The Hunchback of Notre Dame (warning: Spoilers Ahead!)

I am sick. As in sick. Sick enough to leave school before recess. Thanks to the Looooooooong assembly today.

Actually, can't blame them for making me sick coz i was sickly this morning. But the assembly just made it worse.

Anyway, I have progressed from being sick to being sickly, giving me time to prepare for my MUET assignment. Haha.

BTW I have a throat infection, swelling my lymph nodes to amazing proportions. The interesting thing is, the doctor who treated me was well aware I was a Michaelian, and asked me if there was a school play this year. I told him we are doing the Hunchback of Notre Dame this year and he got excited and quoted parts of the book to me. Lucky I read the first and last chapters of the book ( as well as the synopsis) so I was able to relate to what he was talking about. I told him we are doing the Disney version, to which he said the Victor Hugo version is more romantic.

There are several stuff in Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame that might make monsieur Hugo roll in his grave in the magnificent Pantheon. Here's why:

Quisimodo would never have been able to sing the high high high notes (sung wonderfully by actor Tom Hulce) in the cartoon. Why? Coz he's deaf. He's a bellringer, for goodness sakes. And he was not the King of Fools but the Pope of the Fools.

Here is an excerpt of Victor Hugo's description of Quasi:

After all the pentagonal, hexagonal, and whimsical faces, which
had succeeded each other at that hole without realizing the
ideal of the grotesque which their imaginations, excited by
the orgy, had constructed, nothing less was needed to win their
suffrages than the sublime grimace which had just dazzled the
assembly. Master Coppenole himself applauded, and Clopin
Trouillefou, who had been among the competitors (and God
knows what intensity of ugliness his visage could attain),
confessed himself conquered: We will do the same. We
shall not try to give the reader an idea of that tetrahedral
nose, that horseshoe mouth; that little left eye obstructed
with a red, bushy, bristling eyebrow, while the right eye disappeared
entirely beneath an enormous wart; of those teeth
in disarray, broken here and there, like the embattled parapet
of a fortress; of that callous lip, upon which one of these
teeth encroached, like the tusk of an elephant; of that forked
chin; and above all, of the expression spread over the whole;
of that mixture of malice, amazement, and sadness. Let the
reader dream of this whole, if he can.

The acclamation was unanimous; people rushed towards
the chapel. They made the lucky Pope of the Fools come
forth in triumph. But it was then that surprise and admiration
attained their highest pitch; the grimace was his face.

Or rather, his whole person was a grimace. A huge head,
bristling with red hair; between his shoulders an enormous
hump, a counterpart perceptible in front; a system of thighs
and legs so strangely astray that they could touch each other
only at the knees, and, viewed from the front, resembled the
crescents of two scythes joined by the handles; large feet, monstrous
hands; and, with all this deformity, an indescribable
and redoubtable air of vigor, agility, and courage,--strange
exception to the eternal rule which wills that force as well as
beauty shall be the result of harmony. Such was the pope
whom the fools had just chosen for themselves.

One would have pronounced him a giant who had been
broken and badly put together again.

When this species of cyclops appeared on the threshold of
the chapel, motionless, squat, and almost as broad as he was
tall; squared on the base, as a great man says; with his doublet
half red, half violet, sown with silver bells, and, above all,
in the perfection of his ugliness, the populace recognized him
on the instant, and shouted with one voice,--

"'Tis Quasimodo, the bellringer! 'tis Quasimodo, the hunchback
of Notre-Dame! Quasimodo, the one-eyed! Quasimodo, the
bandy-legged!

An old woman explained to Coppenole that Quasimodo was deaf.




Besides that, the ending was altered terribly. In the book, Dom Claude Frollo (who is an archdeacon in the book but a judge in the cartoon), Esmeralda and Quasimodo all die, Esmeralda by hanging, Frollo fell to his death (graphic descriptions from the book) and Quasi died hugging Esmeralda in her tomb.



Quasimodo was burning to ask him what he had done with
the gypsy; but the archdeacon seemed to be out of the world
at that moment. He was evidently in one of those violent
moments of life when one would not feel the earth crumble.
He remained motionless and silent, with his eyes steadily
fixed on a certain point; and there was something so terrible
about this silence and immobility that the savage bellringer
shuddered before it and dared not come in contact with it.
Only, and this was also one way of interrogating the archdeacon,
he followed the direction of his vision, and in this way the
glance of the unhappy deaf man fell upon the Place de Grève.

Thus he saw what the priest was looking at. The ladder
was erected near the permanent gallows. There were some
people and many soldiers in the Place. A man was dragging
a white thing, from which hung something black, along the
pavement. This man halted at the foot of the gallows.

Here something took place which Quasimodo could not see
very clearly. It was not because his only eye had not
preserved its long range, but there was a group of soldiers
which prevented his seeing everything. Moreover, at that moment
the sun appeared, and such a flood of light overflowed the
horizon that one would have said that all the points in Paris,
spires, chimneys, gables, had simultaneously taken fire.

