2016م - 1444هـ
The Hunchback of Notre Dame

HREE HUNDRED AND forty-eight years, six months, and

nineteen days ago to-day, the Parisians awoke to the

sound of all the bells in the triple circuit of the city, the

university, and the town ringing a full peal.

The sixth of January, 1482, is not, however, a day of

which history has preserved the memory. There was

nothing notable in the event which thus set the bells

and the bourgeois of Paris in a ferment from early

morning. It was neither an assault by the Picards nor

the Burgundians, nor a hunt led along in procession,

nor a revolt of scholars in the town of Laas, nor an

entry of “our much dread lord, monsieur the king,”

nor even a pretty hanging of male and female thieves

by the courts of Paris. Neither was it the arrival, so

frequent in the fifteenth century, of some plumed and

bedizened embassy. It was barely two days since the

last cavalcade of that nature, that of the Flemish ambassadors charged with concluding the marriage between the dauphin and Marguerite of Flanders, had

made its entry into Paris, to the great annoyance of

M. le Cardinal de Bourbon, who, for the sake of pleasing the king, had been obliged to assume an amiable

mien towards this whole rustic rabble of Flemish burgomasters, and to regale them at his Hôtel de Bourbon, with a very “pretty morality, allegorical satire,

and farce,” while a driving rain drenched the magnificent tapestries at his door.