The Grimace

His whole person was a grimace. His prodigious head was covered with red bristles; between his shoulders rose an enormous hump... His feet were immense, his hands monstrous; but, with all this deformity, he possessed a formidable air of strength, agility, and courage, constituting a singular exception to the eternal rule which ordains that force, as well as beauty, shall result from harmony.

It's Quasimodo the Hunchback himself! Originally I was going to continue the trend of drawing the characters of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in pairs. I had planned on drawing Quasimodo and Phoebus and titling it something along the lines of "The Fair and the Ugly" - but the hunchback ended up taking over an entire page of my sketchbook. So here he is - alone.

We shall not attempt to give the reader any idea... of that horseshoe mouth, of that little left eye, obscured by a bristly red eyebrow, while the right was completely overwhelmed and buried by an enormous wart; of those irregular teeth, jagged here and there like the battlements of a fortress; of that horny lip, over which one of those teeth protruded, like the tusk of an elephant... and, above all, of the expression, that mixture of spite, astonishment, and melancholy, spread over all these features. Imagine such an object, if you can.

(The above expression was one I tried to portray in the lower left drawing.)

The quote is taken from a song that the hunchback sang to Esmeralda ( [link] ):

They were verses without rhyme, such as a deaf man might make.

Do not look at the face,
Young girl, look at the heart,
The heart of a handsome young man is often deformed.
There are hearts where love does not last.
Young girl, the fir is not beautiful.
It is not beautiful like the poplar,
But it keeps its foliage in winter.
Alas! What good is it to say this?
That which is not beautiful is wrong to be at all.
Beauty loves only beauty,
April turns its back on January.
Beauty is perfect,
Beauty is capable of anything.
Beauty is the only thing that does not exist in half measures.
The crow flies only in the day.
The owl flies only at night.
The swan flies day and night.

Sorry for such a long description! I would welcome any comments you have. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo is an amazing book. I recommend it. Have you read it? What is your opinion?

I fixed up the scan this time with a pencil brush that you can find here [link] . I think it was really great to fix up my pencil drawings without losing the texture.

~ For more Hunchback of Notre Dame art:
Pierre Gringoire and Esmeralda [link]
Jehan Frollo du Moulin and his brother Claude Frollo [link]
and more of Claude [link]