Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Victor Hugo
Notre-Dame de Paris
Note on Money
Explanatory Notes
內容試閱：
Today, more than a hundred years after Hugos death, it is difficult, if not impossible, to approach the man and his work with an open mind. His remains were enthusiastically borne to the pantheonin1885，to join those of such other great men as Voltaire and Rousseau; he endured exile for nearly twenty years for speaking his mind against Napoleon III; he fought a spirited campaign all his life against capital punishment. His vast literary output includes some of the most notable poetry in French in both the lyric and the epic mode. His dramatic work was an integral part of the Romantic movement： although his plays are of very varying quality, the preface to the virtually unactable Cromwell 1827 is probably better known than any other manifesto of Romanticism, while Hernani literally caused a riot in the theatre at its first performance in February 1830. More to the immediate point, his two best-known novels have inspired several film versions of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame a title, incidentally, going back to the English translation of the novel in 1833 and stage, as well as film, versions of parts of Les Misirables, the most recent of which has proved a commercial success as a musical. On the subject of music, it is worth noting that as early as 1851 Verdi took Hugo''s drama Le Roi s''amuse banned as subversive after its first performance in 1832 as the basis for his opera Rigoletto another hunchback hero ... . The sheer energy and range of Hugo''s writings, and indeed of the man himself in his life from day to day, should not be allowed to obscure the fact that all is by no means sound and fury： his poetry includes many examples of a more reflective, elegiac lyricism.
It would be misleading here to treat Notre-Dame in the light of Hugo''s later novels, or as a stage in his long ii Introduction development as man and writer. What matters is the book itself, the experiences, literary and other, which helped to shape it, and, not least, features of the novel''s structure and composition which are by no means obvious to an uninitiated reader.
The first Note, introducing the text published in March 1831, but apparently composed only after completion of that text, explains that the inspiration for the book was an inscription, incised deeply into the wall of one of the towers of Notre-Dame by an identifiably medieval hand, but erased since the author first came upon it while exploring the building： the single Greek word ''ANArKH. This brief Note, despite specific references to crime and misfortune, souls in anguish, and so on, is curiously vague and uncertain as to why the inscription can no longer be seen. More than half-way through the novel Book Seven, Ch. IV, the reader meets the word again, first in the chapter heading, then actually being incised with a pair of compasses into the wall by Claude Frollo, whose state of mind at that moment matches the description given in Hugo''s introductory Note. Such careful mystification and ambiguity is a recurrent feature of Hugo''s narrative technique, but in this case is uniquely prominent because the implications of the Greek inscription go far beyond anything Frollo could have foreseen when he wrote it. The author alone holds the secret of his book, and reveals it to the reader as and when he chooses. That reader in 1831 would have had to wait for the definitive edition of 1832 for an explanation of the emphasis in the second half of the Note on demolition, erasure, destruction-not just of individuals, but of the seemingly most solid and beautiful works of human hands.
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