Today we were supposed to be embarking on our new nightly yarn in our monthly series of audio adventures Tales for Our Time. But after the incendiary start to Holy Week in France I thought we'd postpone it a few days and instead present a Good Friday special edition featuring selections from The Hunchback of Notre Dame - or, to give it Victor Hugo's title in French, Notre-Dame de Paris. Because, as much as it's about Quasimodo and Esmeralda, it's also about the building, the cathedral. That's one reason why this Easter weekend a near-two-hundred-year-old novel is the Number One bestselling book in France.
On the night of the fire, an Ontario member of The Mark Steyn Club, Nicola Timmerman, wrote to remind me of the first page of Hugo's great work, a memory of a forgotten graffito, a Greek word scrolled on the wall of the cathedral - ananke:
With the exception of the fragile memory which the author of this book here consecrates to it, there remains to-day nothing whatever of the mysterious word engraved within the gloomy tower of Notre-Dame,—nothing of the destiny which it so sadly summed up. The man who wrote that word upon the wall disappeared from the midst of the generations of man many centuries ago; the word, in its turn, has been effaced from the wall of the church; the church will, perhaps, itself soon disappear from the face of the earth.
It is upon this word that this book is founded.
What follows is just under an hour in the company of Victor Hugo as architecture critic, as historian, and of course as novelist. Prefaced by my introduction, we take a tour of Notre Dame, survey the history of Paris as seen from its rooftops, take in the bells of the city on an Easter morn, and finally meet the bellringer himself, Quasimodo. Along the way we also hear music from two of the earliest adaptations of the book - Pugni's 1844 ballet La Esmeralda, and Dargomyzhsky's 1847 opera Esmeralda.
To hear me read these selections from Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris, please click here and log-in.
As I've emphasized since we launched The Mark Steyn Club almost two years ago, our regular content - all my daily commentary, cultural and geopolitical essays, our weekend movie and music features, SteynPosts and Mark's Mailbox and all the rest - will always be free to everyone around the planet. In fact, every week we now offer more free content than at any point in our sixteen-year history. But we have spent the last couple of years letting Club members in on a few experimental features which we might eventually make more widely available. Tales for Our Time is one such experiment: If you're not a Club member (or you are but you've never partaken of this series) you can hear what you're missing in our first-birthday Tales for Our Times sampler, a 75-minute audio special hosted by me and including excerpts from some of our ripping yarns of the last year - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, H G Wells, John Buchan, Jack London, Scott Fitzgerald and Robert Louis Stevenson. And, if it whets your appetite, you can find the above authors and a dozen more collected here.
I'm truly thrilled to see that our nightly radio serials have proved one of the most popular of our Club extras these last two years. I did do a little professional story-reading a zillion years ago, so, if these fancies tickle you, we may release them as audio books on CD or Audible a ways down the road. But for the moment it's an exclusive bonus for members. If you've enjoyed our monthly Steyn Club radio adventures and you're looking for a present for a fellow fan of classic fiction, I hope you'll consider our special Club Gift Membership. Aside from Tales for Our Time, The Mark Steyn Club does come with other benefits:
~Exclusive Steyn Store member pricing on over 40 books, mugs, T-shirts, and other products;
~The opportunity to engage in live Clubland Q&A sessions with yours truly (the latest airs this coming week);
~Transcript and audio versions of The Mark Steyn Show, SteynPosts, and our other video content;
~My video series of classic poetry (like last weekend's);
~Priority booking for the second annual Mark Steyn Club Cruise (but hurry - like our maiden voyage, it's almost sold out);
~Advance booking for my live appearances around the world, including my next tour with Dennis Miller;
~Customized email alerts for new content in your areas of interest;
~and the opportunity to support our print, audio and video ventures as they wing their way around the planet.
To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget that special Gift Membership. As soon as you join, you'll get access not only to Notre-Dame de Paris but to all the other audio adventures listed below.
One other benefit to membership is our Comment Club privileges. So, whether you like my reading of this twenty-fifth Tale for Our Time or feel minded to burn it to the ground, then feel free to comment away below.
For previous Tales for Our Time, click below:
#1: The Tragedy of the Korosko
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#2: The Time Machine
by H G Wells
#3: The Secret Agent
by Joseph Conrad
#4: The Prisoner of Zenda
by Anthony Hope
#5: The Cat That Walked By Himself
by Rudyard Kipling
#6: The Diamond as Big as the Ritz
by F Scott Fitzgerald
#7: The Rubber Check
by F Scott Fitzgerald
#8: A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens
#9: Plum Duff
by Mark Steyn
#10: To Build a Fire
by Jack London
#11: The Overcoat
by Nikolai Gogol
#12: The Thirty-Nine Steps
by John Buchan
#13: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson
#14: The Man Who Would Be King
by Rudyard Kipling
#15: His Last Bow
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#16: Greenmantle
by John Buchan
#17: Metamorphosis
by Franz Kafka
#18: The Scarlet Pimpernel
by Baroness Orczy
#19: Little Women at Christmas
by Louisa May Alcott
#20: The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#21: The Gift of the Magi
by O Henry
#22: Anne of Green Gables: An Unfortunate Lily Maid
by L M Montgomery
#23: With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 AD
by Rudyard Kipling
#24: As Easy as ABC
by Rudyard Kipling
