Notre-Dame de Paris (Oxford World's Classics) Read online

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  Translation and editorial material © Alban Krailsheimer 1993

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  First published as a World’s Classics paperback 1993

  Reissued as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 1999

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  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Data available

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Hugo, Victor, 1802–1885.

  [Notre-Dame de Paris. English]

  Notre-Dame de Paris / Victor Hugo; translated with an introduction

  and notes by Alban Krailsheimer.

  p. cm.

  1. France—History—Louis XI, 1461–1483—Fiction.

  2. Paris (France)—History—To 1515—Fiction.

  I. Krailsheimer, A. J. II. Title.

  PQ2288.A35 1993 843’.7—dc20 92-38259

  ISBN 0–19–283701–X

  3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

  Printed in Great Britain by

  Clays Ltd., St Ives plc

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

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  Refer to the Table of Contents to navigate through the material in this Oxford World’s Classics ebook. Use the asterisks (*) throughout the text to access the hyperlinked Explanatory Notes.

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  VICTOR HUGO

  Notre-Dame de Paris

  Translated with an Introduction and Notes by

  ALBAN KRAILSHEIMER

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  NOTRE-DAME DE PARIS

  VICTOR HUGO was born in Besançon in 1802, the youngest of three sons of an officer (eventually a general), who took his family with him from posting to posting, as far as Italy and Spain. In 1812 his parents separated, and Madame Hugo settled in Paris with her sons. Victor’s prolific literary career began with publication of poems (1822), a novel (1823), and a drama, Cromwell (1827), the preface of which remains a major manifesto of French Romanticism. The riot occasioned at the first performance of his drama Hernani (1830) established him as a leading figure among the Romantics, and Notre-Dame (1831) added to his prestige at home and abroad. Favoured by Louis-Philippe (1830-48), he chose exile rather than live under Napoleon III (President 1848, Emperor 1851). In exile in Brussels (1851), Jersey (1853), and Guernsey (1855) he wrote some of his finest works, notably the satirical poems Les Châtiments (1853), the first of a series of epic poems, Légende des siècles (1859), and the lengthy novel Les Misérables (1862). Only with Napoleon III’s defeat and replacement by the Third Republic did Hugo return, to be elected deputy, and later senator. His opposition to tyranny and continuing immense literary output established him as a national hero. When he died in 1885 he was honoured by interment in the Panthéon.

  A. J. KRAILSHEIMER was Emeritus Student and Tutor in French at Christ Church, Oxford from 1957 until his retirement in 1988. His published work is mostly on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but among his translations are Balzac’s Père Goriot, Flaubert’s Three Tales (both also in Oxford World’s Classics), Salammbô, and Bouvard et Pécuchet.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Note on the Text

  Select Bibliography

  A Chronology of Victor Hugo

  NOTRE-DAME DE PARIS

  Note on Money

  Explanatory Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  (NOTE: Readers who do not want to know beforehand the plot of Notre-Dame de Paris might prefer to read this Introduction after the book itself.)

  TODAY, more than a hundred years after Hugo’s death, it is difficult, if not impossible, to approach the man and his work with an open mind. His remains were enthusiastically borne to the Panthéon in 1885, to join those of such other great men as Voltaire and Rousseau; he endured exile for nearly twenty years for speaking his mind against Napoleon III; he fought a spirited campaign all his life against capital punishment. His vast literary output includes some of the most notable poetry in French in both the lyric and the epic mode. His dramatic work was an integral part of the Romantic movement: although his plays are of very varying quality, the preface to the virtually unactable Cromwell (1827) is probably better known than any other manifesto of Romanticism, while Hernani literally caused a riot in the theatre at its first performance in February 1830. More to the immediate point, his two best-known novels have inspired several film versions of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (a title, incidentally, going back to the English translation of the novel in 1833) and stage, as well as film, versions of parts of Les Misérables, the most recent of which has proved a commercial success as a musical. On the subject of music, it is worth noting that as early as 1851 Verdi took Hugo’s drama Le Roi s’amuse (banned as subversive after its first performance in 1832) as the basis for his opera Rigoletto (another hunchback hero …). The sheer energy and range of Hugo’s writings, and indeed of the man himself in his life from day to day, should not be allowed to obscure the fact that all is by no means sound and fury: his poetry includes many examples of a more reflective, elegiac lyricism.

  It would be misleading here to treat Notre-Dame in the light of Hugo’s later novels, or as a stage in his long development as man and writer. What matters is the book itself, the experiences, literary and other, which helped to shape it, and, not least, features of the novel’s structure and composition which are by no means obvious to an uninitiated reader.

