Esmeralda, a beautiful sixteen-year-old woman who can sing and dance, is not recognized or accepted by the hierarchical upper class of the time because she was stolen from her home by gypsies and raised among wandering entertainers. When she is heroically rescued by the handsome and dashing Captain Forbes of the Royal Guard during a late-night robbery, she falls in love at first sight, and he is captured by her beauty.
Esmeralda, like all the heroines in Joan of Arc novels, fell in love with the one she loved without complaint or regret as soon as she met him. Regardless of whether this love has a result, regardless of whether the other party really love themselves, even know that this kind of love can not have a result, even know that the other party does not really love themselves, but also still in love with each other, still on this kind of illusory love loyalty.
Esmeralda not only had a perfect body, but also a noble and pure heart. When the poet Grandgoire was about to be hanged by the beggar kingdom at a critical moment, she did not hesitate to save the poet by willingly marrying him. Struck by her beauty and nobility, the poet immediately fell in love with her and wished to be her husband in name only. But Esmeralda, for the sake of her beloved idol of love, calmly refused him, "I can only love a man who can protect me." And she told him that she had only married him to save his life, so she could only maintain a nominal relationship with him as husband and wife.
When Vice Bishop Claude uses all sorts of underhanded tactics to try to force Esmeralda to accept his love, Esmeralda prefers to die rather than comply. When Claude is in prison to gain Esmeralda's love, he deceives her that her beloved Forbes has been killed by him, and tells her to have no more illusions, and promises to save her from her death sentence if she promises his love. Esmeralda's reply was "If he is dead, why do you urge me to live?" When Claude asks Esmeralda to choose for the last time in front of the gallows, even though by this time Esmeralda knows that her beloved Phobos is still alive and that she has found her real mother, who she has been separated from for fifteen years, and that she wants to live very much, she responds to Claude's advances by saying, "The gallows disgusts me less than thee. "
Casimodo, the personification of "ugliness" in the novel, first appears as Esmeralda's persecutor when he is ordered to rob Esmeralda in the dead of night. When Quasimodo is arrested by the Royal Guard for the failed robbery and tied to a pillar of shame under the hot sun to be whipped for public display, he thirsts for the crowd of onlookers to give him a little water to drink, but no one pays any attention. When he was on the verge of fainting, he didn't realize that the person who bravely gave him water in full view of the crowd was the angelic Esmeralda.
Esmeralda's return of kindness for kindness y shocked the deformed and ugly Quasimodo, for in his heart there was the same strong love and affection as in others. Later he risked his life to rescue Esmeralda from the death rack, but his ugly and deformed appearance was always the gap between him and Esmeralda that could never be crossed. Mr. Hugo finally crosses this gap at the end of the novel through death, and I think that may indeed be the only viable way.
Second, the love of Vorbis
Vorbis is the captain of the royal guards, and he is very handsome and good-looking, and he spends all his time in the high society, and he is the ideal prince of the rich ladies. The clever Forbes is very good at utilizing his effective resources, and he chooses his cousin Lily, who has a rich dowry, as his fiancée, while at the same time going after the beauty of Esmeralda. In him, we see very clearly the figure of those clever men in today's society who have long sleeves and "red flags at home and colorful flags outside the home."
The abomination of Phobos was that he loved only the beauty of Esmeralda, but not the life of Esmeralda in the least. Esmeralda was sentenced to death for the murder of Phobos, but Phobos, after escaping from the hospital in the midst of his treatment, did not even go to testify against the real murderer in order to save Esmeralda's life so as not to have his scandalous behavior exposed. There are not a few such hypocrites in life, although they are usually very good at talking about love, swearing by the sea, sweet words, and heavenly flowers, but when it comes to the critical moment, love will immediately become worthless to them, because in the hearts of these people, they have never known what true love is. Volume 2 Chapter 3 Repaying Grudges with Virtue
Walking forward and taking a closer look, I realized that the circle the crowd had formed was much larger than the Fan
surround needed to heat the house, and that the spectators weren't flocking to the house simply attracted by the beauty of the thousands of bundles of burning firewood
.
It turned out to be a young girl
dancing in a wide open space between the crowd and the fireworks.
Whether the maiden was a human being, or a fairy, or an angel, Grandcourt, skeptical philosopher or satirical poet, could not decide, for
he was mesmerized by the dazzling sight.
She was not tall, but her slim figure was erect and appeared slender, so that he seemed
as if she were tall. She was brownish-brown in complexion, but could be guessed to look
upon in the daytime, probably with a beautiful golden
gloss like the Andalusian and Roman girls. Her small, slender feet, also Andalusian in appearance, looked snug and at ease in
elegant shoes throughout. She danced, twirled, and swirled on an old Persian carpet that was casually padded at her
feet; each time she twirled
turned, her radiant face flickered past you, and her large, ebony
eyes threw lightning bolts of lightening at you.
Everyone around her stares fixedly, mouths wide open. True to form, she fluttered about, her two round, clean arms raised above her head, and a Basque tambourine buzzing; her head was slender, soft, and agile as a hornet's; she wore a golden corset, flat and unruffled, and a gown
mottled in color and fluffy; her shoulders bare, and her skirt The shoulders were bare, and the skirt was now and then lifted, revealing a pair of
graceful legs; the hair was black, and the eyes were like flames; in short, it was a work of art
that was truly a work of art.
