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of their individual moral potential. Time and again, the message of Hugo’s “new” novel is that historical existence as depicted, with its blindness, failures, and shortcomings, is incompatible with, or at the very least less significant than, the realization of this personal and often private promise.
    In spite of Hugo’s lingering hesitancy surrounding the genre—a thirty-year period of novelistic silence separates the wildly successful Hunchback of Notre Dame from Les Misérables— it is without a doubt the form best suited to the scope and breadth of his all-encompassing vision, one that, to his own mind, was not at all fatalistic. On the contrary, Hugo preferred to view his novels as a “series of affirmations of the soul” ( Oeuvres complètes , vol. 14, p. 387; translation mine). While contemporary readers and critics did not always agree—citing The Hunchback of Notre Dame as particularly ambiguous in its meaning—Hugo’s profound and overwhelming belief in both individual and collective man’s potential for progress is perhaps more evident to us today. Indeed, while the inadequacies of each past society that he examines and of the present in which he wrote pervade Hugo’s fiction, his presentation of core, universal truths relative to the human condition show an unwavering faith in the future, in our future, to which his aspirations for the historical and social worlds are deferred.
    This continued relevance of Hugo’s vision to our world finds its confirmation in the amazing capacity for reinvention that his fiction has shown, in a resilience that has granted it a life and mythology all its own in popular culture, particularly in the genres of film (Lon Chaney’s and Charles Laughton’s impressive interpretations of Quasimodo come immediately to mind) and theater, in which Hugo’s unforgettable, larger-than-life characters have continued to mesmerize. While this in some ways implies that Hugo’s prediction that the book will kill the monument has been surpassed, and that it is now the book’s turn to be rivaled by and perhaps supplanted by other creative mediums, it is difficult to argue that Hugo would not be in favor of this evolution. During his own lifetime Hugo authorized, encouraged, and even participated in the adaptation of several of his works for the stage (including an 1836 opera based on The Hunchback of Notre Dame), reflecting a desire to give his timeless message the momentum it needed to ensure it an afterlife in fresh contexts and mediums. It is thus that, more than two hundred years after Hugo’s birth, the vision he sought to project has, far beyond the boundaries of the novel, continued to leave its indelible mark on each new generation.

    Isabel Roche has a Ph.D. in French literature from New York University. Her dissertation explores the creation and role of character in the novels of Victor Hugo. Her research interests include Hugo, his fiction, and French Romanticism. She has published articles in The French Review and French Forum. Roche teaches at Benning ton College in Vermont.

Preface
    Some years ago, while visiting, or rather exploring, Notre-Dame, the author of this book discovered in an obscure corner of one of the towers this word, carved upon the wall:
    ‘ANÁTKH a
    These Greek characters, black with age and cut deep into the stone with the peculiarities of form and arrangement common to Gothic calligraphy that marked them the work of some hand in the Middle Ages, and above all the sad and mournful meaning which they expressed, forcibly impressed the author.
    He questioned himself, he tried to divine what sad soul was loath to quit the earth without leaving behind this brand of crime or misery upon the brow of the old church.
    Since then the wall has been whitewashed or scraped (I have forgotten which), and the inscription has vanished; for this is the way in which, for some two hundred years, we have treated the wonderful churches of the Middle Ages. They are