All of the characters except for Master Pierre Gringoire met their tragic end because of love. Quasimodo died from a broken heart when he failed to protect La Esmeralda who was the only person who showed him genuine kindness when he needed most; La Esmeralda died for loving the false savior, the King’s Archer Phoebus de Châteaupers who could care less if she died in captivity for being framed as his murderer; Captain Phoebus died (mentally) when he got married because that means no more night out at the brothel; the recluse from the rat-hole died from trying to protect her daughter from being captured by the King’s guards; and lastly, the Archdeacon Claude Frollo died under God’s will for he was a priest who can never pursue La Esmeralda like a normal man. Only Gringoire, the poet, escaped death because he found love in stones:
First, I love women, then animals. Now I love stones. They are quite as amusing as women and animals and less treacherous.
-Gringoire (p.477)
I find that quote quite amusing because there is some truth to it, although I would have crossed out the ‘women’ part in the quote and inserted ‘men’ instead. Joke aside. In literature, we call characters like Gringoire, a comic relief because the subject of this story is quite serious. I don’t think I would like the book as much if Gringoire had not made me laugh. He was the only character I felt safe around La Esmeralda, because he wasn’t interested in deflowering her. But why is this important? No pun intended, because no one wants to get screwed! Indeed, she did get trapped in a web like a fly:
“A bewildered fly, which was seeking the March sun, flung itself through the net and became entangled there. On the agitation of his web, the enormous spider made an abrupt move from his central cell, then one bound rushed upon the fly, which he folded together with his fore antennae, while his hideous proboscis dug into the victim’s head (p.338)”
This passage is about La Esmeralda. She was like the bewildered fly trapped in a big spider web (Notre-Dame) and was later sentenced to death by the King (the big spider) because he is the protector of Notre-Dame. The King under God’s absolute authority was too deaf and blind to grant clemency to La Esmeralda, who was accused of murdering Captain Phoebus (he wasn’t even dead, btw). And Archdeacon Frollo allowed fate to take its course by not saving La Esmeralda when she rejected his love. If he cannot have her, then no one can. That was his logic (p.574). Do you see why I said jokingly that men are treacherous? How could she love an assassin who forces her to follow him and make him her master, her savior? We cannot force people to be with us. That’s imprisonment.
Minus the love drama, the book is about how human thoughts and beliefs change the structure of society over time. The invention of the printing press killed the architecture because each book is each person’s thoughts and when you add them all up together, it’s bigger than one architecture that represented millions of people (p.227). That is how the architecture loses its authoritative voice in the society. That is why Victor Hugo the author, introduces the reader to the Feast of Fools in the first chapter to forewarn the reader on what is yet to come by making a mockery out of the elected Pope by having him switch places with Quasimodo, the hunchback, one-eyed, deaf bellringer of Notre-Dame. He may be a “one-eyed man [but he] is far less complete than a blind man. He knows what he lacks (p.66), unlike the Pope, the King, and the rest of the aristocrats. Because “[without clemency,] they are but blind men groping after God in the dark (p.540).” It made sense to me why La Esmeralda and her goat were mocking the captain of the city’s pistoleers and the king’s procurator in the ecclesiastical court during their street performance in the earlier part of the book. These high officials don’t provide justice; they are just aristocratic clowns on public display. Not only did she captivate the crowd, but she also bewitched the Archdeacon to the point that he attempted to kidnap her with Quasimodo so that she would stop polluting his mind with impure thoughts with the little pout she always made. The truth is something within her has awakened his soul. Was it love, or was it the eternal life he was searching for that he couldn’t find it in science or alchemy? In the end, it was the vagabonds and Quasimodo who tried to save Esmeralda from the power grip of evil men. They were the real savior. The introduction of the Feast of Fools was indeed a mockery of the failed belief system in Paris during 1482.
For my final thoughts, out of all the characters, I pitied Archdeacon Frollo the most even though Quasimodo is just as unfortunate. Being a learned man had turned him into a rigid priest and a very sad one (p.194). When you are always seeking knowledge, you leave yourself with no room to connect with other humans. It’s a lonely place to feel like you are above everyone. Lastly, I find the passage about writers are the new masons (p.230) quite interesting. What would Victor Hugo think about the internet?! He would say the programmers are the new writers! You see, the “Architecture is the great book of humanity, the principal expression of man in his different stages of development, either as a force or as an intelligence (p.216).” When the printing press came into existence in the mid-1400s, humans transferred their beliefs from stones to books, and so the architectures no longer have the tyrannical authority over society’s beliefs; it became art or a symbol of the past, just like Notre-Dame of Paris. Now books are becoming a symbol of the past as digital contents are more popular among the mass. The human mind is indeed the architecture of humanity. So yeah, “All civilization begins in theocracy and ends in democracy (p.218).”
Note: I read the unabridged version published by Fingerprint. Also, the featured image for the blog post is by AI. Pardon me if it looks kind of odd. I believe it’s because it lacks a human soul.
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