Victor Hugo's 'The Hunchback of Notre-Dame' shot to the top of the Amazon bestseller list as firefighters damped down the embers of the blaze which ravaged the ancient cathedral.
The original French version of Victor Hugo's gothic novel 'Notre-Dame de Paris', became the fastest selling book in France and is also a number one bestseller worldwide in English in two sub-categories of historical fiction. Victor Hugo's "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame" shot to the top of the Amazon bestseller list Tuesday as firefighters damped down the embers of the blaze which ravaged the ancient cathedral.
But his epic about the tragic fate of the Gypsy girl Esmeralda who captures the heart of Captain Phoebus, the poet Pierre Gringoire, Archdeacon Frollo -- and most of all the hunchback Quasimodo -- helped mobilise the mammoth 19th-century restoration of the monument. "All eyes were turned to the top of the church," Hugo wrote as if describing the millions of people who gathered along the banks of the Seine or watched agog on television as the great 850-year-old structure burned."What they saw was most strange. Upon the top of the topmost gallery, higher than the central rose-window, a vast flame ascended between the two belfries with whirlings sparks.
"Below this flame, below the dark balustrade with its glowing trefoils, two spouts, terminating in gargoyles, vomited sheets of fiery rain, whose silvery streams shone out distinctly against the gloom of the lowers part of the cathedral front." Sales of the American writer Ernest Hemingway's ode to Paris in the 1920s, "A Moveable Feast", soared after the November 2015 Paris attacks.
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