The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

Question number 32.

Who wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame? Is it Alexander Dumas, Gustave Flaubert, or Victor Hugo? The correct answer is Victor Hugo.

Question number 33.

What is a group of rhinoceroses called? Is it band, crash, or army? The correct answer is crash.

It's possible to recognize evil without possessing the courage and character to confront it rightly.

Now I want you to think of one of the greatest works of classic literature, Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

A beautiful young woman named Esmeralda is being led to the gallows for her execution.

She's helpless.

It's a daily matter.

Victor Hugo, isn't that La Miserable and like the Hunchback of Notre Dame? Isn't he like a famous author?

Is

he a French

Yeah.

Most likely.

The guy who wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame, you know?

Well, there you go.

There were people who were interested from a spiritual religious standpoint.

There were people who were interested from a literary standpoint with Victor Hugo and the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

There were people who were interested from an architectural standpoint, it being a UNESCO World Heritage Site with Gothic architecture.

And then there were people who were interested from a world heritage site, you know, 860 years of history.

Victor Hugo is one of the most famous French writers of all time.

He wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

He wrote Les Misérables, which later turned into that hit musical Les Mis.

Victor Hugo, a cultured man, a literate man.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, so we got The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Um, an American, Washington Irving, published Tales of Alhambra.

Uh, we got George Borrow publishing The Zincali, so it's like the people are eating this up.

If it may interest you, I can even tell you that I have several times had the honor of being entertained by royalty.

but my ambition has never been so wild as to expect that one day i might be entertained by the aristocracy of new york no i do not expect to be entertained by you nor do i want you to expect me to entertain you and your friends to-night for i decline to keep the engagement now i could fill a book on america with reminiscences of this sort adding a few chapters on bosses and boodlers on new york chronic on the tenement houses of the large cities on the gambling hells of denver and the dens of san francisco and what not but not even your nasty article on my country mark will make me do it we should not think it kind no matter how much we might have associated with kings and nobilities we should not think it right to crush her with it and make her ashamed of her lowlier walk in life for we have a saying who humiliates my mother includes his own do i seriously imagine you to be the author of that strange letter monsieur bourget indeed i do not i believe it to have been surreptitiously inserted by your amanuensis when your back was turned i think he did it with a good motive expecting it to add force and piquancy to your article but it does not reflect your nature and i know it will grieve you when you see it i also think he interlarded many other things which you will disapprove of when you see them i am certain that all the harsh names discharged at me come from him not you no doubt you could have proved me entitled to them with as little trouble as it has cost him to do it but it would have been your disposition to hunt game of a higher quality why i even doubt if it is you who furnish me all that excellent information about balzac and those others now the style of m bourget and many other french writers is apparently a closed letter to mark twain but let us leave that alone has he read erckman chatrion victor hugo lamartine edmond d'abou cher bullier renan has he read gustave drose's monsieur madame et bebe and those books which leave for a long time a perfume about you has he read the novels of alexandre dumas eugene suet george sand and balzac has he read victor hugo's les miserables and notre dame de paris has he read or heard the plays of sandeau ogier dumas and sardou the works of those titans of modern literature whose names will be household words all over the world for hundreds of years to come he has read la terre this kind-hearted refined humorist when mark twain visits a garden does he smell the violets the roses the jasmine or the honeysuckle no he goes in the far-away corner where the soil is prepared hear what he says i wish monsieur paul bourget had read more of our novels before he came it is the only way to thoroughly understand a people when i found i was coming to paris i read la All this in simple justice to you, and to me, for to gravely accept those interlardings as yours would be to wrong your head and heart, and at the same time convict myself of being equipped with a vacancy where my penetration ought to be lodged.

