5 - “Graecum Est, Non Legitur”: Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris

Summary

THE FIRST SCENE OF READING THAT ONE ENCOUNTERS in Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) does not belong to the story proper but to the paratextual apparatus that the author placed before it. A prefatory note dated March, 1831, explains that Hugo had visited the great cathedral a few years before writing his novel and had found inscribed on a wall “in a dark recess of one of the towers” the Greek word for fate, ἀνάγκη:

The Greek capitals, black with age and cut quite deep into the stone, the forms and attitudes of their calligraphy, which had something peculiarly gothic about it [je ne sais quels signes propres à la calligraphie gothique empreints dans leurs formes et dans leurs attitudes], as if to show that the hand which had inscribed them there were a medieval one, and above all their grim and fatal import [le sens lugubre et fatal], made a keen impression on the author [frappèrent vivement l'auteur].

He wondered, and tried to guess who the tormented soul [l'âme en peine] might have been who had not wanted to depart this world without leaving behind, on the brow of the old church [au front de la vieille église], this stigma of crime or misfortune. (HE 25; HF 3)

The author reads in the most profound sense, for he does not simply decipher the Greek letters — something of an accomplishment in itself for one who was not trained as a paleographer — but he reconstructs and interprets the message imbedded in their inscription.