More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
on the prodigious comet of 1465,
1456, actually, and it was Halley
the fruit of whole peoples in labour rather than the inspiration of men of genius;
Tolstoyan thing to say!
Time is the architect, the whole people the builder.
Time also the destroyer.
The University was built on hilly ground. To the southeast the Montagne Sainte-Genèvieve formed an immense bulge, and it was a sight to see from the top of Notre-Dame that throng of narrow winding streets (the Latin Quarter of today), those clusters of houses, spread out in all directions from the summit of that eminence, tumbling in disorder, almost vertically, down its slopes to the water’s edge, looking as if some were falling and others climbing back again, all holding on to each other.
Huckleberry Finn, chapter 21:
"On the river front some of the houses was sticking out over the bank, and they was bowed and bent, and about ready to tumble in, The people had moved out of them. The bank was caved away under one corner of some others, and that corner was hanging over. People lived in them yet, but it was dangersome, because sometimes a strip of land as wide as a house caves in at a time. Sometimes a belt of land a quarter of a mile deep will start in and cave along and cave along till it all caves into the river in one summer. Such a town as that has to be always moving back, and back, and back, because the river's always gnawing at it."
It is certain that the spirit atrophies in a defective body.
No
He thus became more and more learned and at the same time, as a natural consequence, more and more rigid as a priest, more and more gloomy as a man.
Why natural?
Every civilization begins with theocracy and ends up with democracy. This law of liberty succeeding unity is written in architecture.
This is not a law. It is not even a certain trend, and I wish it were.
Whether he be called Brahmin, magus, or pope, in the Hindu, Egyptian, or Romanesque masonry it is always the priest, nothing but the priest, of whom one is aware. It is not the same with popular forms of architecture. They are richer and less sacred. In Phoenician architecture one is aware of the merchant, in Greek of the republican, in Gothic of the citizen.
If this is true of the Gothic, why did the revolutionaries of 1789 not feel it? Why did they attack Notre Dame in their declarations and leave it to rot?
manuscript! How much more solid, durable, and resistant a book is a building! All that it takes to destroy the written word is a lighted torch or a Turk. To demolish the constructed word it takes a social, a terrestrial revolution.
But a mere fire could destroy a construction. An earthquake could do it. Or a common, non-revolutionary war.
For the rest the prodigious edifice remains always unfinished. The printing press, that giant machine, pumping without respite all the intellectual sap of society, incessantly spews out fresh material for its work. The entire human race is on the scaffolding. Every mind is a mason. The very humblest stops up a hole or lays a stone. Rétif de la Bretonne* brings up his hod full of plaster. Every day a new course is added. Independently of the original, individual contribution of each writer, there are collective shares. The eighteenth century gives the Encyclopédie, the Revolution the Moniteur*
...more
The great irony here is that the book did not kill the cathedral; Hugo's novel practically saved Notre Dame. He wages a campaign to save such structures through his novels and in other ways. He recognized how the printing press could be put to the purpose of saving architecture, and even in this chapter he notes that in his time the printing press "begins to reconstruct" what it had destroyed.
And maybe for Hugo the revival of architecture through literature was not an irony but something that rather proved his point: architecture is so dead that only its killer could revive it.
Maybe. But it seems to me that new technologies always give new life to old texts. Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Victor Hugo, all live again every time we get a new movie.
It's true that if new technologies are not invented, people continue to speak through existing technologies. If the printing press had never come along, the people of Europe would still have expressed themselves in illuminated manuscripts and stone cathedrals. Well enough. But I can't see how the old would not have stagnated, without the new. Living on and never being replaced is not the same thing as growing and thriving, not the same thing as renewal and life.
