This ain't the Hunchback of Notre Dame

[Terrance]

What is it? 
A book? 
A Woman? 


That a cathedral will so exist as a temporal phenomenon in disparate
consciousness is realized by Victor Hugo in his eponymous novel centered
on Notre Dame de Paris. He writes of the devotion to it "at that period"
of two beings "so unlike as [the archdeacon] Claude and Quasimodo ­
loved by one, a sort of half-human creature, for its beauty, for its
stature, for the harmonies dwelling in the magnificent whole; loved by
the other, a being of cultivated and ardent imagination, for its
signification, its mystic meaning, the symbolic language lurking under
the sculpture on its front, like the
first text under the second in a palimpsestus ­ in short, for the enigma
which it eternally proposes to the understanding." Throughout Notre Dame
de Paris Hugo is constantly aware of; as he expresses it, "'that
singular assimilation, symmetrical, immediate ­ consubstantial almost ­
of a man to a building." And equally correspondence existing between
cathedral as a creation and creation as a cathedral: "a
sort of human Creation," he writes, "[...] mighty and prolific as the
Divine Creation of which it seems to have caught the double character-
variety and eternity."