The news that the bees from the three hives atop Notre Dame’s sacristy have survived last week’s devastation would have no doubt been seen by him as symbolic of such solidarity and resilience. Hugo likens these human feats to the prodigious labour of bees, as for him both society and nature are driven by the same mysterious life force. “The universal history of mankind might be written from these successive weldings of different styles at different levels.” The cathedral is therefore a communal rather than individual achievement: monumental but not superior, and dynamic rather than set in stone. “Great buildings, like great mountains, are the work of centuries,” Hugo says, whereby “each wave of time lays down its alluvium”.

Notre Dame testified to this protean reality in its varied composition. When viewed across the infinite expanse of creation, a natural order of freedom comes into Hugo’s focus, in which nothing remains unchanged and everything flows with time. It inspired a poetic vision in Hugo akin to time-lapse photography, allowing him elsewhere to imagine mountains as granite waves and the lunar surface as a rolling tide. ‘Victor Hugo envisages Notre Dame as the heart of a dawning civilisation.’ Photograph: Nadar/EPA Moving performances from actors such as Charles Laughton and Anthony Hopkins have helped to solidify Quasimodo’s place at the story’s centre (even if they were more than twice as old as a character who’s barely in his 20s), and no less than three different versions using the “Hunchback” title have been announced by Netflix, Disney, and ITV over the past year alone. Proving that a monster can still be a man, Quasimodo’s awakening humanity is integral to the novel’s pathos and to its many adaptations on stage and screen, from 19th-century theatre and opera to the 1996 Disney animated film and the hit French musical. This is not to discount the Hunchback of Notre Dame’s importance. Nearly two centuries later, his words still compel us to consider the cathedral with awe. Hugo thought that Notre Dame’s sublime features could take us to new heights, both physical and spiritual, from which we could sense a fervent connection to our world and to one another. For the future “great man” of French literature, the book’s main attraction was the gothic cathedral itself, not its hunchbacked bell-ringer. V ictor Hugo was not enamoured with the title of Frederic Shoberl’s English translation of his 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris.

The hunchback of notre dame in french