Notre-Dame de Paris

Also known as:

The Hunchback of Notre Dame


by Victor Hugo




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:--

~ANArKH~.


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