Victor Hugo: The Complete Novels + A Biography of the Author E-Book

Victor Hugo

• Herausgeber: Book House Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

This book contains several HTML tables of contents.The first table of contents (at the very beginning of the ebook) lists the titles of all novels included in this volume. By clicking on one of those titles you will be redirected to the beginning of that work, where you'll find a new TOC that lists all the chapters and sub-chapters of that specific work.This book contains the complete novels of Victor Hugo in the chronological order of their original publication.- Hans of Iceland- Bug-Jargal- The Last Day of a Condemned Man- The Hunchback of Notre-Dame- Claude Gueux- Les Misérables- Toilers of the Sea- The Man Who Laughs- Ninety-Three

Leseprobe

Victor Hugo

THE COMPLETE NOVELS

2017 © Book House Publishing

[email protected]

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic,

mechanical, photocopying,

recording or otherwise,

without prior permission of

Book House.

Get your next Book House Publishing title for Kindle here

Table of Contents

Victor Hugo — An Extensive Biography

Hans of Iceland

Bug-Jargal

The Last Day of a Condemned Man

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Claude Gueux

Les Misérables

Toilers of the Sea

The Man Who Laughs

Ninety-Three

Victor Hugo — An Extensive Biography

by Mary Duclaux

Chapter 1 — Childhood

Chapter 2 — The Return to France

Chapter 3 — Royalist Paris

Chapter 4 — The First Gleams of Glory

Chapter 5 — First Love

Chapter 6 — The Bridegroom and His Brother

Chapter 7 — Life Is an Ode

Chapter 8 — A Prince of Poets

Chapter 9 — From “Cromwell” to “Hernani”

Chapter 10 — “Hernani”

Chapter 11 — 1830

Chapter 12 — “Notre-Dame de Paris”

Chapter 13 — Autumn and Twilight

Chapter 14 — The Princess Negroni

Chapter 15 — Eliduc

Chapter 16 — Victor Hugo as Ruy Blas

Chapter 17 — 1848

Chapter 18 — The “Coup d’État”

Chapter 19 — A Volcano in Eruption

Chapter 20 — Contemplation

Chapter 21 — The Zenith

Chapter 22 — The Close of a Chapter

Chapter 23 — The Exile’s Return

Chapter 24 — The Last Sheaf of Harvest

Chapter 25 — The Buddha On the Bracket

Chapter 1 — Childhood

TheFrance into which Victor Hugo was born was not unlike our recent world of the Great War. The armies of the Republic, having repelled the invaders, had seethed over her borders into Holland, into Italy. All Europe was in ebullition, and felt the dread of the triumphant conqueror who led the armies of France.

Eighteen Hundred and Two. Sparta gives way to Rome.

Napoleon begins to bud in Bonaparte.

Now where the Emperor’s forehead presses home

The mask of the First Consul bursts apart.

‘Twas in Besançon, an old Spanish city,

A child was born, by chance, — a wind-swept grain

Whose double root was Brittany, Lorraine, —

Mute, sightless, pale was he, a thing to pity,

So faint, so frail, no baby but a ghost,

All, save his mother, gave him up for lost.

His fragile neck fell sideways like a reed,

His cradle and his coffin came together:

This child whose name Life would not write or read,

This dying child that could not hope to weather

The morrow of his birth — ‘Tis I!

Victor was but six weeks old when his father, CommandantJoseph Léopold Sigisbert Hugo, was sent from Besançon to Marseilles, — and thence to Corsica, to Elba, accompanied in all these changes of garrison by his wife and his three little boys: Victor had too elder brothers, Abel and Eugène. But this hard and roving life tried too severely the feeble health of the youngest-born. When, in 1804, the Major was ordered to Italy, to the front, the young mother felt that her place was not on a battlefield. She parted from her husband, took her babies to Paris, and devoted herself to the care of them. Not till October 1807 did she take them to rejoin their father, now Colonel Hugo, Governor of the province of Avellino and the right hand of Joseph Bonaparte, King of Naples. Napoleon’s Roman peace had settled on the reluctant conquered country, and the Governor of Avellino thought to offer his family a settled and illustrious home.

Of that long journey Victor, who was but five years old, remembered little: a sledge-ride on the snow of the Alps; the grey, piled roofs of Susa, a flood at Parma, the bridge of Saint-Angelo at Rome, and the barracks:

où mon père, jeune homme,

Nous regardait jouer dans la caserne à Rome,

A cheval sur la grande épée, tout petits,

and Naples shining in the sunshine with the sea at her feet; the child said that the city wore a white dress fringed with blue.

