Quasimodo, Esmeralda and Notre Dame

While we mourn the loss of Notre Dame Cathedral, a Parisian landmark, every second we are losing a part of our living heritage, from the evergreen rainforests in the Amazon and Southeast Asia to the melting ice in Antarctica and the Arctic, to the vanishing species and subspecies of fauna and flora across the world.

Has Victor Hugo’s “prophecy” that the hunchback Quasimodo’s bones turned into dust will ultimately kindle the fire that will raze the Notre Dame Cathedral come true? Or is it because Esmeralda, the Gypsy beauty, a symbol of compassion and kindness — and therefore a symbol of Mother Nature — believed Captain Phoebus loved her and would protect her against all odds and yet is charged with his murder and sentenced to be hanged? Or is it because of Claude Frollo’s lust for Esmeralda and his designs to “conquer” her led to Quasimodo’s sentence

to be lashed in public?

We know Quasimodo pushes Frollo off the cathedral to his death when he sees him laughing during Esmeralda’s hanging and then hugs the Gypsy beauty’s body and dies of starvation.

The scenario that Hugo, out of his dislike for the then-ruling elites, envisaged seems to have come true almost two centuries later. That nobody was injured again points to the immense love nature and history have for humankind.

Incidentally, Hugo wrote The Hunchback of Notre-Dame to remind his contemporaries and the ruling elites of the importance of Gothic architecture (read old structures), which was either neglected or destroyed to be often replaced by new buildings, or “modern” facades.

Did Hugo warn us against destroying the established natural architecture of the planet we humans call home? Did he warn us against ascribing demonic features to what appears to us as ugly and thus unwelcome? Quasimodo, for example.

This is not the first time Notre Dame has faced devastation. Protestant Huguenots ransacked it in the 16th century. It was pillaged again during the French Revolution of the 1790s and left in a state of semi-neglect. Hugo’s 1831 work led to revived interest in the cathedral leading to a partly botched restoration that began in 1844.

Notre Dame, built over a century starting in 1163, is among the finest examples of French Gothic cathedral architecture and a UNECSO World Heritage Site. It also gave life to a hero like Quasimodo, whom society considered ugly and unsocial.

Quasimodo is also the surname of Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodo, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1959. Along with Giuseppe Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale (the 1975 Literature Nobel winner), Quasimodo is one of the foremost Italian poets of the 20th century.

And as poet Quasimodo said: Everyone stands alone at the heart of the world, pierced by a ray of sunlight, and suddenly it’s evening.

And since evening presages night, if we go on destroying all that is old, we will soon enter the night of our existence.

CHRSTIAN HARTMANN / REUTERS