The gargoyles (Hugo,Victor, Laverne) with Quasimodo and Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame © Walt Disney Pictures

The final scenes, diverging more than in any preceding versions, from the ending planned by Hugo, falls back on cliches. In consistent evil, Frollo wants to stab Quasimodo, but Esmeralda is there to save her friend, and then Phoebus catches him in flight. The only point in common with the novel is the fall of Frollo from the high towers of Notre-Dame, but not indeed because of Quasimodo, since undoubtedly the authors did not want to tarnish his unvarying kindness by making him push his master to his death. There couldn't be a more conventional "Happy End": the pretty Esmeralda (she in undeniably pretty, and so much more, just as Hugo had imagined her) marries the handsome Phoebus (or whoever that creature really is) under the touching gaze of Quasimodo. In Dieterle's version, Phoebus did not escape Frollo's dagger, and it is a character omitted from the animated film, the poet Gringoire (a bearer of Hugo's sentiments in a different register from King Louis XI) who wins Esmeralda's love, and the happy couple leave behind them the poor Quasimodo, dreaming of becoming stone like the gargoyles. That was not satisfactory and even bluntly disappointing, the animated happy end leaves one still further from the last pages of the novel with its double tragic ending, ironically represented by two marriages: that of Phoebus with his noble lady Fleur-de-Lys, and that poignant "wedding" of Quasimodo desperately clutching the corpse of Esmeralda even in death. Perhaps it needed a poet like Jacques Prévert (in the adaptation that was filmed in 1956 by Jean Delannoy) to have Hugo's "grotesque" and "sublime" last sentence about Quasimodo spoken on the soundtrack: "When they tried to detach him from the skeleton that he embraced, it fell into dust."

Arnaud Laster, Master of Lectures in French Literature at the New Sorbonne (University of Paris III), author of books on Victor Hugo (of which Pleins feux sur Victor Hugo was published by the Comédie-Française) and co-editor, with Danièle Gasiglia-Laster, of the complete works of Jacques Prévert in the Pléiade edition. He teaches notably the relation of cinema and music with the works of Victor Hugo, and analyzes the screenplays and dialogues of Prévert.