As Notre Dame Cathedral burned and the world’s grief mounted, one artist channeled her own emotion by imagining how the church’s most famous fictional denizen – its hunchbacked bell ringer – might have responded to the calamity.
Quasimodo, the Disney cartoon version, embraces the iconic Paris landmark – complete with twin towers – in a drawing by Cristina Correa Freile that quickly earned more than 160,000 social media supporters.
“I made (this) because of what’s happening right now,” said the architect and illustrator, who lives in Ecuador. “The world embraces Notre Dame right now.”
The physically deformed Quasimodo is the central character of Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” which tells the tale of his obsession with the beautiful Esmeralda. The story was told on the big screen in 1939, then Disney remade it in 1996 as a cartoon.
Correa Freile, who said she loved her two visits to Paris, posted her drawing Monday on Instagram, where it quickly went viral.
“It’s an overwhelming feeling,” she said, “to see that everyone post the drawing and share the feeling.”
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