The poor devil, assuming that the Provost was asking his name, broke his customary silence and answered in a hoarse, guttural voice: ‘Quasimodo.’ The reply bore so little relevance to the question that the uncontrollable laughter began again,
Similar to the trial of the poor Champmathieu in Les Miserables
Two of these women were dressed like good townswomen of Paris. Their fine white gorgets, their red-and-white striped tiretaine skirts, their white knitted stockings, with coloured embroidery at the ankles, pulled trimly over the leg, their square shoes of fawn leather with black soles, and especially their headdress, a sort of tinsel horn loaded with ribbons and lace, such as women still wear in Champagne, in common with the grenadiers of the Russian Imperial Guard, proclaimed that they belonged to that class of rich tradespeople which comes midway between what servants call ‘a woman’ and what
...more
A middle class?
There was no more room for doubt; the gypsies had held their sabbath on that heath, and had devoured the child in the company of Beelzebub, as the Mohammedans do.
So this calumny has been aimed at Romani (gypsies), Jews and Muslims
At length Gervaise, the most inquisitive of the three, and consequently the least sensitive,
Why?
Without a word she approached the victim who twisted about in vain to escape her, and taking a gourd from off her belt, she gently brought it to the poor wretch’s parched lips. Then from that eye, which up to then had been so dry and burnt up, a big tear could be seen slowly rolling down that misshapen face, so long distorted by despair. It was perhaps the first tear the unfortunate creature had ever shed. Meanwhile he forgot about drinking. The gypsy girl made her little pout of impatience, and pressed the neck of the gourd to Quasimodo’s tusky mouth. He drank a long draught. His thirst was
...more
The similarly silent scene in Lew Wallace's "Ben-Hur":
"The hand laid kindly upon his shoulder awoke the unfortunate Judah, and, looking up, he saw a face he never forgot—the face of a boy about his own age, shaded by locks of yellowish bright chestnut hair; a face lighted by dark-blue eyes, at the time so soft, so appealing, so full of love and holy purpose, that they had all the power of command and will. The spirit of the Jew, hardened though it was by days and nights of suffering, and so embittered by wrong that its dreams of revenge took in all the world, melted under the stranger’s look, and became as a child’s. He put his lips to the pitcher, and drank long and deep. Not a word was said to him, nor did he say a word."
The archdeacon put his chin in his hand, and seemed to be reflecting for a moment. Suddenly he turned round towards Gringoire. ‘And you swear you have never touched her?’ ‘Who?’ said Gringoire. ‘The goat?’ ‘No, the woman.’ ‘My wife? I swear I haven’t.’ ‘And you are often alone with her?’ ‘Every evening, for a good hour.’ Dom Claude frowned. ‘Oh! oh! solus cum sola non cogitabuntur orare Pater noster [a man and a woman alone together will not be assumed to be saying the Our Father].’ ‘Upon my soul, I could say the Pater and the Ave Maria, and the Credo in Deum omnipotentem [I believe in God the
...more
Don't think I laughed harder anywhere in this novel.
Incidentally, Hugo changes the phrase, "a man and a woman alone together will not be assumed to be saying the Our Father", into a description of two criminals in "Les Misérables":
"It is not to be expected that two men alone together in a remote place will be saying the Lord’s Prayer."
Dom Claude, however, could see everything. The door was made of rotten puncheon staves, which left wide cracks through which his predatory gaze could pass. This broad-shouldered, brown-skinned priest, hitherto condemned to the austere virginity of the cloister, shivered and seethed at this scene of love, darkness, and sensuality. The beautiful young girl surrendering in disarray to this ardent young man sent molten lead coursing through his veins. Extraordinary reactions stirred within him. His jealous and lascivious eye delved deep beneath all those undone pins. To anyone seeing the unhappy
...more
Disney's interpretation
Just one thing still automatically caught her ear: above her head the dampness seeped through the mouldering stones of the vault, and at regular intervals a drop of water broke away. She listened in a daze to the sound of each drop falling into the pool beside her. This drop of water falling into the pool was the only thing that still stirred around her, the only clock to mark the time, the only sound to reach down to her out of all the sounds being produced on the earth’s surface.