  The first Note, introducing the text published in March 1831, but apparently composed only after c
ompletion of that text, explains that the inspiration for the book was an inscription, incised deeply into the wall of one of the towers of Notre-Dame by an identifiably medieval hand, but erased since the author first came upon it while exploring the building: the single Greek word ’ANÁΓKH. This brief Note, despite specific references to crime and misfortune, souls in anguish, and so on, is curiously vague and uncertain as to why the inscription can no longer be seen. More than half-way through the novel (Book Seven, Ch. IV), the reader meets the word again, first in the chapter heading, then actually being incised with a pair of compasses into the wall by Claude Frollo, whose state of mind at that moment matches the description given in Hugo’s introductory Note. Such careful mystification and ambiguity is a recurrent feature of Hugo’s narrative technique, but in this case is uniquely prominent because the implications of the Greek inscription go far beyond anything Frollo could have foreseen when he wrote it. The author alone holds the secret of his book, and reveals it to the reader as and when he chooses. That reader (in 1831) would have had to wait for the definitive edition of 1832 for an explanation of the emphasis in the second half of the Note on demolition, erasure, destruction—not just of individuals, but of the seemingly most solid and beautiful works of human hands.

  The second Note addressed to the reader, dated October 1832, is much longer and as well as explaining, after a fashion, why three previously unpublished chapters are only now appearing, goes on to amplify in detail, and with examples, the brief general statements on the destruction of medieval architecture already included in the earlier Note. The aesthetic and philosophical considerations which Hugo touches on in the Note of 1832 were of great importance to him, and need comment, but it is necessary first to explain why chapters already composed were not published with the rest in 1831.

  As early as November 1828 Hugo had signed a contract with the publisher Gosselin for a novel on the lines of those of Walter Scott, wildly popular at the time in France. This was originally due to be delivered the following year, but was constantly deferred. His theatrical work, especially Hernani, a more public and tempting arena for someone of Hugo’s combative temperament, and domestic preoccupations distracted him until an ultimatum from the publisher, giving him until December 1830 to deliver the promised novel or suffer heavy financial penalty, finally spurred him to make a start. On 25 July Hugo, in serious need of cash, began to write, two days later the brief but decisive July Revolution (‘the Three Glorious Days’) broke out, and on 28 July his wife Adèle presented him with their fifth child, a daughter. Nothing daunted (and by then there were enough problems to daunt anyone of meaner stamp) Hugo grimly went about his task, and by October foresaw that his original plan was likely to exceed the two volumes stipulated. He imprudently asked Gosselin how much extra he would be paid for the third volume which seemed necessary to accommodate the novel as he now envisaged it. Gosselin was in no mood to temporize, and all that Hugo extracted from him was a few weeks’ extension to the deadline—even publishers have to recognize the distraction of a revolution as a valid excuse for delay—and a bleak refusal to entertain the idea of a third volume, let alone pay extra for it. In the event, the chapters Hugo held back are the two comprising the present Book Five. A third chapter, only one page long, rounding off Book Four with a description of Frollo and Quasimodo together, seems to have been added shortly before the definitive edition came out. Whether the Book Five dossier was at any stage lost or mislaid in the course of moving house, as Hugo claims in his Note, is irrelevant; he knew very well that the content would be, so to speak, ‘caviare to the general’.

  By the time Hugo had settled his accounts with Gosselin he had moved to another publisher, Renduel. That is why the definitive edition of 1832 makes much of the two classes of reader: those who seek no more than ‘a good read’, or, as Hugo more elegantly puts it, ‘who looked in Notre-Dame de Paris only for the drama, the novel’; and those other readers ‘who have not found it a waste of time to study the aesthetic and philosophical ideas hidden within the book … It is especially for those readers that the chapters added to this edition will make Notre-Dame de Paris complete …’. There follows a condemnation of contemporary architecture, with a catalogue of the acts of vandalism accomplished or threatened against medieval buildings. The Note of 1832 affirms Hugo’s passionate commitment to the cause of conservation, which he describes as one of the chief aims in his life, with a specific statement to the effect that the novel was intended to serve that cause. If more evidence were needed, it is worth mentioning that already in the first edition a chapter added at the last moment, ‘Bird’s-Eye View of Paris’, contains a brief but withering attack on post-medieval architecture in Paris.

