He hastened with Cosette to Jean Valjean’s room; but the old man’s last hour had come.

“Come closer, come closer, both of you,” he cried.  “I love you so much.  It is good to die like this!  You love me too, my Cosette.  I know you’ve always had a fondness for the poor old man.  And you, M. Pontmercy, will always make Cosette happy.  There were several things I wanted to say, but they don’t matter now.  Come nearer, my children.  I am happy in dying!”

Cosette and Marius fell on their knees, and covered his hands with kisses.

Jean Valjean was dead!

* * * * *

Notre Dame de Paris

Victor Hugo was already eminent as one of the greatest dramatic poets of his day before he gave to the world, in 1831, his great tragic romance, “Notre Dame de Paris,” of which the original title was “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”  Hugo has said that the story was suggested to him by the Greek word anagke (Fate), which one day he discovered carved on one of the towers of the famous cathedral.  “These Greek characters,” he says, “black with age and cut deep into the stone with the peculiarities of form and arrangement common to the Gothic caligraphy that marked them the work of some hand in the Middle Ages, and above all the sad and mournful meaning which they expressed, forcibly impressed me.”  In “Notre Dame” there is all the tenderness for sorrow and sympathy for the afflicted, which found even fuller and deeper expression thirty years later in “Les Miserables”; while as a study of the life of Paris of the Middle Ages, and of the great church after which the romance is called, the book is still unrivalled.

I.—­The Hunchback of Notre Dame

It was January 6, 1482, and all Paris was keeping the double festival of Epiphany and the Feast of Fools.

The Lord of Misrule was to be elected, and all who were competing for the post came in turn and made a grimace at a broken window in the great hall of the Palace of Justice.  The ugliest face was to be acclaimed victor by the populace, and shouts of laughter greeted the grotesque appearances.

The vote was unanimous in favour of the hunchback of Notre Dame.  He had but stood at the window, and at once had been elected.  The square nose, the horseshoe shaped mouth, the one eye, overhung by a bushy red eyebrow, the forked chin, and the strange expression of amazement, malice, and melancholy—­who had seen such a grimace?

It was only when the crowd had carried away the Lord of Misrule in triumph that they understood that the grimace was the hunchback’s natural face.  In fact, the entire man was a grimace.  Humpbacked, an enormous head, with bristles of red hair; broad feet, huge hands, crooked legs; and, with all this deformity, a wonderful vigour, agility, and courage.  Such was the newly chosen Lord of Misrule—­a giant broken to pieces and badly mended.