Quasimodo

Quasimodo is the deformed bell-ringer of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Victor Hugo's novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, published in 1831 and set in fifteenth-century Paris. Abandoned as a severely disfigured infant and raised within the cathedral by the archdeacon Claude Frollo, Quasimodo grows up almost entirely isolated from society because of his appearance, deafened further by years of ringing the cathedral's great bells, and treated as a spectacle and outcast by the people of Paris. His life changes when he falls into devoted, largely unspoken love with Esmeralda, a kind Romani street dancer who is one of the few people to show him compassion, and Quasimodo ultimately defies Frollo, who has become obsessed with and threatens Esmeralda, to protect her even at fatal cost to himself. Hugo used Quasimodo's story partly as an argument for the preservation of Notre-Dame and Gothic architecture more broadly, and the character became a lasting symbol in Western literature of inner gentleness and love persisting beneath a frightening exterior, and of a society's cruelty toward those it deems monstrous.