NOT FOR CHILDREN TO READ

review of
Victor Hugo's "Notre-Dame" & "The History of a Crime: The Testimony of an Eye-Witness"
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - May 27, 2017

The full review is here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/561336-victor-hugo?chapter=1

I picked up this 1898ish hardback edition of The Novels of Victor Hugo: Volume I for something like a dollar. Life is good. It's published by P. F. Collier & is "profusely illustrated with elegant wood engravings" wch are, yes, really something to behold. I decided to read it partially just to hold this old hardback bk in my hands. The physical feel of the bk alone does it for me. Hugo lived from February 26, 1802 to May 22, 1885 so this bk was only published 13 yrs after his death. There's something special about that.

In André Breton's 1st Surrealist Manifesto he declares that "Hugo is Surrealist when he isn't stupid." (p 27, Manifestoes of Surrealism, The University of Michigan Press, 1969 - original manifesto: 1924) What he meant by that is unclear to me. Having read 3 of Hugo's bks now I wdn't call any of them Surrealist or stupid so I have to wonder if Breton wasn't just trying to rope Hugo into a lineage of his creation w/ a disclaimer added on to protect his own interests.

I'd previously read Notre-Dame under the title The Hunch-Back of Notre-Dame in a goat-skin bound 1928 edition from Walter J. Black, Inc, but I wasn't sure whether this was the same story or not so it seemed worth the dollar I forked over. I'd also read Hugo's The Toilers of the Sea. I read them over 40 yrs ago so my memories of both were dim. The Hunch-Back of Notre-Dame I probably remembered more from the film starring Lon Chaney. At any rate, as I discovered whilst rereading it, I really remembered almost nothing about it & it's a much richer bk than my sketchy outline recalled.

This bk was written at a time when people who were lucky enuf to get an education were taught Greek & Latin. As such, it's not uncommon to find things written in both languages in bks w/o any translation provided:

"AUTHOR'S PREFACE.

"Some years ag, while visiting the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, or, to speak more properly, exploring every corner of it, the author of this book discovered, in a dark corner in one of the towers, this word, in Greek capital letters, engraven upon the wall—

'ANA'TKH.

[Not quite - what I've written as a "T" is missing its left horizontal]

These characters, black with age and deeply cut into the stone, with certain peculiarities of form and posture belonging to the Gothic calligraphy, as if to declare that they had been traced there by some hand of the middle ages—and, above all, the dismal and fatal meaning they conveyed—struck the author forcibly." - p 5

Yes, but what does it mean?! This question, regarding the above passage, had already been asked of Yahoo Answers & produced "need", seemingly the most accurate answer, & "anarchy", seemingly a mistranslation. Don't ask me, I just work here.

"Yet the 6th of January, 1482, was not a day of which history has preserved any record." - p 5

Ok, I'll bite, I looked-it-up-online & the 1st entry refers to the Hugo novel & to the annual Feast of Fools, a popular medieval festival. A Day of the Week website informs me it was a Friday. I didn't find anything historical for that date so Hugo chose it well.

My memory of The Hunch-Back of Notre-Dame had little more in it than the hunch-back bell-ringer of the famous church rescuing a gypsy girl & protecting her by pouring boiling oil off the ramparts of the church. That memory turns out to be more than a little defective. A substantial part of the beginning of the novel is detailed descriptions of the history of Paris of the time. It's evident that Hugo did extensive research (or faked it, wch seems considerably less likely) & went to great effort to establish the scene.

"It is certain that if Ravaillac had not assassinated Henry IV., there would have been no documents relative to the trial of Ravaillac deposited in the registry of the Palais de Justice, no accomplices interested in causing the disappearance of the said documents, and therefore no incendiaries obliged, for want of any better expedient, to burn the registry for the sake of burning the documents, and to burn the Palais de Justice for the sake of burning the registry—in short, no fire of 1618." - p 7

Thusly showing the difficulty of some of his research. Hugo puts some interesting speech in the mouths of his characters. Here's "the sworn bookseller to the University" speaking:

'""I tell you monsieur, the world's at an end. Never were there such breakings-out of the scholars ! It's the accursed inventions of the age that are ruining everything—the artillery—the serpentines—the bombards—and, above all, the printing-press, that German pest ! No more manuscripts—no more books ! Printing puts an end to bookselling—the end of the world is coming !"" - p 12

Interesting, isn't it? Hugo reminds us that there was a time when book-selling was a matter of selling manuscripts to universities, presumably for high prices based on rarity. The arrival of mass-production wd dramatically change all that. To most of 'us', the invention of the printing press marks the beginning of the era of bks.

