Gringoire and the Crowd : High and Dry in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame 
In the first and second books of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, the crowd is a true agent of the narrative, and its main function is to leave Gringoire high and dry. This paper examines the way in which Victor Hugo’s text establishes the metaphorical equivalence between crowd and water, and qualifies the perception that critics have had of the crowds in this great Parisian novel. From then on, we can better measure the natural and cultural forces determining the destiny of this poet who, in the first hundred pages of the work, holds the upper hand all the while tumbling down.