The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

by Victor Hugo

It is that setting sun which we mistake for the dawn.

Nevertheless, from the moment when architecture is no longer anything but an art like any other; as soon as it is no longer the total art, the sovereign art, the tyrant art,—it has no longer the power to retain the other arts. So they emancipate themselves, break the yoke of the architect, and take themselves off, each one in its own direction. Each one of them gains by this divorce. Isolation aggrandizes everything. Sculpture becomes statuary, the image trade becomes painting, the canon becomes music. One would pronounce it an empire dismembered at the death of its Alexander, and whose provinces become kingdoms.

Meanwhile what becomes of printing? All the life which is leaving architecture comes to it. In proportion as architecture ebbs, printing swells and grows.

Genres dominating in turn, zero-sum of energy - check who else claimed this idea

In the eighteenth, having reposed for a long time at the court of Louis XIV, it seizes again the old sword of Luther, puts it into the hand of Voltaire, and rushes impetuously to the attack of that ancient Europe, whose architectural expression it has already killed.

The Bible resembles the pyramids; the Iliad, the Parthenon; Homer, Phidias. Dante in the thirteenth century is the last Romanesque church; Shakespeare in the sixteenth, the last Gothic cathedral.

the human race has two books, two registers, two testaments: masonry and printing; the Bible of stone and the Bible of paper.

it is not that sort of grandeur of which we wished to speak. Nevertheless, when one tries to collect in one’s mind a comprehensive image of the total products of printing down to our own days, does not that total appear to us like an immense construction, resting upon the entire world, at which humanity toils without relaxation, and whose monstrous crest is lost in the profound mists of the future? It is the anthill of intelligence. It is the hive whither come all imaginations, those golden bees, with their honey.

The press, that giant machine, which incessantly pumps all the intellectual sap of society, belches forth without pause fresh materials for its work.

Press a pump

Everything was then viewed without metaphysics, without exaggeration, without magnifying glass, with the naked eye. The microscope had not yet been invented, either for things of matter or for things of the mind.

Seriously?

It is true that nothing was ever less curious on the score of architecture than the worthy gapers of the Middle Ages, and that they cared very little for the beauty of a pillory.

How do we know?

Let the reader reconcile these things as best he can. I am simply the historian.

No you are not

Nothing was more common in the Middle Ages than these learned animals, which amazed people greatly, and often led their instructors to the stake.

Master Jacques, ’tis fate! Alas! Claude, thou art the spider! Claude, thou art the fly also! Thou wert flying towards learning, light, the sun. Thou hadst no other care than to reach the open air, the full daylight of eternal truth; but in precipitating thyself towards the dazzling window which opens upon the other world,—upon the world of brightness, intelligence, and science—blind fly! senseless, learned man! thou hast not perceived that subtle spider’s web, stretched by destiny betwixt the light and thee—thou hast flung thyself headlong into it, and now thou art struggling with head broken and mangled wings between the iron antennæ of fate! Master Jacques! Master Jacques! let the spider work its will!”

The dazzling window upon the other world

“And even couldst thou have broken through that formidable web, with thy gnat’s wings, thou believest that thou couldst have reached the light? Alas! that pane of glass which is further on, that transparent obstacle, that wall of crystal, harder than brass, which separates all philosophies from the truth, how wouldst thou have overcome it? Oh, vanity of science! how many wise men come flying from afar, to dash their heads against thee! How many systems vainly fling themselves buzzing against that eternal pane!”

Glass pane

The Archdeacon shook his head, with a bitter smile. “Master Jacques, read Michel Psellus’s Dialogus de Energia et Operatione Dæmonum. What we are doing is not wholly innocent.” “Speak lower, master! I have my suspicions of it,” said Jacques Charmolue. “But one must practise a bit of hermetic science when one is only procurator of the king in the Ecclesiastical Court, at thirty crowns tournois a year. Only speak low.”

I merely assume that there is some sorcery about it, since the official is present at the trial.”

Sorcerers trying a commoner for sorcery

“Girl, you are of the Bohemian race,

I'm pretty sure they wouldn't say "race." If not, what would they say?

