Other editions of book The Hunchback of Notre Dame

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1862 edition. Excerpt: ...it could not be helped. The fault lay in my old doublet, which cowardly abandoned me at the first of winter under pretext it was falling off piecemeal and pvanted to go to rest in the rag-picker's bag. What could I do? civilization has not yet readied the point when one may go all naked, like ancient Diogenes. Ad'd that there blew a very cold wind, and to run about stripped is an experiment not to be jegun in January. This dress was offered ne, I accepted it, and cast oil' my old jlack frock which, for a hermetic like myself, was far from hermetically sealed. Belold me in an actor's garb, like Saint Jenest. It is an eclipse." "You choose a lino pursuit!" said tho archdeacon. J "I agree, master, that it is better to be poet and philosopher, to blow the flame of the furnace or receive it from above, than to balance cats and chairs. So, when you apostrophized me, I was as foolish as an ass before a turnspit. But, messire, one must live anJ the first Alexandrines are not worth to the tooth a hunk of Brie cheese. Now I wrote for Lady Margaret of Flanders the famous epithalamium that you wot of, and the city would not pay me, asserting it was not excellent, as if for four crowns one could buy a tragedy of Sophocles. I would have died of hunger. Happily, I found out I was strong in the jaw, and I bade it: 'Jaw, do thy duty, perform tricks of strength and balancing; nourish yourself. Ale te ip.iam.' A bunch of rags whom I number among my friends taught me some twenty herculean feats, and now I give to my teeth every night what they earn in the day by the sweat of my brow. After all, concede, I acknowledge it is a sad employment of my intellectual faculties, and that man is not made to spend his life drumming and biting chairs....