Naples was a glimpse, an unforgettable vision, and the little band went still farther south. They stopped at Avellino, where the Governor of the province, Colonel Hugo, in full uniform, stood waiting to greet them on the steps of a great marble palace, fissured by earthquakes. The child remembered of Italy what a child can grasp: the vast room in which he slept alone, with a rift in the wall through which he saw the changing landscape outside; the brilliance of the air, the golden sunshine, the burning heat, the general splendour of the scene; but especially the precipices, filled with nut-bushes that, in the eyes of a little boy, made the peculiar charm of that great landscape. The nuts of Avellino are famous the world over; their oval “avelines” are larger than any other hazels; and when the Hugo children discovered that Victor, by a fortunate idiosyncrasy, was insensible to giddiness, they saw that he spent most of his time clambering about the almost perpendicular walls of those ravines gathering nuts. I have often wondered whether the poet’s frequent use of the metaphors or images, “abîme,” “gouffre,” “précipice,” and even “la bouche d’ombre,” may not be due to that early experience; he had felt the attraction of the abyss at an age when most children stray not far beyond the kitchen-garden. At five years old he observed and remembered. And Colonel Hugo, writing to his mother in Burgundy, remarked that the child was already unusually sedate and deliberate.

Abel is the most amiable of boys, tall, polite, more deliberate than children are generally at his age, and, like his brothers, very good-tempered.

Eugène has the handsomest face in the world, and is as lively as quicksilver — less inclined, I fancy, to study than his brothers.

Victor, the youngest, shows a great aptitude for learning. He is as deliberate as his elder brother and very thoughtful. He speaks little, and always to the purpose. His reflections have often struck me. He has a very sweet face.

This sweet but solemn baby showed already one of the chief qualities of the future poet’s genius: the faculty of absorption, of reflection, of an extraordinary retentiveness. Already in this early journey he acquired the first elements of that sense of glory which in later years enabled him to represent with such splendour in his verse the great adventure and the nomadic triumphs of the Empire. As he was to sing in his Odes et Ballades (“Mon Enfance”), in an early poem still embued with the stiff, almost stilted, quality of Napoleon’s epoch:

My childhood in the world of war was spent

‘Mid the piled arms, the dusty wains, the tent —

I’ve slept upon the gun-carriage o’ nights.

I loved the fiery chargers and their manes,

The stirrup’s creaking where the bright spur bites.

I loved the thundering forts with lofty flanks,

The drawn sword of the chief leading the ranks,

The mounted sentry in a lonely glade,

The tried battalions marching through the towns

With a torn banner, all its wounds displayed.

My envious soul admired the swift hussar,

His breast embroidered with the gold of war,

The lancer, all his snowy plumes a-stir,

The tall dragoon whose Scythian helmet flaunts

A mare’s tail mingled with a tiger’s fur.

Victor’s wanderings were far from finished. His father’s chief, Joseph Bonaparte, was barely settled on his throne in Naples, contented with his lot and determined to conciliate his people, when Napoleon decided to create him King of Spain. This meant leaving Italy and conquering an unwilling and unwanted crown. Spain was in no humour to recognize the monarch thrust upon her; Spain, like King Joseph, would rather matters had remained as they were, but it was impossible to gainsay the glorious tyrant who shaped Europe as it suited his fancy. Joseph with a sigh left the sunny Chiaja and set out at the head of his troops. The Governor of Avellino felt in honour bound to accompany his patron upon his dangerous expedition, but it was naturally impossible to undertake the Peninsular War in the company of a young wife and her babies. Madame Hugo and the little boys were regretfully sent back to Paris after a brief year’s visit, leaving in the future poet’s imagination no accurate image but

Un vague faisceau de lueurs incertaines

a wandering cluster of uncertain gleams. Farewell to blue seas and marble palaces rent by earthquakes! Italy counts for little in the formation of Victor Hugo — he was but six years old when he left it! — he perceived of all that grandeur and beauty just such a haunting glimpse as he caught of the landscape of Avellino through the rift in his bedroom wall.