Of course this recalls the "drop of water" that she had given Quasimodo. It also reminds me of the following passage from Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer":
"The poor unfortunate had starved to death. In one place, near at hand, a stalagmite had been slowly growing up from the ground for ages, builded by the water-drip from a stalactite overhead. The captive had broken off the stalagmite, and upon the stump had placed a stone, wherein he had scooped a shallow hollow to catch the precious drop that fell once in every three minutes with the dreary regularity of a clock-tick—a dessertspoonful once in four and twenty hours. That drop was falling when the Pyramids were new; when Troy fell; when the foundations of Rome were laid; when Christ was crucified; when the Conqueror created the British empire; when Columbus sailed; when the massacre at Lexington was 'news.' It is falling now; it will still be falling when all these things shall have sunk down the afternoon of history, and the twilight of tradition, and been swallowed up in the thick night of oblivion. Has everything a purpose and a mission? Did this drop fall patiently during five thousand years to be ready for this flitting human insect’s need? and has it another important object to accomplish ten thousand years to come?"
In doing wrong one must go the whole way. It’s crazy to stop half-way in what is monstrous! The extreme in crime brings delirious joy.
The titular character in Roald Dahl's "Matilda" explains how the villain, Miss Trunchbull, gets away with her abuses:
"Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it's unbelievable."
a mother who has lost her child no longer believes in God?
In this she is unlike Job, whose book is quoted so frequently here. Job refuses to curse God after losing his children, though in due course he comes to accuse God of allowing or perpetrating evil.
out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice, for thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods encompassed me.]
Jonah's prayer
This flight from nature, life, himself, mankind, God, from everything, lasted all day.
Flight of Jonah from God
Claude, in the state of hallucination in which he found himself, thought he was seeing with his living eyes the steeple of hell; the countless lights distributed along the whole height of the horrifying tower appeared to him like so many openings into the huge inner furnaces; the voices and murmurs coming from it, like so many cries, so many death-rattles. Then he felt afraid, he put his hands over his ears so that he should hear no more, turned his back so that he should see no more, and strode away from the fearful vision.
Frodo Baggins in "The Lord of the Rings":
"No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star are left to me. I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I begin to see it even with my waking eyes, and all else fades."
the outside world had become for him nothing but a kind of visible, palpable, terrifying apocalypse.
One definition, perhaps, of Gothic literature
she looked down at herself, saw she was almost naked and blushed. Life was coming back.
Eve in Genesis
With the coming of evening she found the night so beautiful, the moon so sweet, that she walked all the way round the lofty gallery encircling the church. The walk brought her some relief, so calm did the earth appear seen from that height.
About 150 feet up
You need only to be handsome on the outside!
This line is spoken by a man, but women know this too from their own experience
The human heart (Dom Claude had meditated on such matters) can contain only a certain amount of despair. Once the sponge is saturated, the sea can pass over it without adding one drop more.
From "Les Misérables":
"She has been through everything, borne everything, sustained everything, suffered everything, lost everything, mourned everything. She is resigned with a resignation that resembles indifference as death resembles sleep. There is nothing more she shrinks from, nothing more she fears. Let the whole rain-cloud come down on her and the entire ocean sweep over her! What does she care? She is a saturated sponge."
The day must surely come when in France there will be only one king, one lord, one judge, one headsman, just as in paradise there is only one God!
Ahab to Starbuck: “There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one Captain that is lord over the Pequod.—On deck!”
they found among all these hideous carcasses two skeletons, one clasping the other in a strange embrace.
Thirty-two years later Hugo recalled this scene with a few lines in "Les Misérables":
"Oh! to lie side by side in the same tomb, holding hands, and gently to caress each other’s fingers now and then in the shadows, that would satisfy me for eternity!"
This comet, against which Pope Calixtus, uncle of Borgia, ordered public prayers, is the same as will reappear in 1835. [V. H.]
1456 is the correct year, and it was Halley. Pope Callixtus III died in 1458 and was later (1475) said to have excommunicated the appearance of the comet, believing it to be an ill omen for the Christian defenders of Belgrade from the besieging Ottoman armies. His actual papal bull from 1456 makes no mention of a comet. Halley did reappear in 1835, as predicted by Edmond Halley.
