1482 No novel opens with a more precise calendrical reference than Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (the melodramatic translation of the author’s more neutral Notre Dame de Paris):
Three hundred and forty-eight years, six months, and nineteen days ago to-day, the Parisians awoke to the sound of all the bells in the triple circuit of the city, the university, and the town ringing a full peal. The sixth of January, 1482, is not, however, a day of which history has preserved the memory.
Fiction has preserved it. The day, we learn, is notable to the citizens of Hugo’s Paris as the ‘double solemnity, united from time immemorial, of the Epiphany and the Feast of Fools’. On this day the lay populace elect their ‘Pope of Fools’. On 6 January 1482 the street vote goes to the bell-ringer of Notre Dame – principally because of his hilarious physical deformity. He is a living satire less of the Pontiff than of humanity itself:
His whole person was a grimace. A huge head, bristling with red hair; between his shoulders an enormous hump, a counterpart perceptible in front; a system of thighs and legs so strangely astray that they could touch each other only at the knees, and, viewed from the front, resembled the crescents of two scythes joined by the handles; large feet, monstrous hands; and, with all this deformity, an indescribable and redoubtable air of vigour, agility, and courage, – strange exception to the eternal rule which wills that force as well as beauty shall be the result of harmony. Such was the pope whom the fools had just chosen for themselves.
Is this the image of God? Quasimodo’s grotesque anatomy and indomitable willpower have become folkloric: as much for Charles Laughton’s classic depiction in the 1939 film as for Hugo’s 1831 novel.
There is another significance to the date than the street festival. Hugo sees 1482 as an epochal literary moment. The point is made by ‘the sworn bookseller of the university, Master Andry Musnier’ in conversation with ‘the furrier of the king’s robes, Master Gilles Lecornu’:
‘I tell you, sir, that the end of the world has come. No-one has ever beheld such outbreaks among the students! It is the accursed inventions of this century that are ruining everything, – artilleries, bombards, and, above all, printing, that other German pest. No more manuscripts, no more books! printing will kill bookselling. It is the end of the world that is drawing nigh.’
By ‘no more books’ he means the end of the manuscript codex. Printing will, Musnier foresees, also be the end of monarchy and its lovely hierarchies. And the end of cathedrals – the ‘script’ of old France. After books there will be no more Notre Dames.
Who then (historically) is the villain of Notre Dame de Paris? Not the hunchback but Gutenberg. The novel eerily prophesies contemporary 21st-century jeremiads about the death of the book with the arrival of such newfangled things as Gutenberg.org (see 1 December) and the Kindle e-reader. The end of another world draws nigh.