BELGRADE, THURSDAY

THE INSIDE IS READY, the outside is still being renovated. But Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris is ready enough for its most famous resident to move back in. The Hunchback of Notre Dame will ring the church bells again some time before Christmas.

“We don’t know when, exactly,” said a spokesman for the Archbishop of Paris. “He’s a secretive character, as you may know, always disappearing and reappearing; he just pops up when he feels like it. No one knows exactly where he lives inside the building. It had been hoped that the restoration crew might discover his lair, but they found nothing.”

It was thought that the 2019 fire that consumed the world famous cathedral had either taken the life of the resident hunchback or at least driven him elsewhere, but a small note to President Macron while the building was being restored, with some recommendations about redesign, led the French Government to suspect that once Notre Dame was back in action, so would its hunchback.

“Where would the cathedral be without the hunchback?” said literary historian Charles Laughton, whose transcription of the legendary Hugo novel into Indo-European won him the Nobel Prize for Earnestness in 2020. “Quasimodo lives as long as the cathedral lives.”