The street where he lives is renamed L’avenue Victor-Hugo.

1882Hugo is reelected to the Senate. His play Torquemada (1869) is performed.
1883Juliette Drouet, Hugo’s mistress since 1833, dies after a pro longed struggle with cancer. The final volume of Hugo’s po etic history of the world, La Légende des siècles, appears.
1885Victor Hugo dies May 22. Two million mourners pass his coffin underneath the Arc de Triomphe. Hugo is entombed in the Pantheon, the first of a series of culture heroes and great leaders to be placed there. June 1 is declared a day of national mourning. Posthumous publications will enhance his reputation for decades—notably, the verse collections La Fin de Satan (The End of Satan, 1886), Toute la lyre (1888, 1893), and Dieu (1891). His experimental plays, eventually published in a Pléïade edition as “Le Theatre en liberte,” brilliantly anticipate the Theater of the Absurd in the 1950s.
1902On the centenary of his birth, the French government opens the Maison de Victor Hugo museum in the apartment where he once lived on the place des Vosges.
1912 1918In collaboration with André Antoine, the director of the nat uralistic Théatre-Libre, the filmmaker Albert Capellani, with the Pathé firm, produces a series of movies based on Hugo’s works: Les Misérables (1912), Marie Tudor (1912), Quatrevingt-treize (1914), and Les Travailleurs de la mer (1918).
1923Wallace Worsley’s silent film version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame appears, starring Lon Chaney as Quasimodo.
1926The Buddhist sect Cao Dai originates in Vietnam. It now has about 2,000 temples and several million followers world wide. The worshipers venerate Hugo and his two sons, whom they believe return to earth, reincarnated.
1939William Dieterle’s film version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, with Charles Laughton as Quasimodo and Maureen O‘Hara as Esmeralda, is released.
1975François Truffaut’s film Adèle H., retelling the tragedy of Hugo’s second daughter, wins Le Grand Prix du Cinema Français.
1996Walt Disney issues an animated, freely altered film version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, distinctive in its politi cally correct treatment of gypsies, women, and persons with disabilities.

Introduction

With the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, the cathedral of Notre Dame figures among the most visited monuments of Paris. Famous for its Gothic facade, great portals, rose window, and looming towers, the cathedral—built principally in the twelfth century—is one of the most enduring symbols of the French capital and its medieval heritage. Aiding in the transmission of the cathedral’s symbolic importance is the novel it inspired: Victor Hugo’s 1831 Notre-Dame de Paris: 1482, better known in English as The Hunchback of Notre Dame. In it, Hugo brings to life the cathedral of Notre Dame as it existed at the end of the fifteenth century. Many critics and readers have seen the great church as the novel’s true hero, as it takes an active role in the narrative and resides at the core of the ideological message Hugo seeks to project on collective and individual destiny, the passage of time, and the nature of progress. Indeed, Hugo’s novel is perhaps as well known today as the cathedral itself and is, alongside its main characters—Claude Frollo, the fiery priest; Quasimodo, the hideously deformed bell ringer; Phoebus, the golden guardsman; and Esmeralda, the beautiful gypsy girl—firmly implanted in cultural consciousness. From the written page to the stage and screen, the tale has been told and retold countless times, its impact and capacity for reinvention rivaled only by that of another of Hugo’s novels, the ever-popular Les Miserables (1862). If the flurry of recent reprintings and adaptations-including two Disney films and a new musical version—are any indication, generations to come will continue to be enthralled by Hugo’s story of love rendered impossible.

Yet did Hugo set out to immortalize Notre Dame? As much myth surrounds the origin and writing of the novel as surrounds the cathedral itself. If the publicly presented version is to be believed, The Hunchback of Notre Dame was written from July 1830 to January 1831. This account is furnished in Victor Hugo raconté par un témoin de sa vie (Victor Hugo: A Life Related by One Who Has Witnessed It, 1863; henceforth cited as A Life Related), a testimonial written by Hugo’s wife, Adèle, with, as it often has been observed, more than a helping hand from her husband. The novel had been under contract with the publisher Gosselin since 1828, but the theatrical success of Hugo’s play Hernani (1830) distracted the writer from the project. In April 1830 Hugo still had not begun the novel and was threatened by Gosselin with financial sanctions if he failed to deliver the manuscript. A new deadline of December 1830 was agreed upon but was then jeopardized by the political and social upheaval of July 1830, during which the restored Bourbon monarchy was toppled and Louis-Philippe, duke of Orleans, ascended the throne. Consumed by these events and their impact, and additionally troubled by a book of notes that had “disappeared” during his family’s move to a new apartment, Hugo, who had only begun to compose his novel, lost weeks of writing time. Gosselin grudgingly agreed to another extension, pushing back the due date to February 1, 1831. It was at this point, according to Adèle’s explanation, that her husband entered into his novel as into “a prison,” stopping only to eat and sleep. In one of the most famous anecdotes of A Life Related, she recounts how Hugo, upon returning to writing The Hunchback, bought a new bottle of ink. He plunged himself into his work, using this bottle alone, which ran out only on the day he completed the manuscript—January 14, 1831—at the precise moment he marked the novel’s final word on the page. As the story goes, Hugo, reflecting on this “remarkable” coincidence, considered renaming his novel “Ce qu‘ilyadans une bouteille d’encre” (What Is Inside a Bottle of Ink).

This tale of the writing process, and particularly the prodigious circumstances surrounding the novel’s completion, cannot, however, be taken at face value. Even in the early years of his career, Hugo was a master shaper of his own image and rarely failed to seize the opportunity to market himself, to spin reality into legend. The truth behind the composition of The Hunchback is in all likelihood more complex, and is certainly less of a good story. What is clear is that Hugo had a difficult time beginning the novel.