![]() ‘In the minds of progressive Parisians,’ writes Hugo’s biographer, ‘it was a shabby relic of the barbarian past.’ (Graham Robb, Victor Hugo, London, 1998, p.158) The style of the book is as ‘Gothic’ as the architecture it praises, ‘a style that had long been under a cloud in France, from which it took Romanticism to save it … The novel is thus meant in part as a redemption of an architecture in eclipse’ (John Sturrock, introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Notre-Dame de Paris, London, 2004, pp.16, 17). It was certainly not appreciated as a Gothic masterpiece. ![]() ![]() The ‘eye of the novel’, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame itself, was in a pitiful state of neglect Robert Louis Stevenson described it as an ‘old church thrust away into a corner’ ( Familiar Studies of Men and Books, London, 1917, pp.11-12). The carved figure above - by Viollet-le-Duc - is more like the sinister Frollo of the novel than the real-life Canon Guillot de Montjoye of the painting ![]()
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