Meanwhile, the man began to mount the ladder. Then Quasimodo
saw him again distinctly. He was carrying a woman on his shoulder,
a young girl dressed in white; that young girl had a noose about
her neck. Quasimodo recognized her.

It was she.

The man reached the top of the ladder. There he arranged
the noose. Here the priest, in order to see the better, knelt
upon the balustrade.

All at once the man kicked away the ladder abruptly, and
Quasimodo, who had not breathed for several moments, beheld
the unhappy child dangling at the end of the rope two fathoms
above the pavement, with the man squatting on her shoulders.
The rope made several gyrations on itself, and Quasimodo
beheld horrible convulsions run along the gypsy's body. The
priest, on his side, with outstretched neck and eyes starting
from his head, contemplated this horrible group of the man
and the young girl,--the spider and the fly.

At the moment when it was most horrible, the laugh of a
demon, a laugh which one can only give vent to when one is
no longer human, burst forth on the priest's livid face.

Quasimodo did not hear that laugh, but he saw it.

The bellringer retreated several paces behind the archdeacon,
and suddenly hurling himself upon him with fury, with his huge
hands he pushed him by the back over into the abyss over which
Dom Claude was leaning.

The priest shrieked: "Damnation!" and fell.

The spout, above which he had stood, arrested him in his
fall. He clung to it with desperate hands, and, at the moment
when he opened his mouth to utter a second cry, he beheld
the formidable and avenging face of Quasimodo thrust over
the edge of the balustrade above his head.

Then he was silent.

The abyss was there below him. A fall of more than two hundred
feet and the pavement.

In this terrible situation, the archdeacon said not a word,
uttered not a groan. He merely writhed upon the spout,
with incredible efforts to climb up again; but his hands had
no hold on the granite, his feet slid along the blackened wall
without catching fast. People who have ascended the towers
of Notre-Dame know that there is a swell of the stone immediately
beneath the balustrade. It was on this retreating angle that
miserable archdeacon exhausted himself. He had not to deal with
a perpendicular wall, but with one which sloped away beneath him.

Quasimodo had but to stretch out his hand in order to draw
him from the gulf; but he did not even look at him. He was
looking at the Grève. He was looking at the gallows. He
was looking at the gypsy.

The deaf man was leaning, with his elbows on the balustrade,
at the spot where the archdeacon had been a moment before,
and there, never detaching his gaze from the only object which
existed for him in the world at that moment, he remained
motionless and mute, like a man struck by lightning, and a
long stream of tears flowed in silence from that eye which,
up to that time, had never shed but one tear.

Meanwhile, the archdeacon was panting. His bald brow
was dripping with perspiration, his nails were bleeding
against the stones, his knees were flayed by the wall.

He heard his cassock, which was caught on the spout, crack
and rip at every jerk that he gave it. To complete his
misfortune, this spout ended in a leaden pipe which bent under
the weight of his body. The archdeacon felt this pipe slowly

giving way. The miserable man said to himself that, when
his hands should be worn out with fatigue, when his cassock
should tear asunder, when the lead should give way, he would
be obliged to fall, and terror seized upon his very vitals.
Now and then he glanced wildly at a sort of narrow shelf formed,
ten feet lower down, by projections of the sculpture, and he
prayed heaven, from the depths of his distressed soul, that he
might be allowed to finish his life, were it to last two centuries,
on that space two feet square. Once, he glanced below him into
the Place, into the abyss; the head which he raised again had
its eyes closed and its hair standing erect.

There was something frightful in the silence of these two
men. While the archdeacon agonized in this terrible fashion
a few feet below him, Quasimodo wept and gazed at the Grève.

The archdeacon, seeing that all his exertions served only to
weaken the fragile support which remained to him, decided
to remain quiet. There he hung, embracing the gutter, hardly
breathing, no longer stirring, making no longer any other
movements than that mechanical convulsion of the stomach,
which one experiences in dreams when one fancies himself
falling. His fixed eyes were wide open with a stare. He
lost ground little by little, nevertheless, his fingers slipped
along the spout; he became more and more conscious of the
feebleness of his arms and the weight of his body. The curve
of the lead which sustained him inclined more and more each
instant towards the abyss.

He beheld below him, a frightful thing, the roof of Saint-
Jean le Rond, as small as a card folded in two. He gazed at
the impressive carvings, one by one, of the tower, suspended
like himself over the precipice, but without terror for
themselves or pity for him. All was stone around him; before
his eyes, gaping monsters; below, quite at the bottom, in the
Place, the pavement; above his head, Quasimodo weeping.

In the Parvis there were several groups of curious good
people, who were tranquilly seeking to divine who the madman
could be who was amusing himself in so strange a manner.
The priest heard them saying, for their voices reached
him, clear and shrill: "Why, he will break his neck!"

Quasimodo wept.

