Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

to destroy, resisting ‘avec des mugissements épouvantables, aux énormes coups de masses de fer
que lui assénaient, en se relayant, les hommes les plus vigoureux.’ [with appalling groans the
great blows of the iron weights with which the strongest men, working in relays, assailed it]. 156
This awful resonating image of determined destruction, a perversion of the bell’s true purpose, so
that it tolls for its own death, like an animal in agony (‘mugissements’ means literally ‘mooings’)
is not dwelled on in St Wandrille. Its implications are brought out, however, in the Hymne à la
Cloche, published the same year. The poem was finished, according to Langlois’s colophon [fig:
33] in the shape of a bell, on New Year’s Day 1831, exactly a fortnight before Hugo finished
writing Notre Dame. It cannot therefore reflect Hugo’s influence; it can only demonstrate how
similarly both men saw the potential of the material past for narrative.
Figure 33 Hymne a la Cloche, colophon
In Notre Dame the bells are important. They give expression to Quasimodo, whose
deafness makes him unable to speak easily, and they are the voice of Notre Dame. In Langlois’s
prose poem the bell, which is supposed alone to have escaped the fate of the others in 1793,
assumes a power and personality such as Hugo gives to the cathedral. Langlois imagines it at all
times and all seasons, calling forth prayer, as Notre Dame bestows comfort on Esmeralda, but
privy also to the grotesque aspects of the Gothic, causing witches to drop from the sky with the
first note of the Angelus. The bell witnesses the events of All Hallows Eve when:
Les Morts, envelopés de leurs linceuls, surgissant de toutes parts dans l’église obscure et silencieuse: il sont pales et
tristes, mais calmes; car les feux du Purgatoire n’ont point d’action sur eux le jour de la Toussaint et le lendemain.
156 Lenoir, St Wandrille, p.244.
150