Notre-Dame de Paris part.2

Notre-Dame de Paris 2

Author

Victor Hugo (author)

Publisher

Minumsa | Published 2005-02-23

Category

Novel

Book intro

Victor Hugo's masterpiece, better known as 'The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.' 183...

At the end of Volume 1, La Esmeralda offers a mouthful of water to the 'Pope of Fools,' Quasimodo. The pure, beautiful, and kind La Esmeralda falls in love with 'Phoebus,' who rescued her, but she tries to extend kindness to everyone. Even though she's an Egyptian princess and a Bohemian maiden, her heart is kind. (Of course, being a gypsy doesn't mean one can be branded as having a bad heart, but the Parisian aristocrats greatly despised the gypsies. Moreover, the sack nun La Sachette also greatly disliked the gypsies.) Such behavior is reasonable as the cause that made Gringoire, Claude Frollo, and Quasimodo all 'adore' her. An extremely beautiful woman who is good at music and good at performing—no matter how poor the social perception is, because 'beauty' does not change, she would be attractive.

Sometimes in the evenings, she would hear a voice hidden beneath the eaves of the bell tower singing a strange, sad song, as if to lull her to sleep. It was a verse of ill fortune, the kind of poem only a deaf person could compose.

Look not at the face,

Maiden, look at the heart.

The hearts of handsome young men are often hideous

There are hearts in which love does not last.

Maiden, the fir tree is not beautiful,

Not beautiful like the poplar,

But it keeps its leaves even in winter.

Ah! What use is there in saying such things?

That which is not beautiful is wrong to live,

That beauty loves only beauty,

That April turns its back on January.

Beauty is the perfect thing,

Beauty is the all-powerful thing,

Beauty is the only thing that does not exist by halves.

The crow flies only by day,

The owl flies only by night,

But the swan flies day and night.

One morning, when she awoke, she saw on the windowsill two vases full of flowers. One was a very beautiful, sparkling crystal vase, but it was cracked. The water that had been poured to fill it had leaked away, and the flowers placed in it had withered. The other was an earthenware jar, shabby and ordinary, but it had kept its water intact, so the flowers were still fresh and as crimson as ever.

Whether she did so deliberately or not I cannot tell, but La Esmeralda picked up that withered bouquet and held it to her breast all day long.

Having fallen for Phoebus, who rescued her from danger, La Esmeralda is captivated by Phoebus's looks. It's true that she is pure and beautiful, but she placed enormous importance on the appearance manifested in one's looks. How telling it is that, looking at Quasimodo, she so emphatically said, 'If only he were handsome.' In a word, it can be called appearance-supremacism. Even though Quasimodo rescues her from the brink of death, feeds her, cares for her, and shows her every consideration, in vain his devotion, La Esmeralda only seeks out 'Phoebus.' Toward such a Quasimodo, I couldn't help but be filled with pity and compassion. His being deaf was perfectly fine, but as Quasimodo himself said, he is hated unavoidably because he resembles not an animal but a human.

If there's a commonality between Quasimodo and Claude Frollo, it's that neither of them receives proper love from La Esmeralda. Quasimodo takes on tragedy in the part where, even after shouting 'Sanctuary!' and rescuing her and devoting all his care to her, once Phoebus appears once, he can no longer expect 'love' from her; and Claude Frollo takes on tragedy in the part where he tries several times to imprint his feelings on her but fails every time (the problem is that he speaks at timings where his words can only sound coercive, and the problem is also that she is not fated to love Claude. Because he speaks while in the middle of abducting her, or, when she is in prison, meets her one-on-one by the archdeacon's authority to convey his feelings.) To compare, Quasimodo's purity is pitiful because La Esmeralda ultimately never recognizes it, and Claude's love is pitiful in that it was conveyed by such excessively violent means that she always chose 'death' over 'Claude' when given the choice between 'death' and 'Claude.'

In the part where Ἀνάγκη - the Greek word meaning fate or destiny - appears, the archdeacon Claude seems to have many thoughts. For him, was the path of scholarship and religion really the answer? In my view, even after reading Volumes 1 and 2, it absolutely doesn't seem to be the answer. A person's passion and love cannot be devoted to scholarship alone. Anyone in the world can, in a single moment, have a flame ignite in their eyes and heart and fall for one person. It's just that Claude had probably never felt such an emotion before meeting 'La Esmeralda.' That's why he couldn't understand falling for her even more, and I think he couldn't help but be unable to properly accept that emotion, which was enough to make him lose all of his age, his scholarly knowledge, and his insight. He was a person who kept no laws other than the pleasant natural law of the world, but because of 'La Esmeralda' all of that was overturned, and because of it he even met his death, which is pitiful. For Claude Frollo, she was Ἀνάγκη itself.

La Sachette (the sack nun) was, as expected, La Esmeralda's mother. In the latter half of Volume 2, through La Esmeralda's necklace amulet, she confirms that the girl is her daughter, but the fate of the two—mother and daughter—was very ill-starred, and watching her daughter who ultimately dies, La Sachette's heart must have torn apart. And Quasimodo, watching the dying La Esmeralda and the falling Claude, was even more pitiful. Because people empathize more easily with tragedy than with comedy, I understand why Hugo based the work on tragedy, but it couldn't be helped that it was sad and pitiful.

The Place de Grève, Notre-Dame Cathedral, and the Court of Miracles became the settings of this story. The majesty of Notre-Dame was completed and cultivated by Quasimodo, and the cruelty and horror of the Place de Grève began with Claude Frollo and ended with La Esmeralda's death. I see these spaces as signifying death, sanctuary, and freedom. At the Place de Grève, Quasimodo is flogged and La Esmeralda meets her death, thereby revealing tragedy; Quasimodo's act of rescuing La Esmeralda into Notre-Dame Cathedral reveals both Quasimodo's goodness and the 'place of refuge' that existed in France at the time; and the Court of Miracles symbolized both La Esmeralda's home and the freedom of the 'beggars.' Although the images each space shows are different, I want to emphasize that these spaces are absolutely essential to understanding Pierre Gringoire, Claude Frollo, Jehan Frollo, Quasimodo, Phoebus, and La Esmeralda.

In the morning I turned on the TV, and the animated The Hunchback of Notre-Dame was showing. In that scene, seeing Quasimodo holding a crown and a staff, I came to think, 'This is the scene of the Pope of Fools,' and after feeling that the very fact I could think this way is, after all, possible because I read the book, I'm looking forward to reading Les Misérables soon, watching the film, and gaining something to think about. I'll have to read it before I go out next time. I'm busy.^^

Related post: Notre-Dame de Paris part.1