owhere on earth was there a more grotesque creature. One of his eyes was buried under an enormous cyst. His teeth hung over his protruding lower lips like tusks. His eyebrows were red bristles, and his gigantic nose curved over his upper lip like a snout. His long arms protruded from his shoulders, dangling like an ape's. Further, not unlike Stevenson's brutal Hyde, Quasimodo is a henchman of the night, a stalker ofdarkened alleys, and a hunter of women, finding cover by day deep within the bowels of Notre Dame.Here, it seems, is a fiend to haunt the nightmares of children and whip mobs into a fury. Still, as Hugo's narrative unfolds, it is not Quasimodo but the cathedral's archdeacon, ClaudeFrollo, who is revealed as the novel's real monster. Like Frankenstein and Jekyll, the ascetic scholarand priest Frollo is a man who cannot abide the limits of his own mortality or acknowledge theall-too-human passions that burn within him. But Frollo's attempts to fly above this mortal flesh, or tobury it within the cathedral's shadowy vaults and Gothic spires, are all in vain. And in the end, it is hewho dispatches Quasimodo--his own Mr. Hyde--to stalk and kidnap the gypsy Esmeralda; it is hewho will destroy her; and it is he who--like the thoughtless Victor Frankenstein--cruelly abandons thetortured beast he was sworn to protect. The real fiends, then, in so many classic monster stories, are the Frankensteins, Jekylls, andFrollos who cannot abide their own humanity and cannot or will not show any compassion for thosewhose disfigured humanity has made them outcasts. It is the men who cannot recognize their owndeformities writ large on the faces of these brutes--who feel no mercy, no responsibility, no pity--whoare the true monsters, and indeed, the creators of monsters. Even in "Richard III," Shakespeare's tale of the sociopathic "Hunchback of York," there is somereminder that monster...