  All this emphasis on architecture, the pleas for conservation, and the diatribes against contemporary lack of taste and blatant vandalism, seem to have little enough to do with a novel on the lines of Walter Scott, or indeed with any novel designed primarily to attract readers seeking no more than dramatic and narrative entertainment. Be that as it may, it would be a serious mistake to dismiss Hugo’s claim to be crusading for Gothic architecture as mere rhetoric, or at best as the expression of an amateur interest, however genuine. He wanted to achieve results, and from all accounts succeeded. As early as 1824 his ode ‘La Bande noire’ had denounced vandalism in general, and in March 1832, that is between the first and definitive editions of Notre-Dame, he had published a vigorous article in the Revue des deux mondes entitled ‘Guerre aux démolisseurs!’ [‘War on the Demolishers!’]. From 1835 until 1848 he served continuously and actively on a government committee for ancient monuments. At first he was one of eight members, then, from 1838, with a more specific brief, the committee was enlarged to number sixteen, including Mérimée and Montalembert. In the opinion of Montalembert, an influential figure at the time, the success of Notre-Dame had made a decisive contribution to the cause of the conservationists. The reader may well not share Hugo’s priorities, or indeed have the slightest interest in architecture, but the recital of these bare facts (and there are of course many more) should be enough to show that in the Notes just considered he wrote about architecture from deep conviction, and deserves to be taken seriously.

  The novel’s opening sentences pose a problem of a different order. The precision of the dating is of twofold importance: ‘the sixth of January 1482’, like the book’s sub-title ‘1482’, seems to announce a historical novel, more or less on the lines of Scott’s Quentin Durward, set in 1468, which Hugo had reviewed quite favourably in 1823, but the date 25 July 1830, which a moment’s calculation reveals as the ‘today’ designated by the very precise lapse of time, is no ordinary date. The Revolution which broke out two days later swept away the restored Bourbon monarchy in the person of the increasingly repressive Charles X, and put on the throne Louis-Philippe of the junior Orléans branch as constitutional monarch. Thus every reflection throughout the book on kingship, popular insurrection, and the Bourbon family (powerful in 1482 but still a good hundred years from the throne) is liable to be coloured by recent nineteenth-century events as much as by the fifteenth-century context, and prophecies made by characters in 1482 are inevitably conditioned by the reader’s knowledge and the author’s interpretation of happenings in 1789 and 1830.

  Where specific events, great or small, in the narrative are concerned one should not expect a historian’s accuracy or consistent chronology, for the book is fiction and artistic demands are paramount in chronology as in everything else. At the very beginning of the story, for example, it is true to say that the feast of the Epiphany always falls on 6 January, but it is quite untrue that the Feast of Fools coincided with it ‘from time immemorial’, or at all. The fact that the Flemish embassy adds a new strand to the festivities, and that thanks to them a face-pulling competition gives yet another theme to this particular day, is of minor importance in terms of chronology, but essential to the narrative. More significant is the change Hugo effected in Pierre Gringoire’s dates: the write
r was in fact born in 1475 and thus 7 years old in 1482, but he is none the less chosen by Hugo for a leading role in the story, and is made twenty years older to that end. When we read, in the second chapter of the book, that he announced his name to the chattering girls as proudly as if he had said ‘Pierre Corneille’ (1606–84), we realize that it is only the name and some anachronistic details that have anything to do with the real Pierre Gringoire of history.

  Towards the end of his life Hugo categorically denied ever having written a historical novel, by which he meant, it seems, a novel based on historical persons and events, into which fictional characters and situations are inserted. While generally appreciative of Scott’s work, as early as the review of Quentin Durward in 1823, Hugo regretted the absence of a truly epic dimension, a broadly sweeping view which would give the narrative some deeper meaning. At the same time he was fascinated by the odd minutiae of bygone ages. This flexible attitude to chronology on the one hand and an eagerness to share with the reader a mass of curious and esoteric information on the other gives much of the book a paradoxically realistic quality. The fact that Paris is the scene of most of the action explains why two of Hugo’s main sources are early historians of the city: Jacques Du Breul (1528–1614), whose Théâtre des antiquités de Paris was published in 1612, and Henri Sauval (1623–76) whose Histoire et recherches des antiquités de la ville de Paris came out in 1724 in three large folio volumes, the third of which was devoted to printing the accounts for the Provostry of Paris, covering the period of the novel. Sauval in particular is a mine of curious and often improbable information on topography, etymology of street names, strange happenings, popular sayings, even the Court of Miracles. Sauval indeed, a zealous rather than a discriminating collector of antiquarian facts, devotes three pages to the ‘Visions’, as he puts it, concerning various statues and figures in Notre-Dame and other buildings which the ‘seekers after the philosophers’ stone’, or alchemists, associate with their mystery; treasure trove indeed for Hugo. Sauval, two hundred years and more after the event, also enables Hugo to give chapter and verse for the trial and condemnation (and cost) of animals connected with witchcraft.