the breast.

The crowd of burghers and bourgeoises therefore made its way from all parts from the morning, houses and shops closed, toward one of the three designated places. Each had taken sides, one for the bonfire, one for the maypole, one for the mystery. It must be said, to the praise of the ancient good sense of the gapers of Paris, that the greater part of this crowd directed itself toward the bonfire, which was quite in season, or toward the mystery, which was to be represented in the great hall of the Palais well covered and well closed, and that the curious agreed to leave the poorly flowered poor maypole shivering alone beneath the January sky in the cemetery of the chapel of Braque.

The people flowed especially into the avenues of the Palais de Justice, because one knew that the Flemish ambassadors, arrived from the eve before, proposed to attend the representation of the mystery and the election of the pope of fools, which was also to take place in the great hall.

It was not an easy thing to penetrate that day into that great hall, reputed however then the largest covered enclosure that was in the world (it is true that Sauval had not yet measured the great hall of the castle of Montargis[2]). The Place du Palais, encumbered with people, offered to curious windows the aspect of a sea, in which five or six streets, like so many river mouths, disgorged at every instant new floods of heads. The waves of this crowd, incessantly swollen, struck against the angles of the houses which advanced here and there, like so many promontories, in the irregular basin of the place. At the center of the high Gothic façade[3] of the Palais, the great staircase, without respite mounted and descended by a double current which, after breaking against the intermediate landing, spread in broad waves upon its two lateral slopes, the great staircase, I say, streamed incessantly into the place like a cascade into a lake. The cries, the laughter, the stamping of those thousand feet made a great noise and a great clamor. From time to time this clamor and this noise redoubled, the current that pushed all this crowd toward the great staircase turned back, grew troubled, whirled. It was a shove from an archer or the horse of a sergeant of the provostry that reared to reestablish order; admirable tradition that the provostry has bequeathed to the constabulary, the constabulary to the maréchaussée, and the maréchaussée to our gendarmerie of Paris.

At the doors, at the windows, at the dormers, upon the roofs, swarmed thousands of good bourgeois faces, calm and honest, looking at the palace, looking at the rabble, and asking no more; for many people in Paris content themselves with the spectacle of the spectators, and it is already for us a very curious thing that a wall behind which something is passing.

If it could be granted to us, men of 1830, to mingle in thought with those Parisians of the fifteenth century and to enter with them, pulled, jostled, overthrown, into that immense hall of the Palais, so narrow on the 6th of January 1482, the spectacle would be neither without interest nor without charm, and we should have around us only things so old that they would seem all new to us.

If the reader consents to it, we shall try to recover in thought the impression he would have felt with us in crossing the threshold of this great hall amid this rabble in surcoat, in jerkin and in cotte-hardie.

And first, buzzing in the ears, dazzlement in the eyes. Above our heads a double vault in ogive, wainscoted in wood carvings, painted in azure, fleur-de-lysed in gold; beneath our feet, a pavement alternating white and black marble. A few steps from us, an enormous pillar, then another, then another; in all seven pillars in the length of the hall, sustaining in the middle of its width the fallings of the double vault. Around the first four pillars, booths of merchants, all sparkling with glass and tinsel; around the last three, oak wood benches, worn and polished by the breeches of litigants and the robe of attorneys. Around the hall, along the high wall, between the doors, between the windows, between the pillars, the interminable row of statues of all the kings of France since Pharamond; the idle kings, arms hanging and eyes lowered; the valiant and warlike kings, head and hands boldly raised to heaven. Then, at the long ogive windows, stained glass of a thousand colors; at the wide issues of the hall, rich doors finely sculpted; and all that, vaults, pillars, walls, doorframes, wainscots, doors, statues, covered from top to bottom with a splendid illumination of blue and gold, which, already somewhat tarnished at the epoch where we see it, had almost entirely disappeared under the dust and cobwebs in the year of grace 1549, when Du Breul still admired it by tradition.

Let one represent now this immense oblong hall, lit by the wan clarity of a January day, invaded by a motley and noisy crowd that drifts along the walls and whirls around the seven pillars, and one will already have a confused idea of the ensemble of the picture whose curious details we are going to try to indicate more precisely.

It is certain that, if Ravaillac had not assassinated Henri IV, there would have been no pieces of the trial of Ravaillac deposited in the registry of the Palais de Justice; no interested accomplices to make the said pieces disappear; consequently no incendiaries obliged, for lack of a better means, to burn the registry to burn the pieces, and to burn the Palais de Justice to burn the registry; hence finally, no fire of 1618. The old Palais would still be standing with its old great hall; I could say to the reader: Go see it; and we should thus be dispensed both, I from making, he from reading a description such as it is.--Which proves this new truth: that great events have incalculable consequences.

It is true that it would be quite possible first that Ravaillac had no accomplices, next that his accomplices, if by chance he had any, were for nothing in the fire of 1618. There exist two other very plausible explanations of it. First, the great flaming star, a foot wide, a cubit high, which fell, as everyone knows, from heaven upon the Palais, on the 7th of March after midnight. Secondly, the quatrain of Théophile:

_Certainly, it was a sorry game_ _When in Paris dame Justice,_ _For having eaten too much spice,_ _Set the whole palace on fire._

Whatever one thinks of this triple political, physical, poetic explanation of the fire of the Palais de Justice in 1618, the fact unfortunately certain is the fire. There remains very little today, thanks to this catastrophe, thanks above all to the various successive restorations which have finished what it had spared, there remains very little of this first dwelling of the kings of France, of this elder palace of the Louvre, already so old in the time of Philippe le Bel that one sought there the traces of the magnificent buildings raised by king Robert and described by Helgaldus. Almost all has disappeared. What has become of the chamber of the chancellery where saint Louis _consummated his marriage_? the garden where he rendered justice, "clothed in a camelot coat, a sleeveless tiretaine surcoat, and a black sandal mantle above, lying upon carpets, with Joinville"? Where is the chamber of the emperor Sigismond? that of Charles IV? that of John Lackland? Where is the staircase from which Charles VI promulgated his edict of grace? the slab where Marcel slit the throat, in the presence of the dauphin, of Robert de Clermont and the marshal of Champagne? the wicket where the bulls of the antipope Benedict were torn, and from which those who had brought them departed, coped and mitred in derision, and making honorable amends through all Paris? and the great hall, with its gilding, its azure, its ogives, its statues, its pillars, its immense vault all jagged with sculptures? and the gilded chamber? and the stone lion which stood at the door, head lowered, tail between the legs, like the lions of the throne of Solomon, in the humiliated attitude which befits force before justice? and the beautiful doors? and the beautiful stained glass? and the chiseled ironwork which discouraged Biscornette? and the delicate woodwork of Du Hancy?... What has time done, what have men done with these marvels? What have they given us for all that, for all that Gallic history, for all that Gothic art? the heavy surbased arches of M. de Brosse, that awkward architect of the Saint-Gervais portal, that is for art; and as for history, we have the garrulous memories of the fat pillar, still all resounding with the tittle-tattle of Patrus.

It is not much.--Let us return to the true great hall of the true old Palais.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”