The novel by Victor Hugo Notre-Dame de Paris was number one on Tuesday on the Amazon platform in the aftermath of the terrible fire that partially destroyed Paris Cathedral. After the attacks on Paris on November 13, 2015, the same phenomenon was observed. The book Paris is a feast of the American Ernest Hemingway snapped in the bookstores.
Written in 1831, Victor Hugo's novel, often adapted to the cinema, was in 1482 at the time of the reign of Louis XI. A passage in the novel draws particular attention today: "All the eyes had risen to the top of the church, what they saw was extraordinary.On the top of the highest gallery, higher than the central rosette, there was a great flame rising between the two steeples with whirlwinds of sparks, a great flame disorderly and furious whose wind sometimes carried a rag in the smoke, "writes Hugo.
The cathedral, the true heroine of the novel
Around characters such as the gypsy Esmeralda, the "monster" Quasimodo, Frollo or Phoebus, Hugo makes the cathedral the true heroine of his novel. The goal of the novelist is to rehabilitate a monument fallen into decrepitude. "Without doubt, it is still today a majestic and sublime edifice that the church of Notre-Dame de Paris," he writes in the chapter entitled Notre-Dame.
"But," he adds, "so beautiful that it has been preserved as it gets older, it is difficult not to sigh, not to be indignant at degradations, mutilations without number, that time and men have simultaneously to the venerable monument, without respect for Charlemagne who had laid the first stone, for Philip Augustus who had laid the last.
A big public success
The publication of the book, which was a great public success, drew general attention to the "inadmissible" state of the monument. The movement of opinion led to the decision to establish a competition participated many architects including Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Lassus and Eugene Viollet-le-Duc whose project of rehabilitation of the monument was retained in 1844.