"Truly, this is an elf ①
, a mountain nymph, a goddess, a priestess of wine in the mountains of May
Narus ②
." Grandcueva thought to himself.
At that exact moment, one of the Elf's hair braids came apart, and a
brass pin that had been stuck in it tumbled to the ground.
"Oops! Nope! It's a gypsy girl." Grandcueva said
speaking out of turn.
Any visions vanished at once.
She resumed her dance. Taking two swords from the floor, she held the ends to her forehead
and with that turned the swords in one direction while her body turned in the opposite direction.
Not at all true, she was indeed a gypsy girl. That said, even though the G
Languava illusion had faded, this whole picturesque landscape still did not lose its mesmerizing
charm. The fireworks shone upon her, the intense red glow, brilliant and brilliant,
flashing on the face plates of the onlookers, on the brown brains of the gypsy women,
and casting over into the depths of the square shimmering white reflections, only to be seen as figures wavered and swayed on the cracked, dark, ancient facade of the Court of the Columns, and on the stone arms of the gallows on either side of it.
In the midst of the millions of faces reddened by the firelight, one seemed to gaze more intently at the dancer than all the others
. It was the face of a man
grim, calm, and somber. The man was dressed in something, for
it was impossible to tell by the mass around him, and was not more than thirty-five years of age at most;
but was bald, with only a few sparse and already gray hairs at the temples; his forehead
was broad and lofty, and was beginning to be etched with wrinkles; and yet the y sunken
eyes were bursting with an extraordinary youthful sparks of fiery vigor and deep lust.
He poured all this emotion into the gypsy girl; and as he watched this
infatuated young girl of twenty-eight fluttering and twirling, and making the crowd look
distracted, he looked more and more sombre in his thoughtfulness.
From time to time a smile swept across his lips, and at the same time a sigh escaped, only the smile
was ten times more painful than the sigh. In the star-studded French literary scene of the nineteenth century, Victor? Hugo can be said to be one of the brightest stars. He is a great poet, famous playwright, novelist, and the flag bearer and leader of the French Romantic literary movement. This great work "Notre Dame de Paris" is his first caused a sensational effect of the Romantic novel, its literary value and profound significance to society, so that it after nearly two centuries of time, or in today's reprinted over and over again, reprinted, so as to come to my hands.
As I read the book, I felt a strong "contrast of beauty and ugliness". The characters and events in the book, even if they are derived from real life, have been greatly exaggerated and intensified, and under the writer's heavy ink and color, they form a gorgeous and strange picture, forming a sharp, even unbelievable contrast between good and evil, beauty and ugliness.
The plot of Notre Dame de Paris always centers on three people: the kind and beautiful young girl Esmeralda, the cruel and hypocritical vice bishop of Notre Dame, Claude? Frollo and Gazimodo, the bell-ringer who is ugly on the outside but noble on the inside.
The Bohemian maiden Esmeralda is the darling of the Parisian vagabonds and earns her living as a street vendor. She is innocent and pure, compassionate and happy to help people. Because she could not bear to see an innocent man put to death, she accepted the poet Gamgoire as her nominal husband to save his life; and seeing Gazimodo whipped under the scorching sun, she alone would sympathize with compassion and bring water to the lips of the bell-ringer who cried out from thirst. Such a noble-hearted girl was slandered by the church and the court as a "witch" and a "murderer" and sentenced to death by hanging. The author molded this character into the embodiment of beauty and goodness, so that the beauty of her heart and external beauty are completely unified, in order to arouse the reader's infinite sympathy for her, thus generating a strong resentment against the feudal church and the king's power.
As for Claude, the deputy bishop, and Gazimodo, the bell-ringer, these are two completely opposite images. Claude is outwardly moralistic, leading a life of puritanical and ascetic practice, while inwardly he craves for lustful pleasures and is envious of worldly pleasures. Selfish, sinister and unscrupulous. And Gazimodo, the hunchbacked, one-eyed, deaf and lame deformed man, was discriminated against and bullied by the world from a young age. In Esmeralda, he experienced for the first time the warmth of the human heart, this vulgar and savage appearance of the monstrous man, from then on all his life and passion in Esmeralda's body, can be for her to go through fire, can be for the sake of her happiness to sacrifice their own everything.
This kind of push to the extreme contrast between beauty and ugliness, the absolute sublime and evil opposition, so that the novel has a kind of shocking power, can roll away all our thoughts and feelings. This may be the charm of the romantic novel.
In Notre Dame de Paris, the author depicts the lowest class of Parisian people, vagabonds and beggars with great sympathy. They are ragged and rough in their manners, but possess virtues far superior to those of the so-called educated and civilized world. The virtues of mutual love, integrity, courage and self-sacrifice. The scene in the novel in which the Parisian vagabonds attack Notre Dame to rescue Esmeralda is tragic, intense, generous and thrilling, and obviously incorporates to some extent the bravery shown by the people of Paris in the July Revolution and the destruction by the people of Paris of the Church of St. Germain and the Archbishop's Palace in Paris. When the novel was written, it also predicted, through the mouths of the characters, that the people would rise up and destroy the Bastille, hinting at the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789