The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo [263]
4 (p. 66) thieves’ brotherhood: Hugo borrowed the majority of this description from the seventeenth-century French historian Henri Sauval but augmented it by his imagination and fascination with the clandestine organization and working of the underworld. Vagrants, their world, and the “secret” language of slang are themes that Hugo will take up again in Les Miserables; these themes will also be addressed by other nineteenth-century novelists such as Honoré de Balzac and Eugène Sue.
5 (p. 69) classic and romantic schools: The narrator’s tongue-in-cheek comment makes reference to the state of drama in 1831, when a battle is waging between the supporters of classical theater and its tenets and the new romantic school. In this battle, Hugo, author of the Romantic manifesto prefacing his play Cromwell, is no small player.
6 (p. 74) their neighbors’ sleep: The literary type of the gamin, which Hugo sketches here, will find its fullest form with the creation of the unforgettable man-child Gavroche in Les Misérables.
7 (p. 97) “heaven itself”: In all of Hugo’s novels, romantic love and the formation of a couple mean the complete fusion of the two individuals into one organic whole. This (desired) state is, however, rarely attained. With the exception of Marius and Cosette in Les Miserables and Déruchette and Ebenezer in The Toilers of the Sea, Hugo’s characters most often do not succeed in creating or sustaining ties (romantic or familial) that would bind them to the fictional world. This failure to connect underscores the isolation and exclusion that the majority of these characters face.
8 (p. 149) of living bronze: The sexual undertones of the virginal Quasimodo’s ardor for the cathedral bells has been noted often. What is more significant, however, than this displaced passion is that the cathedral represents everything to the hunchback: It is his protector, his mother, his lover, his universe. As the narrator observes, so much is Quasimodo a part of the cathedral and the cathedral a part of him that, as a result of the cathedral’s “mysterious influences” upon him, he even comes “to look like it” (p. 144).
9 (p. 204) “a young mother”: In all of Hugo’s fiction, maternity is depicted as a sublime state that transforms the woman both physically and spiritually through redemption of present or past transgressions. In this way, the marks of Paquette’s past prostitution are literally erased once she becomes a mother (“She grew handsome again”), as her subsequent existence turns uniquely around her child.
10 (p. 224) for the third time.... ever shed: In addition to solidifying the Christian and, in this case, specifically biblical frame of reference (in imitating Mary Magdalene’s gesture to Christ during his torture and crucifixion), this response to Quasimodo’s thrice-repeated cry for water releases Quasimodo’s soul from its state of dormancy. This transfiguration is highlighted by the release of a different kind of water from Quasimodo’s eye—a tear—“perhaps the first that the unfortunate man had ever shed.”
11 (p. 227) weeks had passed: In the chronology of the novel, which covers a period of approximately six months in the year 1482 and then shoots ahead a year and a half or two in the final chapter, time moves forward unevenly. Gaps, parallel accounts of the same moment, and flashbacks are some of the narrative techniques of acceleration and deceleration that Hugo employs to build suspense.
12 (p. 232) only the historian: The term “historian” was often employed by nineteenth-century French novelists as a way of lending veracity to their works through the illusion of objectivity. In reality, Hugo’s narrator