and now finally i must uncover the secret pain the wee sore from which the reply grew the anecdote which closed my recent article and consider how it is that this pimple has spread to these cancerous dimensions if any but you had dictated the reply monsieur bourget i would know that that anecdote was twisted around and its intention magnified some hundreds of times in order that it might be used as a pretext to creep in the back way but i accuse you of nothing nothing but error when you say that i retort by calling france a nation of bastards it is an error and not a small one but a large one i made no such remark nor anything resembling it moreover the magazine would not have allowed me to use so gross a word as that you told an anecdote a funny one i admit that it hit a foible of our american aristocracy and it stung me i admit that it stung me sharply it was like this you found some ancient portraits of french kings in the gallery of one of our aristocracy and you said he has the grande monarque but where is the portrait of his grandfather that is the american aristocrat's grandfather now that hits only a few of us i grant just the upper crust only but it hits exceedingly hard i wondered if there was any way of getting back at you in one of your chapters i found this chance in our high parisian existence for instance we find applied to arts and luxury and to debauchery all the powers and all the weaknesses of the french soul you see your higher parisian class not everybody not the nation but only the top crust of the nation applies to debauchery all the powers of its soul i argued to myself that that energy must produce results so i built an anecdote out of your remark in it i make napoleon bonifart say to me-but see for yourself the anecdote ingeniously clipped and curtailed in paragraph eleven of your reply so i repeat mark twain does not like m bourget's book so long as he makes light fun of the great french writer he is at home he is pleasant he is the american humorist we know when he takes his revenge and where is the reason for taking a revenge he is unkind unfair bitter nasty for example see his answer to a frenchman who jokingly remarks to him I suppose life can never get entirely dull to an American, because whenever he can't strike up any other way to put in his time he can always get away with a few years trying to find out who his grandfather was.

Hear the answer.

the majestic triumphs of warriors, the mingling of the quaint and sublime in religious ceremony, the gorgeous delirium of gladiatorial shows, and under all the secretly working leaven of Christianity.

such a romance would not call the attention of society to the dialect of stable-boys the low habits of rustics the vulgarity of small schoolmasters the manners of men in livery or to any other form of uneducated talk and sentiments its characteristics would have virtues and vices alike on the grand scale and would express themselves in an english representing the discourse of the most powerful minds in the best latin or possibly greek when there occurred a scene with a greek philosopher on a visit to rome or resident there as a teacher in this way pepin would do in fiction what had never been done before something not at all like rienzi or notre dame de paris or any other attempt of that kind but something at once more penetrating and more magnificent more passionate and more philosophical more panoramic yet more select something that would present a conception of a gigantic period in short something truly roman and world historical when pepin gave me this programme to read he was much younger than at present some slight success in another vein diverted him from the production of panoramic and select romance and the experience of not having tried to carry out his programme has naturally made him more biting and sarcastic on the failures of those who have actually written romances without apparently having had a glimpse of a conception equal to his indeed i am often comparing his rather touchingly inflated naivete as of a small young person walking on tiptoe while he is talking of elevated things at the time when he himself felt the author of that unwritten romance with his present epigrammatic curtness and affectation of power kept strictly in reserve his paragraphs now seemed to have a bitter smile in them from the consciousness of a mind too penetrating to accept any other man's ideas and too equally competent in all directions to seclude his power in any one form of creation but rather fitted to hang over them all as a lamp of guidance to the stumbloos below you perceive how proud he is of not being indebted to any writer even with the dead he is on the creditor's side for he is doing them the service of letting the world know what they meant better than those poor pre papinians themselves had any means of doing and he treats the mighty shades very cavalierly is this fellow citizen of ours considered simply in the light of a baptized christian and tax-paying englishman really as madly conceited as empty of reverential feeling as unvoracious and careless of justice as full of catchpenny devices and strategy attitudinizing as on examination his writing shows itself to be by no means He has arrived at his present pass in the literary calling through the self-imposed obligation to give himself a manner which would convey the impression of superior knowledge and ability.

He is much worthier and more admirable than his written productions because the moral aspects exhibited in his writing are felt to be ridiculous or disgraceful in the personal relations of life.

in blaming pepin's writing we are accusing the public conscience which is so lax and ill-informed on the momentous bearings of authorship that it sanctions the total absence of scruple in undertaking and prosecuting what should be the best warranted of vocations hence i still accept friendly relations with pepin for he has much private amiability and though he probably thinks of me as a man of slender talents without rapidity of coup and with no compensatory penetration he meets me very cordially and would not i am sure willingly pain me in conversation by crudely declaring his low estimate of my capacity yet i have often known him to insult my betters and contribute perhaps unreflectingly to encourage injurious conceptions of them That was done in the course of his professional writing, and then the public conscience still leaves such writing nearly at the level of the Mary Andrews dress, which permits an impudent deportment and extraordinary gambles to one who in his ordinary clothing shows himself the decent father of a family.

Bummer.

It does have a happier ending than the novel, as I recall.

I think that one kind of ends badly for everybody.

Yeah.

I mean, that's where my point

is.

The only relation this has to the Victor Hugo novel is that there's a character named Quasimodo and he has a misshapen back.

that's the only similarities that we're working with I