2 September: The Hunchback of Notre Dame

On this date in 1923 The Hunchback of Notre Dame premièred. The film starred Lon Chaney and was based on the French Gothic novel by Victor Hugo. Here are 10 things you might not know about the novel and some of its various adaptations.

1. Victor Hugo’s original French title was Notre-Dame de Paris.
2. Who is the main character in the story? Was it Quasimodo? Esmerelda? Dom Frollo? If you’d asked Victor Hugo, he would say none of the above. To his mind, the main character in the story was the cathedral of Notre Dame, which is why the book contains so many descriptions of the building. Hugo wrote the story to raise awareness of the value of the Gothic architecture, which was being neglected and even destroyed at the time. Hence Hugo strongly disapproved of the English title of his book, The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
3. What’s the plot? (spoiler alert) Claude Frollo, the Archdeacon of Notre Dame, finds a deformed baby abandoned in the cathedral and brings him up to be the cathedral’s bell ringer. Some years later, Frollo takes a fancy to a beautiful gypsy girl called Esmerelda, and sets out to kidnap her, enlisting Quasimodo’s help. It’s Quasimodo who gets the blame for the crime and he’s sentenced to be flogged. Esmerelda takes pity on him and brings him a glass of Water, and he falls hopelessly in love with her.
4. Frollo tries to murder someone and pin the blame on Esmerelda since she spurned his advances. Quasimodo saves her from hanging by sliding down to the execution site on a rope and whisking Esmerelda away into the cathedral, claiming sanctuary. She is terrified of him at first, but soon realises he has a kind heart.
5. Quasimodo does his best to protect Esmerelda from the mob outside and Frollo’s sexual advances inside. Frollo, however, manages to outwit Quasimodo and lure Esmerelda outside, so she can be arrested and hanged. Needless to say, this doesn’t go down well with Quasimodo, who throws Frollo to this death from the balcony. He then goes off to find Esmerelda’s corpse and lays down beside it until he died himself. Their entwined skeletons are found later by excavators and when they try to separate them, the bones crumble to dust.
6. Quasimodo was so named by Frollo because he was found on Quasimodo Sunday. Quasimodo Sunday is the Sunday after Easter and is so called because a Latin prayer for the day begins with the words Quasi modo. The intended meaning is “similar to” but the literal translation is ”almost standard”. As the book says, “whether it was that he chose thereby to commemorate the day when he had found him, or that he meant to mark by that name how incomplete and imperfectly molded the poor little creature was. Indeed, Quasimodo, one-eyed, hunchbacked, and bow-legged, could hardly be considered as anything more than an almost.” Quasimodo Sunday is also known as White Sunday, Low Sunday or Thomas Sunday.
7. Esmerelda was about 16 years old in the novel, and was really called Agnes. In fact, she and Quasimodo had a history dating back to when they were born. Quasimodo’s mother swapped him for Agnes, and her parents, thinking their own baby had been eaten and a changeling left in her place, disposed of him by dumping him at the cathedral.
8. The two best known live action film adaptations were made in 1923 and 1939 starring Lon Chaney and Charles Laughton respectively. Transforming a normal actor into Quasimodo was no mean feat. It took make up artists two and a half hours to do it with Laughton. Chaney’s make up was also pretty extreme even by his standards. It it is sometimes said that the hump he had to wear left him with permanent back problems, but that isn’t true. It was the braces he had to wear on his legs and the contact lenses he wore in his eyes that caused him problems.
9. Then, in 1996 the story became the unlikely subject of a Disney cartoon. Disney bosses wanted to tone down its religious content, so as not to offend people. Not an easy task, as one animator commented, “seeing as a lot of it takes place in a big church”. Frollo became a judge rather than a deacon, for example. Even so, the film contained more references to the words “Lord” and “God” than all 33 of Disney's previous films put together. And they still managed to offend some people – Victor Hugo’s descendants, who described it as “vulgar commercialization by unscrupulous men” and were particularly upset that their great-great grandfather’s name did not appear on the publicity posters.
10. The Disney film features three talking gargoyles (Victor, Hugo, and Laverne). While Disney is known for giving inanimate objects voices and personalities, there was some justification for doing so in this case – in the novel, Quasimodo, a lonely soul, would spend hours talking to the cathedral’s gargoyles.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

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