The Real Quasimodo - Paris, France
Posted by: Metro2
N 48° 51.195 E 002° 20.941
31U E 452246 N 5411346
In 2010, evidence emerged that there was a real hunchback stone carver working at Notre Dame...and that Victor Hugo almost assuredly would have known him.
Waymark Code: WME2GZ
Location: Île-de-France, France
Date Posted: 03/25/2012
Views: 165
The French author Victor Hugo is perhaps best known for having written The Hunchback of Notre Dame...a fictional account published in 1831 of a deformed hunchback known as Quasimodo who serves as the bellringer at this cathedral. The novel has been adapted for film, television, animation, ballet, theater, television...you name it. But Wikipedia (
visit link) reports that in 2010: "... Adrian Glew, a Tate archivist, announced evidence for a real-life Quasimodo, a "humpbacked [stone] carver" who worked at Notre Dame during the 1820s. The evidence is contained in the memoirs of Henry Sibson, a 19th-century British sculptor who worked at Notre Dame at around the same time Hugo wrote the novel. Sibson describes a humpbacked stonemason working there, "he was the carver under the Government sculptor whose name I forget as I had no intercourse with him, all that I know is that he was humpbacked and he did not like to mix with carvers." Because Victor Hugo had close links with the restoration of the cathedral it is likely he was aware of the unnamed "humpbacked carver" nicknamed "Le Bossu", who oversaw "Monsieur Trajin".[1] Adrian Glew also uncovered that both the hunchback and Hugo were living in the same town of Saint Germain-des-Pres in 1833, and in early drafts of Les Misérables, Hugo named the main character "Jean Trajin" (the same name as the unnamed hunchback carver's employee), but later changed it to "Jean Valjean"."