Now a bit over a third of the way through The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I know I got this far, the first time, because I remember the chapter I just read: a lengthy monograph on how printing supplanted architecture. Victor Hugo seems rather given to that sort of verbose interpolation. Seems like this is at least part of what Goldman was poking fun at in The Princess Bride, with his supposed "abridgments" of hundreds of pages of [entirely imaginary] material that advanced neither plot nor characters.
For some reason, I remembered this from my first attempt on the book, but completely forgot the preceding chapter with Dom Claude Frollo denouncing astrology and medicine (not that the medicine of Hugo's medieval Paris was anything but pure superstition), while expounding on the virtues of alchemy.
At any rate, Victor Hugo makes Tolkien seem terse, and ADF at his most verbose seem downright laconic.
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