When Madame Hugo brought her two younger boys, Eugène and Victor, to Paris in 1808, she took a temporary lodging in the rue de Clichy; but, after the palace at Avellino, how cramped and narrow seemed the Parisian flat! Madame Hugo was no townswoman. At fifteen years of age, during the civil war in Vendée, she had scoured the woods of the Bocage with Madame de la Rochejacquelein; as a woman of thirty she still loved air, space, and a noble adventure. She was to find them all in a roomy old house with a garden on the southern side of the Seine. It was a portion of the ancient convent of the Feuillantines left untouched by the Revolution: — Impasse des Feuillantines, No. 12 — an isolated mansion in a deserted quarter of the left bank of the Seine. The garden had long since run wild, it was full of trees and birds, with in one comer a ruined chapel, less a town garden than a park, deep and vast, shut in by high walls, almost a field in the middle, at the edges almost a wood. Paris had many such gardens in 1808, and has some still; one such waves its unpruned loose-hanging branches below my balcony even as I write. When Madame Hugo took her little lads to inspect this fairyland they greeted it with shouts of delight, rushing here and there like wild things: here at last was the equivalent of the abyss of Avellino! Their eyes were not large enough nor their legs long enough to take in all its possibilities.

“See what I’ve found!”

“Oh, that’s nothing. Look here!”

“Oh! Oh! A swing!”

“An avenue of horse-chestnuts!”

“A cistern gone dry! A fort! It’ll make a fort!”

“I say! Come here!”

“Apples! Oh, and pears! oh, and a trellis of grapes!”

“And they’re ripe!”

I doubt if the future poet in his career of perhaps unparalleled glory was ever to know happier hours.

Three brothers; each was but a little lad;

Our mother bade us play, but she forbad

The ladders and the flower-beds in the grass;

Three brothers — I the youngest of the three —

We munched our crusts with such a hungry glee

The women laughed aloud to see us pass.

Madame Hugo was not very sensitive to the charms of Nature; she cared little enough for mountains and landscapes, but she loved a garden, and, more than anything, she loved the health and happiness of her boys: those years in the Impasse des Feuillantines were probably the pleasantest of her life.

We know all about that garden — not only from Victor Hugo’s poetry, though more than once he has described that early Eden — but also from the author of Victor Hugo raconté par un témoin de sa vie, in later years the poet’s wife, but in those early times a little playmate, a comrade, one year younger than Victor, who shared all their fun, stormed their forts with the boys, and sometimes, with bandaged eyes, was driven in the wheelbarrow from end to end of their domain, and not let free until she had guessed the exact spot where she stood. There was the swing, too; Adèle Foucher, trembling and protesting, was launched high in the air by three vigorous pairs of arms; but none of the boys could swing himself so high as Victor — right up into the branches of the trees, as though he never meant to come down!

The garden was so full of trees and flowers and birds and rabbits, that one scarcely knew which to prefer: the first lilacs and crocuses in spring, the long summer evenings, the apples and grapes of autumn or the snowballs in winter; the garden was not only our poet’s fairyland, but his school. He had, however, another master. Madame Hugo was a Royalist; she discovered in the neighbourhood an ex-priest of the Oratory, the Père de La Rivière, nominally married (in order to put the hounds of the recent Revolution off the scent) to an old housekeeper of his, who waited on him still. The “Père de La Rivière,” ex-priest, ex-aristocrat, had become the “Père Larivière” (or, as we might say, Daddy Rivers), who taught reading and writing to the shopkeepers’ children of the quarter. He furbished up his half-forgotten Greek and Latin for the little Hugos; and the poet always retained a kind remembrance of this early tutor, “naïf comme un savant, malin comme un enfant.” Three-and-forty years after, in an hour of deadly peril, when he had to escape from Paris under a feigned name (which while hiding his identity might still be recognized by his wife), he chose the name of his old master, the Père Larivière.

