Notre-Dame de Paris

by Victor Hugo · language: en

cover NOTRE-DAME DE PARIS Also known as: THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME By Victor Hugo Translated by Isabel F. Hapgood PREFACE.

A few years ago, while visiting or, rather, rummaging about Notre-Dame, the author of this book found, in an obscure nook of one of the towers, the following word, engraved by hand upon the wall:— ἈΝÁΓΚΗ.

These Greek capitals, black with age, and quite deeply graven in the stone, with I know not what signs peculiar to Gothic caligraphy imprinted upon their forms and upon their attitudes, as though with the purpose of revealing that it had been a hand of the Middle Ages which had inscribed them there, and especially the fatal and melancholy meaning contained in them, struck the author deeply.

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