Every year some 12 million visitors, watched silently by a menagerie of Gothic gargoyles, chimeras and grotesques, teem through the portals of Notre-Dame de Paris. Some, of course, come to pray. Most come to take photographs, bathe in the plays of kaleidoscopic light through great rose windows, stare into the high-pointed vaults, listen for bells and, perhaps, sense something of the mysterious, miraculous and even diabolical.

In the popular imagination, Notre-Dame has long been the most gothic of Gothic churches. And yet we owe much of its theatricality to Victor Hugo, whose 1831 novel was set in the magnificent cathedral. English speakers know it as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.

The Telegraph London