This old hedge-schoolmaster of the Paris streets was not Victor Hugo’s principal tutor. It so fell out that a more important part of his education was to be undertaken by his godfather — an unknown godfather whom the child had rarely seen. General Lahorie had been a comrade of General Hugo’s when both were young, during the campaign in Vendée. Since then Lahorie had fallen upon evil days. He was one of those old captains of the First Republic who in their hearts had never accepted General Bonaparte’s elevation to the Empire. They were Republicans, these old soldiers; but if it were shown that a monarchy was a necessity of State, they would have preferred a legitimate king, their born superior, to a fortunate comrade-at-arms. In disgust of Napoleon, Lahorie had conspired with General Moreau to restore the Bourbons. Moreau’s plot had been discovered in 1804 and the two Generals had been condemned to death, but had contrived to escape — Moreau out of France, Lahorie into hiding, travelling as it were underground from one friend’s house to another. By 1808 he had pretty well worn out his welcome, his old haunts were all known to the police, a price was on his head; he was at his wits’ end where to go. It was then that Madame Hugo discovered the deserted convent and the abandoned garden of the rue des Feuillantines. The brave lady took into her charge the man who was her Victor’s godfather and sheltered him for a year and a half. Even the children at first did not know of the refugee, who took up his quarters in an abandoned chapel, converted into a sort of tool-house, in the grounds — the one spot, the one forbidden Bluebeard’s chamber, where they were not allowed to penetrate: their mother kept the key. But, of course, at last these intrepid little marauders discovered the General; they were sworn to secrecy, and thenceforth he was their companion. “Il comprenait les jeux.” He told them wonderful stories; he served camp-dinners on the garden-steps; he read Tacitus with Victor and gave him all Voltaire’s plays. His godson never forgot certain of his phrases — the solemn way, for instance, in which he once said, “Avant tout, la liberté!” Victor had been accustomed to hear more often of “la gloire...” In the eyes of General Lahorie the friends of liberty were generally the enemies of Napoleon. Despite his seclusion, he had resumed his plotting and his planning with the partisans of the Bourbons. Madame Hugo, as I have said, was a Royalist; and I cannot help wondering whether she were not an aider and abettor in some of these conspiracies — whether, perhaps, her real aim in taking the roomy solitary house and forsaken garden of the Impasse des Feuillantines were not the facility which they afforded for secret comings and goings. There, at any rate, Lahorie lived in safety, undiscovered, invisible and happy. At last, one day in 1810, the Minister of Police having assured a common friend that so belated a conspirator ran no risk of arrest and that the General might walk the streets of Paris a free man, Lahorie left that enchanted garden. His little playmates were never to see him again! On the morrow he was again arrested and thrown into prison — a prison which he was to leave but for one day, in 1812.

Meanwhile Victor Hugo began to appreciate Napoleon.

In the case of so retentive a nature we cannot exaggerate the importance of first impressions.

One which was always to remain with Victor Hugo was that of the Strong Man, silent and still, unmoved by the stir that his glory awakes in an attentive and enthusiastic world, dominating his environment in an Olympian calm.

One of his earliest memories was the illumination of all Paris for the birth of the King of Rome in 1811. “J’avais sept ans,” he says; but he was really nine. The triumph and festival that irradiated all the city penetrated even the garden of the Feuillantines, and Victor, excited, exalted, escaped from his mother’s care (she hated to see her boys running after soldiers) and followed the crowd to the neighbouring Place du Panthéon. There was such a throng as the child had never seen, soldiers, citizens, all singing at the top of their voices: “Veillons au salut de l’Empire.” The sides of the square and all the neighbouring streets were packed with troops, and in the middle there was a space of glory, hedged round by the Old Guard, where, followed by a train of kings and princes, appeared Napoleon. He alone was apparently unmoved. He stood there mute, grave, rather shabby, in his old cocked hat and legendary grey great-coat that seemed to mock the dazzling uniforms of his satellites.

Victor was puzzled: Why was the Emperor so much less splendid? Are splendour, noise, applause, a form of homage rendered by inferiors?

For some reason, General Hugo was in Paris. The children seldom saw their father,

Ce héros au sourire si doux,

whom they were to learn to love in after life; but they revered him as a supreme court of appeal. On the morrow, therefore, as father and son were walking on the slope of Saint Geneviève’s Hill, the child put the question to his father: Why were the kings, the generals, and even the soldiers, so noisy and so splendid, and the Emperor so shabby and so calm? The sun was setting and all the western sky was aflame while the town at their feet looked grey and still. The General thought a moment, and then replied, “You must never go by appearances! There is more flame in the centre of that grey earth than in those fiery clouds! The Emperor, too, is full of secret fire and unevident splendours:

Ainsi travaille, enfant, l’âme active et féconde

Du poète qui crée et du soldat qui fonde,

Mais ils n’en font rien voir.

This vision of the Emperor and this explanation of his father’s crystallized in the child’s mind. At seven years old — or rather at nine years old — they inspired him with the idea of a dignity inherent in itself and superior to circumstance — a first conception of the Olympian.

The impression was soon to be deepened and strengthened by a long visit to Spain. There was a certain affinity of nature between the little boy who, at five years old, had been described as “sedate and deliberate” and the Spanish conception of the Hidalgo: Something austere, and yet a little emphatic; reserved, but magnificent; and grandiose perhaps rather than simply great. Above all, the spectacle of a conquered country resisting in every fibre the dominion of the conqueror, and esteeming itself vastly superior to that conqueror, enforced in the child’s mind the sense, already conceived, that exterior success and triumph should not be considered as essential goods. Self-approval, self-esteem are more important than the applause of others. Dignity, perseverance, strength of will, and even obstinacy, are arms sufficient, with which a valiant soul may achieve its true victory in this world...

