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his physical incompleteness leaves him hopelessly suspended between the states of man and animal. Quasimodo is defined by his animal-like strength (proven in numerous scenes such as the early, failed abduction of Esmeralda and the assault on the cathedral) and by his animal-like mentality, which is at once a result of his incomplete intellectual faculties and a conditioned response to the (unkind) way he has been treated by those around him, save his “adopted” father, Claude Frollo, to whom he is completely devoted (“Quasimodo loved the archdeacon as no dog, no horse, no elephant, ever loved its master” [p. 151]). But unlike the archdeacon, who is rigidly locked into his dual(ing) nature, Quasimodo is transfigured by Esmeralda’s simple gesture of kindness to him during his torture on the pillory. All the difference is there. Indeed, from that moment on, Quasimodo undergoes an awakening, during which his dormant soul comes alive and expands exponentially, as witnessed in the scene in which Quasimodo—proud and glorious—swoops down from the top of the cathedral to save Esmeralda from being hanged: “For at that instant Quasimodo was truly beautiful. He was beautiful,—he, that orphan, that foundling, that outcast; he felt himself to be august and strong; he confronted that society from which he was banished ... he,—the lowliest of creatures, with the strength of God” (p. 339). Quasimodo’s devotion to Esmeralda supplants the cherished role previously held for Frollo, and he subsequently does everything in his power to ensure her safety and happiness. In attempting to repair her relationship with Phoebus, in warding off Frollo’s unwanted visits, and in endeavoring to save Esmeralda from the “attackers,” in whom he mistakenly perceives a threat to her safety, Quasimodo risks everything in Esmeralda’s name.

Yet in the end this transfiguration, this conversion from grotesque to sublime—unobserved by Esmeralda, so caught up is she in Phoebus’s aura of false brilliance—is of a profoundly personal nature and passes virtually unnoticed. It is the reader who is charged with recognizing its final expression in the account given in the novel’s last chapter of two anonymous skeletons found sometime later in the vault at Montfaucon, locked in an embrace. Without naming them, the description leaves no doubt that one is Esmeralda (identifiable by the remnants of her white gown and the empty bag that once contained her childhood shoe) and the other is Quasimodo (identifiable by the remains of his hideously deformed body), who disappeared from the cathedral the day of Esmeralda’s death. More remarkable than the embrace, however, is that the male skeleton’s neck is intact, leading to the irrefutable conclusion that he came to the cave not already dead, but to die. The self-imposed nature of Quasimodo’s death thus implies that the completion of this conversion must necessarily occur outside the boundaries of the social and historical world of the novel. For the only place where his opposing poles can be truly reconciled is in the cosmic whole; it is in leaving his shell of a body behind (it significantly crumbles into dust when separated from that of Esmeralda) that this awakened soul can take flight.

This message that redemption and salvation are possible, but never in the world as it exists now, is the thread that binds all of Hugo’s novels together like a quilt whose squares, when viewed carefully, each reveal the same intricate pattern. Everything that is in The Hunchback of Notre Dame will be retraced, retold, rein-vented in Hugo’s four subsequent novels. Quasimodo’s dilemma, his struggle between two opposing poles, will become that of Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, that of Gilliatt in The Toilers of the Sea, that of Cwynplaine—another “monster” horrific on the outside and pure within—in The Man Who Laughs, and that of Gauvain in Ninety-three. Only through their deaths and a corresponding cosmic expansion or rebirth are Hugo’s fictional heroes able to find acceptance, transcendence, reconciliation of their internal oppositions, and affirmation