On Sanctuary: Writing The Hunchback of Notre-Dame for the Littlest Rea

On Sanctuary: Writing The Hunchback of Notre-Dame for the Littlest Readers

Of all the books I have written for Noellie Las Classiques, none has held my heart quite the way this one has, and I think I knew from the very first line that I was not simply adapting a novel but keeping watch over something sacred. Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris has always felt to me less like a story and more like a cathedral of its own, vaulted with sorrow and mercy and light, and when I sat down to retell it for the smallest hands, I wanted every couplet to carry the weight and the wonder of the original.

Beginning With the Cathedral

I began where Hugo began, with Notre-Dame herself, because I could not imagine this story told any other way. Hugo wrote his novel in 1831 partly as a plea to save a cathedral Paris had begun to neglect, and his words stirred an entire nation to restore her, so it felt only right that in my retelling she would stand as a character in her own right rather than a backdrop. When I watched her burn in 2019 and then heard her bells ring out again over the city in December of 2024, I understood more deeply than ever that beautiful things are entrusted to us for safekeeping, and that every generation must learn to love them anew.

Writing Quasimodo With Tenderness

The choice I cared about most was how I would write Quasimodo, because it would have been easy to frame his life around loneliness, and I simply could not bear to do that to him. Hugo tells us he was named for the Sunday after Easter, the day he was found and taken in, and so I wrote him as a soul held within the cathedral's walls like a child within a family, loving her stones and her towers and above all her great bells, whose voices he knew the way one knows the voice of a beloved. I wanted the children reading this book to see him first as someone who loves deeply, long before they ever see him as someone the world misunderstood.

The Page I Wrote for Mercy

The whole book turns on a single moment I have carried with me since I first read it, when Quasimodo is mocked before a jeering crowd and Esmeralda alone climbs up to offer him water. Having spent years studying how beauty forms the soul, I have come to believe that children learn mercy less from being told about it than from being shown it, and so I wrote that page slowly, hoping little ones would pause there and feel how one gentle kindness can live inside a heart for a lifetime. Our Lord promised that even a cup of cold water given to one of His little ones would never be forgotten, and Quasimodo, in his own way, never forgets.

Sanctuary

When Esmeralda stands in danger and Quasimodo carries her into the cathedral crying out for sanctuary, the doors of Notre-Dame close around her like arms, and I wrote that moment as the swelling crescendo of the whole book. It gathers everything I believe about this story into one truth a toddler can feel in the rise and fall of a couplet, that love given freely returns to us, and that the house of God was always meant to be a refuge for the weary and the wandering.

Keeping Faith With Hugo

My first draft was only nine couplets long, and when I held it beside the printed pages of The Odyssey and Hamlet, I realized this story deserved the same fullness, so I let it grow until it reached eighteen. I kept it Hugo's rather than a cartoon's, down to the smallest details, which is why Esmeralda's little goat Djali wears the gilded horns, gilded hooves, and golden collar Hugo himself gave her, and why the cathedral is painted in thick, tender gouache that lets her stone glow like candlelight upon the page.

For the Children Who Will Hear It

I hope this little book finds its way into nurseries where the evening reading lingers a moment longer than planned, where small fingers trace the towers and the rose window, and where a parent's voice slows over the final line I wrote, Notre-Dame remained a sanctuary — for one, and for all. I pray the children who hear it grow into the kind of people who offer water to the one the crowd has turned against, and who open their doors, as the cathedral once did, to whoever comes knocking in the dark.