In the Middle Ages, when an edifice was complete, there was almost as much of it in the earth as above it. Unless built upon piles, like Notre-Dame, a palace, a fortress, a church, had always a double bottom. In cathedrals, it was, in some sort, another subterranean cathedral, low, dark, mysterious, blind, and mute, under the upper nave which was overflowing with light and reverberating with organs and bells day and night. Sometimes it was a sepulchre. In palaces, in fortresses, it was a prison, sometimes a sepulchre also, sometimes both together. These mighty buildings, whose mode of formation and vegetation we have elsewhere explained, had not simply foundations, but, so to speak, roots which ran branching through the soil in chambers, galleries, and staircases, like the construction above. Thus churches, palaces, fortresses, had the earth half way up their bodies. The cellars of an edifice formed another edifice, into which one descended instead of ascending, and which extended its subterranean grounds under the external piles of the monument, like those forests and mountains which are reversed in the mirror-like waters of a lake, beneath the forests and mountains of the banks.

and as not a week passed which had not its counterfeiter to boil, or its witch to hang, or its heretic to burn, at some one of the innumerable justices of Paris, people were so accustomed to seeing in all the squares the ancient feudal Themis, bare armed, with sleeves stripped up, performing her duty at the gibbets, the ladders, and the pillories, that they hardly paid any heed to it. Fashionable society of that day hardly knew the name of the victim who passed by at the corner of the street, and it was the populace at the most who regaled themselves with this coarse fare. An execution was an habitual incident of the public highways, like the braising-pan of the baker or the slaughter-house of the knacker. The executioner was only a sort of butcher of a little deeper dye than the rest.

Of a deeper dye

In fact, within the bounds of Notre-Dame, the condemned girl could not be touched. The cathedral was a place of refuge. All temporal jurisdiction expired upon its threshold.

“I frighten you. I am very ugly, am I not? Do not look at me; only listen to me. During the day you will remain here; at night you can walk all over the church. But do not leave the church either by day or by night. You would be lost. They would kill you, and I should die.”

Cf. Аленький цветочек/ The beauty and the beast(?)

Love is like a tree; it sprouts forth of itself, sends its roots out deeply through our whole being, and often continues to flourish greenly over a heart in ruins. And the inexplicable point about it is that the more blind is this passion, the more tenacious it is. It is never more solid than when it has no reason in it.

It becomes the stubbornest of plants

De Cupa Petrarum, which had given him a violent passion for architecture, an inclination which had replaced in his heart his passion for hermeticism, of which it was, moreover, only a natural corollary, since there is an intimate relation between hermeticism and masonry.

Hermeticism and masonry

“Churches have been known to defend themselves thus all by themselves,” he remarked with a sigh. “Saint-Sophia at Constantinople, forty years ago, hurled to the earth three times in succession, the crescent of Mahom, by shaking her domes, which are her heads. Guillaume de Paris, who built this one, was a magician.”

“Very fine heart of oak,” said the king, striking the woodwork with his fist. “There have been used in this cage,” continued the other, “two hundred and twenty great bolts of iron, of nine feet, and of eight,

Cf. the FBI cage in Blackist

“’Tis a great deal of iron,” said the king, “to contain the light of a spirit.”

“Have you never seen a revolt, Master Jacques?” “I have made them,” said the hosier. “How do you set to work to make a revolt?” said the king. “Ah!” replied Coppenole, “’tis not very difficult. There are a hundred ways. In the first place, there must be discontent in the city. The thing is not uncommon. And then, the character of the inhabitants. Those of Ghent are easy to stir into revolt. They always love the prince’s son; the prince, never. Well! One morning, I will suppose, some one enters my shop, and says to me: ‘Father Coppenole, there is this and there is that, the Demoiselle of Flanders wishes to save her ministers, the grand bailiff is doubling the impost on shagreen, or something else,’—what you will. I leave my work as it stands, I come out of my hosier’s stall, and I shout: ‘To the sack?’ There is always some smashed cask at hand. I mount it, and I say aloud, in the first words that occur to me, what I have on my heart; and when one is of the people, sire, one always has something on the heart. Then people troop up, they shout, they ring the alarm bell, they arm the louts with what they take from the soldiers, the market people join in, and they set out. And it will always be thus, so long as there are lords in the seignories, bourgeois in the bourgs, and peasants in the country.”

If you only knew how much I love you! What a heart is mine! Oh! what desertion of all virtue! What desperate abandonment of myself! A doctor, I mock at science; a gentleman, I tarnish my own name; a priest, I make of the missal a pillow of sensuality, I spit in the face of my God! all this for thee, enchantress! to be more worthy of thy hell! And you will not have the apostate!

Cf. Mr. Darcy's first proposal

let us, while waiting for new monuments, preserve the ancient monuments. Let us, if possible, inspire the nation with a love for national architecture. That, the author declares, is one of the principal aims of this book; it is one of the principal aims of his life.