Hugo is a very dramatic socio-political observer. The only bk that I can recall reading prior to this that rivals it in melodrama was Eugene Sue's The Wandering Jew, a bk that has such a sheer length of doom for its characters that it may still be unsurpassed for me. Still, Notre-Dame may have a similar quantity of misery but it's more compacted, the misery moves along at a quicker pace. It interested me to read in the 2nd bk of this volume, The History of a Crime: The Testimony of an Eye-Witness that Sue was in politics at the same level that Hugo was.

""No ! Croix-Dieu !" he cried, with his voice of thunder : Jacques Coppenole, hosier. Dost thou hear, usher ? Neither more nor less. Croix-Dieu ! a hosier—that's fine enough. Monsieur the archduke has more than once looked for his gant in my hose."

"This play upon the word gant, a glove, pronounced exactly alike Gand or Ghent, the great manufacturing town in Flanders, occasioned a burst of laughter and applause from the people below.

"We must add that Coppenole was one of the people, and that the auditory around him were of the people also ; so that the communication between them and him had been quick, electric, and, as it were, on equal footing. This lofty air which the Flemish hosier gave himself, by humbling the courtiers, had stirred in the plebeian breasts a certain latent feeling of dignity." - p 22

Keep in mind that Hugo was of the period immediately following the French Revolution. The revolution was from 1798 to 1799 & Hugo was born in 1802. Notre-Dame was written in 1831. According to Wikipedia's entry on Hugo: "Though a committed royalist when he was young, Hugo's views changed as the decades passed, and he became a passionate supporter of republicanism. His work touches upon most of the political and social issues and the artistic trends of his time." I'm a little confused by that since he wd've been 29 when he wrote Notre-Dame & since I'd hardly call it "royalist" so if "decades" had to pass to make him not a royalist here does that mean that he was a passionate royalist when he was 9? Here's an example of what I'd call a parody of the king's viciousness:

"The king reascended in silence to his closet, followed by the persons of his train, horror-struck at the last groanings of the condemned. All at once his majesty turned round to the Givernor of the Bastille. "By-the-by," said he, "was theree not someone in that cage?"

""Par-Dieu, yes, sire!" answered the governor astounded at the question.

""And who, pray?"

""Monsieur, the Bishop of Verdun."

"The king knew that better than any one else, but this was a mania of his." - p 225

To quote Wikipedia's entry again:

"In 1848, Hugo was elected to the National Assembly of the Second Republic as a conservative. In 1849, he broke with the conservatives when he gave a noted speech calling for the end of misery and poverty. Other speeches called for universal suffrage and free education for all children. Hugo's advocacy to abolish the death penalty was renowned internationally."

Those details may not be germane to Notre-Dame but they're definitely germane to The History of a Crime & they seem implied, to me at least, in Notre-Dame. If there's any conservatism in Notre-Dame I'm not able to recognize it as such. More than anything else, it's a very grim look at the ways-in-wch-things-can-be-stupid-thanks-to-the-follies-of-human-nature-&-the-struggles-for-power. If slaughter can happen b/c of misunderstandings & bull-headedness (sorry, bulls, it's more human-headedness but the readers wdn't understand that expression) it will. More or less every person in the story is ironically wrong in some fashion or another & there's plenty of misery & death for innocents.

