Lessons from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

Quasimodo is deaf from the bells and shut in the towers, and the one person he obeys is Claude Frollo, the archdeacon who lifted him off the foundling bed on Quasimodo Sunday. Frollo wants La Esmeralda, the dancer the square follows, and he cuts a Greek word for fate into his wall, as if necessity had chosen her. She trusts Captain Phoebus instead. He is the officer who cut her free when Quasimodo tried to carry her off, and a bright uniform is easier to believe than a priest who will not meet her eye. Pierre Gringoire, who only followed her in hope of supper, is married to her with a broken jug in the Court of Miracles, and is then left holding a marriage that protects neither of them. In a cell on the Place de Grève, a woman still keeps one small shoe from a child stolen years ago, and she spends that rage on Esmeralda, whom she takes for one of the people who stole the child. Louis XI hears the city from a turret in the Bastille. When the noise of a rescue reaches him, he will decide whether a church may still hide anyone.

The great hall makes him Pope of Fools, and his face is the whole joke. On the pillory the square is still punishing him, until Esmeralda climbs the ladder with a gourd of water and a tear falls. Her goat, Djali, taps out Phoebus's name on lettered blocks, and a later court reads the trick as witchcraft. During her public penance Quasimodo swings down on a rope, carries her into the cathedral, and for a while the old cry of sanctuary holds. Frollo still has the key to the red door. When she refuses him, the outcasts of the Court of Miracles attack Notre-Dame by night to take her back. Quasimodo, who cannot hear their purpose, defends the church alone with beams and melted lead. Louis, who had been pleased by the rumour of a riot against his bailiff, learns the riot is a rescue and orders the refuge broken. That order is the hinge. The rope can get her inside. It cannot keep her there once the king has named the noise.

Hugo wrote the novel as a defence of the building and of the people a crowd looks at and does not take in. The chapters on the church, the bird's-eye view of Paris, and the claim that the printed book will kill the stone one are not a pause in the plot. They are the plot's argument: a city that forgets how to read its churches will also forget how to see a person. The ending refuses the romance later ages expect. Phoebus marries. Quasimodo throws Frollo from the towers. Esmeralda is hanged on the square that watched her dance. Quasimodo disappears, and about two years later at Montfaucon the gravediggers find his skeleton holding hers. When they try to pull the two apart, he falls to dust.

The laugh in the hall is A Crowd That Makes a Monster, and it does not stop at the feast. It follows him to the pillory, where the one person who brings water is as unwelcome as he is. That is Belonging When You Are Shut Out. The court then turns Esmeralda's dance, her goat, and a name spelled in blocks into proof, which is Beauty Used as a Verdict. Frollo calls his want fate, and Desire That Turns into Possession is that renaming, carried through the red door on a key. Hugo sets the cathedral against the damage in What Stone Remembers: the stone has been carrying the city's argument, and a printed book will not automatically make the city kinder. Sanctuary and the Law shows the limit of the building. It can hide her. It cannot overrule the king.

The image to carry out is not the bells. It is a gourd on a pillory, a child's shoe in a wall, and two skeletons at Montfaucon that fall to dust when someone tries to part them. Wide Reads keeps the Hapgood text beside summaries, quotes, and audio for all 59 chapters, from the mystery in the great hall to the day the searchers try to separate those skeletons.