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Tonight's guest is Kenneth Branagh.
The Hunchback of Strasbourg has considerably less renown than the Hunchback of Notre Dame in Paris. Although both were associated with cathedrals called Notre Dame, and both had the same unfortunate physical deformity, the Parisian hunchback Quasimodo had the good fortune of having his life chronicled by the eminent French Romanticist of the 19th century. Almost immediately upon publication of his story, Hunchback tours began to be arranged for visitors to Paris, and within a century, Hollywood raised his celebrity level to the stratosphere.
The Strasbourg Hunchback, Antoine, instead had the misfortune of having his story chronicled in an obscure Edinburgh journal, where it immediately faded out of the public eye, and today even the locals know nothing about him. He would often bitterly remark on the Parisian Hunchback's fame, saying "I, too, am a contender." More obscurely, he would add, "if I am cut, do I not bleed?"
There were other differences between them, as well. Whereas Quasimodo was a pitiable deaf-mute brute, Antoine was urbane, literate, and grew roses in his spare time. Rather than depending on the pity of a woman as a way of obtaining feminine companionship, he obtained it the time honored way, by paying for it. Demimonderelda, his steady companion, had a hard headed sense of her bottom line, and after all, she wasn't getting any younger.
Perhaps this even-keeled life and its lack of high drama is what kept Antoine out of the limelight. Quasimodo starved to death while curled up next to his dead girlfriend in a grave, whereas Antoine merely saved his father from the guillotine. And he did this by using his brain. For the French, there is no question as to which of these actions are more meaningful, and Victor Hugo never had any doubt which story he would tell.
There are more Hunchback stories that are waiting to be told. It is practically axiomatic that if there exists a church or institution called Notre Dame, somewhere lurking within the bowels of its history or its physical plant, one usually finds a hunchback. There is Quelleriffe, the Hunchback of Quebec, or Bert, the Hunchback of South Bend, not to mention the Metrosexual Hunchback of New York City, known simply as Nomo.
Speaking of French things, how about Georges, the Escargot?
Here's the backside view of Georges, the French Escargot
Craig gets emails...and introduces the world to "fergasms".