Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

much sympathy. But Esmeralda, poor Esmeralda, who through the deep mire of her surroundings has
kept a soul so maidenly and pure, who is full of tender pity for all suffering, and possesses a heart that
beats with such true woman’s love—what had she done that Victor Hugo should bestow the treasure of
that love upon the worthless archer-coxcomb, Phœbus de Châteaupers, that he should make her frail
harmless pretty life, a life of torture, and cause her to die literally in the hangman’s grasp? Was it worth
while that Esmeralda’s mother, Paquerette la Chantefleurie, should find her child again, after long years
of anguish, only to relinquish her, after one brief moment of rapture, for that terrible end? Quentin’s
courage and practical sagacity are crowned with success: he saves the woman he loves. But by what
irony of fate does it happen that Quasimodo’s heroic efforts to defend Esmeralda have for only result to
injure those who are trying to save her, and the hastening of her doom?
Gloom, gloom, a horror of darkness and evil deeds, of human ineptitude and wrong, such is the
background of “Notre Dame.” If Scott gives us a poetry of sunshine and high emprise, Victor Hugo gives
us, and here with a more than equal puissance, the poetry of cloud-wrack and un-governable passion.
There is no piece of character-painting in “Quentin Durward” that, for tragic lurid power and insight, can
be placed beside the portrait of Claude Frollo. 2 Lucid and animated as are such scenes as the sacking of
the bishop’s palace, and the attack on Liége, they are not executed with such striking effects of light and
shade as the companion scene in “Notre Dame,” the attack of the beggars o n the cathedral. Scott’s
landscape is bright, pleasant, the reflection of a world seen by a healthy imagination and clear in the
sunlight of a particularly sane nature. Victor Hugo’s world in “Notre Dame” is as a world seen in
fever-vision, or suddenly illumined by great flashes of lightning. The mediæval city is before us in all its
picturesque huddle of irregular buildings. We are in it; we see it: the narrow streets with their glooms and
gleams, their Rembrandt effects of shadow and light; the quaint overhanging houses each of which seems
to have a face of its own; the churches and convents flinging up to the sky their towers and spires; and
high above all, the city’s very soul, the majestic cathedral. And what a motley medley of human creatures
throng the place! Here is the great guild of beggar-thieves even more tatterdemalion and shamelessly
grotesque than when Callot painted them for us two centuries later. Here is Gringoire, the out-at-elbows
unsuccessful rhymer of the time. Anon Esmeralda passes accompanied by her goat. She lays down her
little mat, and dances lightly, gracefully to her tambourine. See how the gossips whisper of witchcraft as
the goat plays its pretty tricks. And who is that grave priest, lean from the long vigils of study, who
stands watching the girl’s every motion with an eye of sombre flame? Close behind, in attendance on the
priest, is a figure scarcely human, deformed, hideous, having but one Cyclops eye—also fastened on the
girl. Among the bystanders may be seen the priest’s brother, Jehan, the Paris student of the town-sparrow
type that has existed from the days of Villon even until now. Before the dancer has collected her spare
harvest of small coins, a soldier troop rides roughly by, hustling the crowd, and in the captain the poor
child recognises the man who has saved her from violence some days before—the man to whom, alas,
she has given her heart. In such a group as this what elements of tragedy lie lurking and ready to outleap?
That priest in his guilty passion will forswear his priestly vows, stab the soldier, and, failing to compass
his guilty ends, give over the poor child dancer to torture and death. The deformed Cyclops, seeing the
priest’s fiendish laughter as they both stand on the top of Notre Dame tower, watching the girl’s
execution, will guess that he is the cause of her doom, and hurl him over the parapet. And the student too
will be entangled in the tragic chains by which these human creatures are bound together. His shattered
carcase will lie hanging from one of the sculptured ornaments on the front of the cathedral.
Living, living—yes, the book is unmistakably palpitatingly alive. It does not live, perhaps, with the life
of prose and everyday experience. But it lives the better life of imagination. The novelist, by force of