Hunchback of Notre Dame (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free Page A

Revolution, and in spite of efforts in the form undertaken in the first decades of the nineteenth century by respected writers such as Benjamin Constant, François-Rene de Chateaubriand, and Madame de Staël, the novel was nonetheless still perceived in the 1820s as a minor genre and lagged in importance far behind poetry and theater, which were both steeped in classical tradition and prestige.
    Prior to The Hunchback of Notre Dame Hugo had already written and published three novels—Han d‘Islande ( Han of Iceland, 1823), Bug-Jargal (1826), and Le Dernier Jour d’un condamne à mort (The Last Day of a Condemned Man, 1829). Yet each of these examples was more a response to personal or growing social preoccupations than an effort to practice or elevate the genre: Han of Iceland, a Gothic tale of thwarted young lovers, plays out Hugo’s own love story with Adèle (he once said that she was the only person who was meant to understand it). Bug-Jargal, which centers on an episode from the then recent past—a violent 1791 slave revolt in Santo Domingo (present-day Haiti)—had its origins in a school bet in which Hugo was challenged to compose a novel in a period of two weeks. The Last Day of a Condemned Man, a first-person narrative that follows a man through prison to the guillotine, was a polemically charged effort to bring awareness to the horrors of the death penalty. Hugo’s first novelistic endeav ors can be understood as rather isolated attempts to give voice to private or socially oriented concerns. One unifying influence on Hugo’s early novel writing is, however, indisputable—that of the Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott, author of Waverley (1814), Rob Roy (1818), Ivanhoe (1819), and Quentin Durward (1823). Scott’s mastery of the historical novel brought the genre quickly into vogue and helped, in the 1820s, to advance the merits of the novel as a literary form. Staunch and fervent admirers—among them Honoré de Balzac, the future author of La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy )—declared themselves, and French historical novels, such as Alfred de Vigny’s Cinq-Mars (1826) and Prosper Mérimée’s Chronique du règne de Charles IX (Chronicle of the Reign of Charles the Ninth, 1829), began to appear and garner attention. In the same way that nature inspired introspection and reflection in Romantic poetry, history served as the fertile terrain of the Romantic novel. Whether this renewed interest in French history was the result of reawakened national sentiment or sought to exalt and glorify the ideals of the distant past in an effort to soothe the still-open wounds of the Revolution, the historical backdrop and content lent legitimacy and weight to the form, and was the push the novel needed to propel it forward.
    Both Han of Iceland and Bug-Jargal drew heavily on Scott’s expansive vision and his techniques of novel writing, adopting in particular his trademark use of couleur locale —local color—to bring the depiction of the historical period alive through attention to the picturesque. The 1823 preface to Han of Iceland playfully points out the care that went into reproducing the atmosphere of the tale’s exotic location, down to the near-abusive use of the letters k, y, h, and w in the characters’ names. In Bug-Jargal the island of Santo Domingo is also replete with an exoticism produced by vivid details, from the extremes of the tropical landscape to the mysterious language (a mixture of Spanish and Creole) spoken by the rebelling slaves. In a review of Scott’s Quentin Durward that appeared in the July 1823 issue of La Muse française (a periodical Hugo helped found), Hugo openly lauded Scott’s epic and colorful conception of the novel, hailing him as the catalyst of a literary renaissance and praising him for his all-encompassing exploration of the past, for the truth behind his fiction, and for his ability to diffuse a didactic message artfully. Yet Hugo stops short of extolling Scott’s