The Hunchback of Notre Dame: Style 1 key example

Hugo’s own rambling prose does service to this broad, wandering focus. The novel keeps up a chattiness with its audience, often addressing the reader directly. Its long-winded sentences stretch and expand through complex clauses. As Gringoire enters the tavern, for instance, smoke “had risen from the poet’s head or perhaps, quite simply and prosaically, from his empty stomach, and had drifted between him and objects, so that he had glimpsed them only through the incoherent mists of nightmare, through that darkness of dreams which makes every outline waver, every shape grimace, and which makes objects conglomerate in disproportionate groups, whereby things are dilated into chimeras and men into phantoms.” Other passages come laden with dense allusions to classical culture, biblical stories, or French historical figures and streets. Cicero, Marigni, and Persephone all grace the novel’s pages.

At its more emotional moments, Hugo cultivates feeling through rapturous, overflowing sentences. The narrator breathlessly lingers over Esmeralda’s beauty in Book 2, Chapter 7—“her pure, pink lips were half smiling; her serene, child-like brow was clouded over now and again by her thoughts, like a mirror by a breath; a sort of ineffable light came from her long, black, downcast eyelashes, and lent her profile that ideal sweetness which Raphael later discovered at the point of mystical intersection between virginity, motherhood and divinity.” Bells add to the “murmur of half a million men” and “the eternal lament of the river,” a “tumult” that cannot seem to be “more rich, more joyous, more golden or more dazzling.” Taken in all its various registers and forms, the novel entertains, educates, and overwhelms.