The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
By Victor Hugo

And if you would receive from the ancient city an impression that the modern cannot provide, go up (on the morning of some high holiday, at sunrise on Easter or Pentecost) to some elevated point from which you may overlook the whole capitol, and listen to the awakening of the bells. Behold at a sign form heaven, because it comes form the sun itself, those thousand churches trembling all at once. At first a faint tinkling passes from church to church, as when musicians give notice that they are going to begin. Then see, for at certain times the ear too seems to be endowed with sight- see how, all of a sudden, at the same moment, there rises from each steeple as it were a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. At first the vibration of each bell rises straight, pure, and in a manner separate from that of the others, into the splendid morning sky; then, swelling by degrees, they blend, melt, intermingle, and amalgamate into a magnificent concert.
This is an opera truly worth listening to. Normally the noises that Paris makes in the daytime represent the city talking; at night the city breathes. In this case the city sings. Lend your ear then to this tutti of steeples; listen to the buzzing of half a million human beings, the eternal murmur of the river, the infinite breathing of the wind, the grave and distant quartet of the four forests placed like immense organs on the four hills of the horizon. Soften, as with a demi-tint, all that is too shrill and too harsh in the central mass of sound- and say if you know anything in the world more rich, more joyful, more golden, more overwhelming, than that tumult of bells, than that furnace of music, than those ten thousand voices of bronze singing all at once from flutes of stone three hundred feet high, than that city which has become an orchestra, than that symphony which roars like a storm.