At last the archdeacon, foaming with rage and despair,
understood that all was in vain. Nevertheless, he collected
all the strength which remained to him for a final effort. He
stiffened himself upon the spout, pushed against the wall with
both his knees, clung to a crevice in the stones with his hands,
and succeeded in climbing back with one foot, perhaps; but
this effort made the leaden beak on which he rested bend
abruptly. His cassock burst open at the same time. Then,
feeling everything give way beneath him, with nothing but
his stiffened and failing hands to support him, the
unfortunate man closed his eyes and let go of the spout.
He fell.

Quasimodo watched him fall.

A fall from such a height is seldom perpendicular. The
archdeacon, launched into space, fell at first head foremost,
with outspread hands; then he whirled over and over many
times; the wind blew him upon the roof of a house, where
the unfortunate man began to break up. Nevertheless, he was
not dead when he reached there. The bellringer saw him still
endeavor to cling to a gable with his nails; but the surface
sloped too much, and he had no more strength. He slid rapidly
along the roof like a loosened tile, and dashed upon the
pavement. There he no longer moved.

Then Quasimodo raised his eyes to the gypsy, whose body
he beheld hanging from the gibbet, quivering far away beneath
her white robe with the last shudderings of anguish, then he
dropped them on the archdeacon, stretched out at the base of
the tower, and no longer retaining the human form, and he
said, with a sob which heaved his deep chest,--
"Oh! all that I have ever loved!"

Phoebus de Châteaupers also came to a tragic end. He married.



This is the last chapter of the book. Very touching ending.

CHAPTER IV.

THE MARRIAGE OF QUASIMODO.



We have just said that Quasimodo disappeared from Notre-
Dame on the day of the gypsy's and of the archdeacon's death.
He was not seen again, in fact; no one knew what had become
of him.

During the night which followed the execution of la
Esmeralda, the night men had detached her body from the
gibbet, and had carried it, according to custom, to the
cellar of Montfauçon.

Montfauçon was, as Sauval says, "the most ancient and the
most superb gibbet in the kingdom." Between the faubourgs
of the Temple and Saint Martin, about a hundred and sixty
toises from the walls of Paris, a few bow shots from La
Courtille, there was to be seen on the crest of a gentle,
almost imperceptible eminence, but sufficiently elevated to
be seen for several leagues round about, an edifice of strange
form, bearing considerable resemblance to a Celtic cromlech, and
where also human sacrifices were offered.

Let the reader picture to himself, crowning a limestone hillock,
an oblong mass of masonry fifteen feet in height, thirty wide,
forty long, with a gate, an external railing and a platform;
on this platform sixteen enormous pillars of rough hewn stone,
thirty feet in height, arranged in a colonnade round three of
the four sides of the mass which support them, bound together
at their summits by heavy beams, whence hung chains at intervals;
on all these chains, skeletons; in the vicinity, on the plain,
a stone cross and two gibbets of secondary importance, which
seemed to have sprung up as shoots around the central gallows;
above all this, in the sky, a perpetual flock of crows; that
was Montfauçon.

At the end of the fifteenth century, the formidable gibbet
which dated from 1328, was already very much dilapidated;
the beams were wormeaten, the chains rusted, the pillars
green with mould; the layers of hewn stone were all cracked
at their joints, and grass was growing on that platform which
no feet touched. The monument made a horrible profile
against the sky; especially at night when there was a little
moonlight on those white skulls, or when the breeze of evening
brushed the chains and the skeletons, and swayed all these
in the darkness. The presence of this gibbet sufficed to
render gloomy all the surrounding places.

The mass of masonry which served as foundation to the
odious edifice was hollow. A huge cellar had been
constructed there, closed by an old iron grating, which
was out of order, into which were cast not only the human
remains, which were taken from the chains of Montfauçon, but
also the bodies of all the unfortunates executed on the other
permanent gibbets of Paris. To that deep charnel-house, where
so many human remains and so many crimes have rotted in company,
many great ones of this world, many innocent people, have
contributed their bones, from Enguerrand de Marigni, the first
victim, and a just man, to Admiral de Coligni, who was its last,
and who was also a just man.

As for the mysterious disappearance of Quasimodo, this is all
that we have been able to discover.

About eighteen months or two years after the events which
terminate this story, when search was made in that cavern for
the body of Olivier le Daim, who had been hanged two days
previously, and to whom Charles VIII. had granted the favor
of being buried in Saint Laurent, in better company, they
found among all those hideous carcasses two skeletons, one
of which held the other in its embrace. One of these skeletons,
which was that of a woman, still had a few strips of a
garment which had once been white, and around her neck was
to be seen a string of adrézarach beads with a little silk bag
ornamented with green glass, which was open and empty.
These objects were of so little value that the executioner had
probably not cared for them. The other, which held this one
in a close embrace, was the skeleton of a man. It was noticed
that his spinal column was crooked, his head seated on his
shoulder blades, and that one leg was shorter than the other.
Moreover, there was no fracture of the vertebrae at the nape
of the neck, and it was evident that he had not been hanged.
Hence, the man to whom it had belonged had come thither
and had died there. When they tried to detach the skeleton
which he held in his embrace, he fell to dust.