The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, though an early work, shows all the signs of a poetics of excess. In the opening chapters, to create the idea of public celebration and the participation of the aristocracy as well as members of the bourgeoisie and the populace, to create the impression of grouillement (to use Hugo’s word), of a teeming mass, the reader has to digest a vast series of names of characters who may be historical but are completely unfamiliar and therefore meaningless. Heaven help anyone who tries to identify them, or to find out anything about them.
It is like watching a procession—perhaps a July 14 parade in Paris or Trooping the Colour in London—where we cannot identify the various regiments from their uniforms and know nothing about their history, but are struck by the immensity of the parade, and woe betide us if we see only half of it, since we will lose the charm and majesty of the event. Hugo never says to us, “There was a crowd.” He puts us right there in the middle of it, as if he is presenting each of its members to us one by one. We can shake a few hands, pretend to recognize someone we ought to know, and then return home with the feeling of experiencing its immensity.
The same can be said about Gringoire’s Dantesque visit to the Court of Miracles, among villains, vagrants, beggars, defrocked priests, young delinquents, whores, gypsies, narquois, coquillarts, hubins, sabouilleux, false cripples, cutpurses, scoundrels, and so on. We don’t need to recognize them all: it is the descriptions of them that create the effect; we have to feel the place teeming with criminals and wretches to understand this turbulent festering swamp population who, many chapters later, will attack the cathedral like an immense colony of termites, sewer rats, cockroaches, locusts—the protagonist is not one person but the mass. In short, we have to learn to read through the inventories, lists, catalogs like a flow of music. And then we become absorbed into the book.
And we arrive at the point where the poetics of excess is apparent through the technique of the catalog and the list. Hugo uses this technique on countless occasions but perhaps it is used most continuously, most completely and convincingly in Ninety-three.
Though we might be able to spot and list many shortcomings in this book—above all, the rhetorical incontinence—as we thrust the knife deeper in the wound, they begin to appear splendid to us. It would be like a devotee of Bach and his disembodied, almost cerebral compositions, saying that Beethoven creates more noise in comparison with those fine pieces for the well-tempered clavier: but to what purpose? Can we resist the power of the Fifth or the Ninth?
We can avoid indulging in a Pantagruelian feast, but once we have accepted the rules of the game, there is no point remembering the dietitian’s advice or longing for the delicate sensations of nouvelle cuisine. If we have the stomach to join the orgy, it will be an unforgettable experience. Otherwise it is better to leave straightaway and lull ourselves to sleep reading a few aphorisms by an eighteenth-century gentleman. Hugo is not for the faint-hearted. Yet while the battle of Hernani is later than Sturm und Drang, the shadow of that storm and that assault still illuminates the last Romantic in 1874, the date of the novel’s publication (though not of its gestation).
To understand just how Ninety-three is fueled by excess, let us look at the story, which, all in all, is very simple, though heavily melodramatic, and in the hands of an Italian opera librettist could have produced the equivalent, perhaps, of Tosca or Il trovatore (by which I mean their plots, without the music that allows us to take the verses more seriously).
It is the annus horribilis of the Revolution. The Vendée is in revolt. An old aristocrat with a glorious military past, the marquis de Lantenac comes ashore to take command of the peasant masses, who emerge like devils from mysterious forests and shoot while they recite the rosary. The Revolution, in the form of the Convention, has set its men against him.
First there is Gauvain (Lantenac’s nephew), a young aristocrat turned republican, a man of feminine beauty fired with warlike fervor, but an angelic utopian who still hopes that the conflict can be settled in a spirit of compassion and respect for the enemy. Then we meet Cimourdain, a man we’d call a political adviser today. He is a former priest, as ruthless as Lantenac, who is convinced that social and political regeneration will happen only through a bloodbath, and that every hero pardoned today will become the enemy who will kill us tomorrow. Cimourdain, moreover—melodrama does have its demands—was Gauvain’s tutor when he was a child and loves him like a son. Hugo never allows us to think of a passion different from that of a man (first celibate through faith and later through revolutionary vocation) who is consecrated to spiritual fatherhood—but who knows? Cimourdain’s passion is ferocious, complete, and carnally mystical.
In this struggle between Revolution and Reaction, Lantenac and Gauvain try to kill each other, attacking and retreating in a whirl of endless massacres. Yet this story of multiple horrors opens when a hungry widow and her three children are discovered by the men of a republican battalion, who decide to adopt the children one radiant day in May when “les oiseaux gazouillaient au-dessus des baïonnettes.” The children will later be captured by Lantenac, who shoots the mother and takes the little ones (now republican mascots) as hostages. The mother survives the execution and wanders about, desperately looking for them, while the republicans fight to free the three innocent captives, who are held prisoner in the dark medieval tower where Lantenac is then besieged by Gauvain. After fierce resistance, Lantenac manages to escape from the siege along a secret passage, but his followers have set fire to the tower and the children are about to perish. The desperate mother reappears, and Lantenac (who undergoes a sort of transfiguration and is transformed from Satan into a salvific Lucifer) reenters the tower and allows himself to be captured by his enemies in order to rescue the children and bring them to safety.
While waiting for the trial that Cimourdain has organized on the spot, arranging for the guillotine to be brought there, Gauvain asks himself whether a man who has redeemed his errors through an act of generosity has to be sent to death. He enters the prisoner’s cell where, in a long monologue, Lantenac reaffirms the rights of the throne and the altar. In the end Gauvain lets Lantenac escape, and waits in the cell in his place. When Cimourdain discovers what he has done, he has no choice but to put Gauvain on trial and, with his casting vote, to decide his death—the death of the only person he has ever loved.
The recurring theme of the three children to some extent accompanies the troubled story of Gauvain, who, through his kindness and compassion, will face the punishment that awaits him, and both of the themes cast a ray of hope on that future that can only be brought about through human sacrifice. It is to no avail that the whole army shouts out for their commander to be reprieved. Cimourdain knows the suffering of deepest love but has dedicated his life to duty, to the law, and he is guardian of that revolutionary purity that is identified with terror—or rather, with the Terror. Yet at the moment Gauvain’s head rolls into the basket, Cimourdain fires his pistol into his own heart, “and those two souls, tragic sisters, took flight together, the shadow of the one blending with the light of the other.”
Is that it? Did Hugo simply want to reduce us to tears? Of course not, and the first observation has to be made in narrative rather than political terms. It is now part of the koinè, the common language of every scholar of narrative structures (and I will avoid making learned reference to secondary theoretical notions), that in a story the actors of course take part in the action, but the actors are the embodiment of the actants, which might be described as the narrative roles through which the actors can pass, perhaps changing their function in the plot structure. For instance, in a novel like I promessi sposi (The Betrothed), the forces of evil or human weakness can act against the forces of a providence that controls everyone’s destinies, and one and the same actor, such as L’Innominato, can suddenly change from the role of Opponent to that of Auxiliary. And—compared to actors chained to an unchangeable actant role, such as Don Rodrigo on the one hand and Fra Cristoforo on the other—this explains the ambiguity of Don Abbondio, “a vessel of fragile earthenware, obliged to journey in company with many vessels of iron,” who constantly moves from one role to another, and this is why we feel, in the end, that his bewilderment is forgivable.
When Hugo, in his old age, wrote this novel, which he had been pondering for some time (he had mentioned it in the preface to The Man Who Laughs, several years earlier), the political and ideological position of his youth had drastically changed. Although as a young man he had expressed legitimist ideas and had supported the Vendée, he later regarded 1793 as a
