With almost the entire novel set in the cathedral of Notre Dame, the novel also conveys a spiritual element not only in its setting but in its characters. Underneath the unfolding of Quasimodo's love of La Esmeralda is a historical drama set in 1482, a time that in many ways mirrored the times and political struggles of Hugo's nineteenth-century world. But Hugo was a very complex writer who gave his readers a much more complicated story. On the surface, The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a story of unrequited love between a man horribly disfigured and a beautiful woman who loves someone else. Even more popular than it became throughout the twentieth century and into the early 2000s, this romantic story grabbed the imagination of the French people who embraced it for its melodramatic storyline and Hugo's detailed rendering of the life and culture of fifteenth-century Paris. The Hunchback of Notre Dame was to change all that. Although he had written one other novel ( Han d'Islande, 1823), he had not really been known as a novelist. By the time Victor Hugo wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame (published in French as Notre-Dame de Paris), he had already made a name for himself as a poet and dramatist.
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