According to his biographer, Graham Robb, in his award-winning book Victor Hugo, "by the time he fled the country in 1851, Hugo was the most famous living writer in the world . . . His influence on French literature was second only to that of the Bible." Although Hugo's life's work included "seven novels, eighteen volumes of poetry, twenty-one plays," and as Robb writes, "approximately three million words of history, criticism, travel writing and philosophy," Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame retains the honor of being one of his two most famous works. The Hunchback of Notre Dame was very popular in France when it first came out despite the fact, as Robb states it, "the immediate effect on readers of the time was horror verging on intense pleasure." The book shocked Hugo's readers with its "extreme states," Robb concludes, which included those of poverty and ugliness as well as...