The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Book 6, Chapter 2 summary

What happens

1. At ten in the morning, townspeople gather amid festival rubbish, and mounted sergeants attract spectators hoping to see an execution.
2. The narrator describes a barred, doorless cell in the Tour-Roland beside a public prayer book.
3. Madame Rolande de la Tour-Roland establishes the cell to mourn her father and spends twenty years there before death.
4. She leaves the cell for grieving or penitent women, and the city places a prayer book nearby to encourage charity.
5. The narrator describes similar urban cells and contrasts public reverence for penance with limited concern for suffering.
6. An inscription asks passersby to pray, but the people give the cell its familiar name, the Rat-Hole.

What to notice

The cell’s inscription gives its architecture a religious meaning. Its popular nickname instead emphasizes its cramped, gloomy physical character.

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