Quasimodo

The rule of the contest was simple: put your head through a small window, pull the most hideous face, and win the crown of the Pope of Fools.

The Festival of Fools had definitively buried the theatre. The whole hall crowded around the little window. One by one, heads appeared: puffed cheeks, twisted eyes, mouths stretched to the ears.

At every grimace, the crowd howled with laughter and voted.

— Uglier! Even uglier!

Then a head appeared, and the contest stopped dead.

An eye buried under a bristling brow. A broken mouth. Teeth at war with each other. A face in upheaval, as if crumpled by a giant hand.

The effect was immediate: a cry, then an immense laugh, then thunder.

— That's him! The Pope of Fools! Elected! Elected!

They laughed all the harder when they understood: that face was not pulling a grimace.

It was his face.

— It's Quasimodo, the bell-ringer of Notre-Dame!

All Paris knew him by name, the hunchbacked ringer who lived up there in the towers of the cathedral, among his bells. They pulled him from the window, hoisted him onto a makeshift throne, set a mock crown on his head and a mock cope on his shoulders.

Quasimodo let them.

He now towered over the whole hall. From up there, he looked out at that sea of laughing faces turned toward him. Was he proud? Was he wounded? Both, perhaps. His battered face let nothing be read, and the uproar let nothing be heard — he who, from years of bells, hardly heard anything at all.

There were thousands of them looking at him.

Not one wondered what he felt.

They lifted him onto a gilded litter, and the procession of the Pope of Fools set off to parade through the streets of Paris.

The crowd screamed with joy. Quasimodo, crowned and mocked, passed through the doors of the Great Hall.

And while Paris laughed, outside, on a cold January square, a very different destiny was already approaching the cathedral.