It is drawn from the first words of the entrance antiphon for the day, which is the chant sung as the priest approaches the altar for Mass. Quasimodo is the Latin name for the Sunday following Easter. Monseigneur Claude Frollo finds the child on “Quasimodo Sunday” and “called him Quasimodo whether it was that he chose thereby to commemorate the day when he had found him, or that he meant to mark by that name how incomplete and imperfectly molded the poor little creature was,” Hugo wrote. In Hugo’s novel, Quasimodo, rejected by his parents for his deformities, is abandoned inside Notre Dame Cathedral, at a place where orphans and unwanted children were dropped off. Given the emotional reaction to the sketch from thousands who saw it, the beloved character may be at least part of the reason that people once more rally behind the restoration of Notre Dame de Paris.īecause the name “Quasimodo” is most frequently associated with an ugly but lovable character from a fictional story, some may be surprised to learn that the hunchback’s name is actually liturgical. Quasimodo was the hero of a novel by Victor Hugo, written at another time when Notre Dame needed saving, from years of destruction and disrepair. In a pencil sketch posted to Instagram that quickly went viral, artist Cristina Correa Freile depicted Disney’s version of Quasimodo, the famous fictional “Hunchback of Notre Dame”, crying and hugging the beloved church where he was the bellringer. One has to hope the associated serendipity and coincidence bode well for peace, harmony and another nascent resurrection – this time Notre Dame, Our Lady of Paris, herself.Paris, France, / 04:34 pm ( CNA).- As fire ravaged the roof of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris earlier this month, one artist from Ecuador used her skills to express the grief that she and so many people throughout the world felt as the beautiful building burned. This year however, and again somewhat unusually, Passover and Easter coincide on the same weekend, the day of the spring full moon. Ecumenical questions aside it’s also the time of year we stop tinkering and retouching Le Papillon and re-introduce her from her winter lay-up back to the canal proper. Overall, whether you have faith in the resurrection of Christ, or Moses parting of the Red Sea to enable his people’s flight into Egypt, Easter is all about rebirth. But here’s the slightly mind-boggling thing, if you put Pâques into the feminine singular and make it ‘La Pâque’ it becomes the French word for the Jewish festival of Passover – from the Latin word ‘Pesach’ which means ‘flight’ and celebrates the Jewish people’s passage of the Red Sea. Rather it is always expressed in the feminine plural. We also have chocolate eggs and Easter eggs hunts, but it’s the bells that are traditional.įrance is a religious country and we embrace the Resurrection with a proper noun which, slightly unusually for a language with such rigorous grammatical rules as French, takes no gender. Boys born around Easter are often named Pascal and girls Pascale.Īs with elsewhere in the world, ‘Pâques’ is linked with chocolate, although not chocolate bunnies, rather chocolate bells – which takes us right back to Quasimodo. So next Sunday will be ‘Quasimodo Sunday’. Essentially, however, he has a purity linked to the Cathedral and her bells. For all his physical challenges, Hugo redeemed the ugliness of his grotesque by giving him a wonderful singing voice (although in the book he is deaf, so a bit of a conundrum there then!). Not politically correct in this day and age. In Victor Hugo’s sense the meaning of Quasimodo is ‘half made’ – that is a man/creature who is deformed. ‘Quasi modo’ literally translates as ‘in the manner of’. This goes ‘quasi modo geniti infantes’ meaning ‘as new-born babes’. Now not many people know this (at least not without resorting to Wikipedia) but ‘Quasimodo’ comes from the opening words of the liturgical mass in Latin for the first Sunday after Easter. Mention that name to most people and word association will almost certainly take their minds to Victor Hugo’s tragic hero Quasimodo – the legendary ‘Hunchback of Notre Dame’. The week started with the sad news of the fire at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. But this week’s serendipitous collusion between Notre Dame, Easter and the Jewish Feast of Passover really does take some beating, although you might need to work a bit hard to keep up. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by a confusion of tongues – especially at Easter and particularly in the west where so many languages interrelate.
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