Victor Hugo: The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Note added to the Definitive Edition.

Now the chapters have been found, and he avails himself of the first opportunity to restore them to their place.

This now, is his entire work, such as he dreamed it, such as he made it, good or bad, durable or fragile, but such as he wishes it.

These recovered chapters will possess no doubt, but little value in the eyes of persons, otherwise very judicious, who have sought in "Notre-Dame-de-Paris" only the drama, the romance. But there are perchance, other readers, who have not found it useless to study the aesthetic and philosophic thought concealed in this book, and who have taken pleasure, while reading "Notre-Dame-de-Paris," in unravelling beneath the romance something else than the romance, and in following (may we be pardoned these rather ambitious expressions), the system of the historian and the aim of the artist through the creation of the poet.

For such people especially, the chapters added to this edition will complete "Notre-Dame-de-Paris," if we admit that "Notre-Dame-de-Paris" was worth the trouble of completing.

In one of these chapters on the present decadence of architecture, and on the death (in his mind almost inevitable) of that king of arts, the author expresses and develops an opinion unfortunately well rooted in him, and well thought out. But he feels it necessary to say here that he earnestly desires that the future may, some day, put him in the wrong. He knows that art in all its forms has everything to hope from the new generations whose genius, still in the germ, can be heard gushing forth in our studios. The grain is in the furrow, the harvest will certainly be fine. He merely fears, and the reason may be seen in the second volume of this edition, that the sap may have been withdrawn from that ancient soil of architecture which has been for so many centuries the best field for art.

Nevertheless, there are to-day in the artistic youth so much life, power, and, so to speak, predestination, that in our schools of architecture in particular, at the present time, the professors, who are detestable, produce, not only unconsciously but even in spite of themselves, excellent pupils; quite the reverse of that potter mentioned by Horace, who dreamed amphorae and produced pots. Currit rota, urcens exit.