Notre-Dame was so different than my memory of it that I wasn't sure it was the same as The Hunch-Back of Notre-Dame that I'd already read & thought it might be a precursor or sequel to it. THEN, along came CHAPTER V: "Quasimodo, the Hunchback" (p 27) in wch he was chosen to be Pope of Fools:

"The acclamation was unanimous ; the crowd rushed toward the chapel, and the blessed pope of the fools was led out in triumph. And now the surprise and admiration of the people rose still higher, for they found the wondrous grin to be nothing but his ordinary face." - p 29

Perhaps the most charming characters, the most guilt-free ones, &, therefore, the ones DOOMED, are the gypsy girl & her intelligent trained goat:

""Djali!" cried the gypsy.

"Gringoire then saw come up to her a little white she-goat, lively, brisk, and glossy, with gilt horns, gilt feet, and a gilt collar, which he had not before observed ; as, until that moment it had been lying squat upon one corner of the carpet, looking at his mistress dance."

[It's a "she-goat" but it's watching "his" mistress dance? Wassup w/ that?!]

""Djali," said the dancer, "it's your turn now ; " and sitting down, she gracefully held out her tambourine to the goat. "Djali," she continued, "what month of the year is this?"

"The animal lifted its fore foot and struck one stroke upon the tambourine. It was, in fact, the first month of the year. The crowd applauded.

""Djali ! " resumed the girl, turning her tambourine another way, "what day of the month is it?"

"Djali lifted her little golden foot, and struck six times upon the tambourine." - p 36

Now, I don't want to give too much away of the story, for those of you who might read it, but I do want to say that it's a tragedy &, as w/ most or all tragedies, it's based on an ongoing series of misunderstandings - many of wch wdn't be easily corrected b/c of things like Quasimodo's deafness or the main priest character's personality-as-warped-by-religion. Hugo clearly wants the reader to love the gypsy girl & her goat & to see how the whole confused & corrupted & demented society will inevitably scapegoat them both b/c it's not capable of getting out of its own cesspit of stupidity. No-one but the author, apparently, is capable of a detached enuf perspective to see how it all clashes blindly.

A character, initially presented as potentially sympathetic, ends up going into the wrong neighborhood:

""Onde vas, hombre?" cried the wooden legs, throwing aside his scaffolding, and running after him with as good a pair of legs as ever measured a geometrical pace upon the pavement of Paris. Meanwhile, the stump-man, erect upon his feet, clapped his heavy iron-sheathed platter upon his head, while the blind man stared him in the face with great flaming eyes.

""Where am I?" said the terrified poet.

""In the Court of Miracles," answered a fourth specter who had accosted them." - p 45

The poet, Pierre Gringoire, our potentially sympathetic character, who later turns out to be a fool & a coward tells a bit of his history:

"My father was hanged by the Burgundians, and my mother ripped open by the Picards, at the time of the siege of Paris twenty years ago." - p 57

That seems about as miserable as living in Northern Ireland in the 1980s.

In Hugo's prolonged description of Paris, in general, & Notre-Dame, in particular, the reader learns of Notre-Dame's history beyond the time of the novel:

"Thus, to sum up the points which we have here laid down, three kinds of ravages now disfigure Gothic architecture : wrinkles and knobs on the surface—these are the work of time : violences, brutalities, contusions, fractures—these are the work of revolutions, from Luther down to Mirabeau : mutilations, amputations, dislocation of members, restorations—these are the labors, Grecian, Roman, and barbaric, of the professors according to Vitruvius and Vignola. That magnificent art which the Vandals had produced, the academies have murdered. To the operations of ages and of revolutions, which, at all events, devastate with impartiality and grandeur, have been added those of the cloud of school-trained architects, licensed, privileged, and patented, degrading with all the discernment and selection of bad taste—substituting, for instance, the chichorées of Louis XV, for the Gothic lacework, to the greater glory of the Parthenon. This is the kick of the ass at the expiring lion. 'Tis the old oak which, in the last stage of decay, is stung and gnawed by the caterpillars." - pp 60-61

Back to Paris & the cathedral at the time of the novel:

"Now what aspect did all this present when viewed from the top of the towers of Notre-Dame in 1482 ? We will endeavor to describe it.

