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The Hunchback of Notre Dame
by Victor Hugo (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
 The Hunchback of Notre Dame
by Victor Hugo (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
Victor Hugo's 1831 classic has never gone out of print.
Read the Wikipedia article about the novel. Learn more about Victor Hugo (1802-1885), an immortal figure in world and French literature.
The novel has a heroic but tragic plot, centered on the deformed bell-ringer of Notre Dame de Paris cathedral in Paris. It is set in 1482, in Medieval Europe. Its grand setting is the cathedral itself, which needed restoration work in Hugo's time, which became a cause of his, and th e novel helped focus public attention on it. A girl, Esmeralda, has been kidnapped by Gypsies. The hunchback, Quasimodo, becomes her protector. She dies in the end, but Quasimodo manages to toss her killer from the heights of a cathedral tower. One of the themes of the novel is that of a noble and heroic soul inside a warped and deformed body, a theme not unlike that of Beauty and the Beast (a 1740 French fairy tale based on ancient archetypes).
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