Quasimodo 101 (The Lowdown on The Hunchback of Notre Dame)

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Those who read the novel in English know it as The Hunchback of Notre Dame. But the word "bossu" (hunchback) is absent from the original French title of Victor Hugo's 1831 novel, Notre Dame de Paris (simpy Our Lady of Paris). Book Four, Chapter One of Isabel Florence Hapgood’s English translation  tells how Quasimodo got his name on a Sunday morning in 1467:

“Sixteen years previous to the epoch when this story takes place, one fine morning, on Quasimodo Sunday, a living creature had been deposited, after mass, in the church of Notre Dame, on the wooden bed securely fixed in the vestibule on the left, opposite that great image of Saint Christopher … Upon this bed of wood it was customary to expose foundlings for public charity.  Whoever cared to take them did so.  In front of the wooden bed was a copper basin for alms.”

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (edited by F. L. Cross) said that “Quasimodo Sunday" is a "title in the Western Church for Low Sunday,” so called because it is the first Sunday after the “high” feast of Easter Sunday. “Quasimodo” comes from the opening words of the mass of Low Sunday, “Quasi modo geniti” (“As newborn babes”). The full verse is First Peter 2:2, “As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby.”

According to Novels into Film  by John C. Tibbetts and James M. Welsh, there have been five movies from 1917 to 1996, four of them American-made: The Darling of Paris  (1917) and the rest with the title, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The 1923 version featured Lon Chaney, and Charles Laughton starred in the 1939 film only after Bela Lugosi, Claude Rains and Orson Welles had gotten first consideration.  The 1956 movie was a French-Italian production, while the 1996 entry was animated Disney feature (the sequel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame II came out in 2002).

In the 1957 film biography of Lon Chaney, The Man of a Thousand Faces, James Cagney appeared as Quasimodo in a recreation of the classic 1923 flogging scene.

The setting for 1989’s strange Big Man on Campus (original title, The Hunchback Of UCLA) is a modern American college.  Students have sighted a “monster” who, in the words of “The Unknown Movies” web page turns out to be “a hairy, hunchbacked man who has spent virtually his life in isolation, hiding out at the top of the campus' clock tower.” During a college medieval festival, this “Big Man” swings down to rescue a coed.

Most of the films changed the novel’s ending. For instance, Quasimodo frees the gypsy girl Esmeralda (Theda Bara) for a happy ending in the version of 1917, and lives to fight another day in the 1939 retelling. Hunchback and Girl part as friends in the Disney cartoon. Quasimodo does receive a fatal wound in the 1923 film, but it is the French-Italian movie that comes close to the original: the Hunchback embraces Esmeralda’s body in a charnel house until he dies of starvation.

In Hugo’s novel, Quasimodo vanished after Esmeralda was put to death on the gallows. Years later, workers opened a vault where the bodies of criminals had been buried. In the words of Masterplots (edited by Frank N. McGill), “among the skeletons were those of a woman who had been clad in white and of a man whose bony arms were wrapped tight around the woman’s body. His spine was crooked, one leg was shorter than the other, and it was evident that he had not been hanged, for his neck was unbroken. When those who discovered these singular remains tried to separate the two bodies, they crumbled into dust.”

SEE ALSO: Phantoms of the Operas: Catastrophes of the Lyric Stage for more lurid Parisian atmosphere.