"The spectator, on arriving, out of breath, upon this summit, was first of all struck by a dazzling confusion of roofs, chimneys, streets, bridges, squares, spires, steeples. All burst upon the eye at once—the formally-cut gable, the acute-angled roofing, the hanging turret at the angles of the walls, the stone pyramid of the eleventh century, the slate obelisk of the fifteenth ; the donjon tower, round and bare; the church tower, square and decorated ; the large and the small, the massive and the airy. The gaze was for some time utterly bewildered by this labyrinth;" - p 66

Hugo was trying to describe Paris as seen from on top of Notre-Dame but writing 349 yrs later. That's no small feat & my admiration for the seriousness w/ wch he approached this daunting task is considerable.

Another main character is Frollo, the priest who kindly adopts & names Quasimodo & saves him from an even more ignominious life than he eventually suffers thru. he has many good characteristics but his priestly unnatural suppression of his sexual instincts leads to his downfall & to the downfall of others around him. At 1st, his future seems bright:

"Having digested the decretals, he plunged into medicine and the liberal arts, He studied the science of herbs, the science of unguents. He became expert in the treatment of fevers and of contusions, of wounds and of imposthumes. Jacques d'Espars would have admitted him as a physician ; Richard Hellain, as a surgeon. In like manner he ran through every degree in the faculty of the arts. He studied the languages Latin, Greek, Hebrew ; a triple sanctuary, then but very little frequented. He was possessed by an absolute fever of acquiring and storing up science. At eighteen, he had made his way through the four faculties ; it seemed to the young man that life had but one sole object, and that was, to know." - p 80

"impostume"? An "archaic word for abscess" according to Dictionary.com.

Quasimodo is the Notre-Dame bell-ringer. Too bad Frollo didn't have enuf sense to get him to protect his ears b/c bells are damned loud &, yeah, anyone who rings them at close hand is going to get deaf if they aren't cautious. That's one of the reasons why there're keyboards for ringing the bells located a safe distance away.

"It is true that their voices were the only ones that he was still capable of hearing. On this account, the great bell of all as is best beloved. She it was whom he preferred among this family of noisy sisters that fluttered about him on festival days. This great bell was named Marie. She was placed in the southern tower, where she had no companion but her sister Jacqueline, a bell of smaller dimensions, shut up in a smaller cage by the side of her own. This Jacqueline was so named after the wife of Jean Montagu, which Jean had given to the church—a donation, however, which had not prevented him from going out and figuring without his head at Montfaucon. In the northern tower were six other bells ; while the six smallest inhabited the central steeple, over the choir, together with the wooden bell, which was rung only from the afternoon of Maunday-Thursday until the morning of Holy Saturday, ir Easter-eve, Thus Quasimodo had fifteen bells in his seraglio ; but Big Marie was his favorite." - p 84

This deafness in a societal reject, an outsider, is neither much noticed or cared about. When Quasimodo is taken to trial he & his judge both are deaf wch results in total injustice as neither deafness is acknowledged & miscommunication & classism rules:

"["]Registrar, have you taken down what the prisoner has said so far?"

"At this unlucky question a burst of laughter was heard, caught by the audience from the registrar—so violent, so uncontrollable, so contagious, so universal, that neither of the deaf men could help perceiving it. Quasimodo turned round, shrugging up his hump in disdain ; while Maitre Florian, astonished like himself, and supposing that the laughter of the spectators had been excited by some irreverent reply from the accused, rendered himself visible to him by that shrug, apostrophized him indignantly.

""Fellow," said he, "you gave me an answer then that deserves the halter. Know you to whom you are speaking?"" - p 95

I wonder if Hugo had actually witnessed a scene like this or heard tell of one. I was in a courtrm once when a man was charged w/ sleeping on a park bench. When asked what he had to say for himself, he explained that he'd just eaten some food out of the trash can by the McDonald's & that he'd uncontrollably fallen asleep. It was immediately obvious to me that he was hypoglycemic & that that caused him to sleep when he probably wd've been content w/ just sitting in the park. He was sentenced to something like a mnth in jail. The whole process was very perfunctory - & this was in the 20th century, not the Middle Ages. ( )