General Hugo was King Joseph’s right-hand man in Spain; he was Governor of Madrid and Count of the Empire, and was admirably lodged in the splendid palace of Prince Masserano. But he had little leisure to enjoy its magnificence. Spain was in a state of seething unrest. The French army of occupation was incessantly harassed. The General was absent when his wife and children arrived in Madrid, and for six delightful weeks the three little lads ran wild in palace and patio, saturated with sunshine, with beauty and splendour, with the delicious brilliant far-niente of the South. But at last the father came home; and the General (if he had thought his labours at an end for a while as an imposer of discipline) found at home new worlds to conquer. On the following Monday Eugène and Victor were sent to school; Abel, the eldest, being twelve years of age, was reserved for the glory of a Royal Page at Court.

The school which opened its immense and heavy gates to receive the two little French brothers was the College of Nobles. The masters were monks; the pupils were Spaniards of the bluest blood, inwardly disdainful of the sons of the invader. These young hidalgos addressed each other by their titles: “Count,” “Marquis.” They were full of arrogance and pride. They knew to a nicety the value of a title or a coat of arms, and doubtless were aware that Don Eugenio de Hugo and Don Bittor de Hugo were viscounts, and indeed nobles, of a very recent date. Between these newcomers and their environment a secret hostility was intensified by an impulsive act of Madame Hugo’s. Mistrustful of the sombre passion inherent in Spanish Catholicism, and aware of the vibrating delicacy of her children’s nervous constitution, she had declared to the deep-eyed monk who took her sons in charge that they were Protestants — in order to secure them against his religious instruction. Her Voltairean equanimity had not realized the full measure of the disfavour to which she exposed her little boys: Conquerors, heretics, enemy aliens, the young Hugos were not loved. Eugène bore in his cheek the mark of a stab, dealt (with a pair of scissors) by the hand of Frasco, Count of Belverano, a warrior of his own age. Victor had his own troubles with another pupil called Elespuru. He neither forgave nor forgot; years later, de Belverano was to figure as the least sympathetic personage in Lucrezia Borgia, and Elespuru as one of the quartet of fools in Cromwell.

This severe and claustral education was perhaps, on the whole, a beneficial change from the charming riot and gay liberty that attended Madame Hugo’s system of free natural growth and expansion. The children learned the meaning of self-control, discipline; they acquired a high ideal of courtesy. A certain gravity and ceremonial in these young Spaniards attracted Victor. For one of them he formed a friendship which, with his customary fidelity, he was never to forget; and, fifteen years later, Ramon, Duke of Benavente — pensive, intellectual, condemned to a life of solitude and sorrow — figured as the subject of one of our poet’s Odes. Grafted on the trunk of Spain, the fresh French young shoot appeared to prosper, when again the upheaval of Europe changed the shaping destiny of a child. Victor was now ten years of age. We are in 1812...

1812 — the turning-point of Napoleon’s fortunes. The defeat of his armies in Russia was for him more than an overwhelming disaster — it was, in Talleyrand’s phrase, “the beginning of the end.” From East to West the vanquished nations began to lift their suffocated heads; a breath of hope and life stirred in the air like a waft of spring, and nowhere more irresistibly than in Spain — in proud, bitter, injured, trampled Spain.

Chapter 2 — The Return to France

1812 announced the universal revenge of the nations. From Russia to Spain the electric current thrilled and rang and everywhere a secret force vibrated in response. The rule of the French in Spain had always been uneasy; the Spaniards still considered the kidnapped Ferdinand their lawful king and Joseph Bonaparte a foreign invader; five years of constant effort had not established him securely on his throne despite an army of 300,000 men occupying the Peninsula under Massena, Soult, and Marmont, Napoleon’s famous marshals.

And now the success of Wellington in Portugal revived the hopes of the Spaniards; while Napoleon in Russia suffered an epical defeat. In May 1813 Wellington marched on Madrid, driving the French back towards the Pyrenees — past the Pyrenees; then, in his turn, crossing the frontier and invading France! Napoleon, beaten in Russia, beaten in Prussia, beaten in Spain, reluctantly gave back his crown to Ferdinand VII and sent him from Valençay to Madrid.

These world-shaking events had had their repercussion in the family circle of General Hugo. In the spring of 1812, Abel, already a young second lieutenant of fifteen under his father’s orders, had taken part in the hard-fought battle of Salamanca, and had suffered the crushing reverse of Vittoria. In March, Madame Hugo and her two younger sons hastily left Madrid for France; in the first days of April they were in Paris. The garden of the Feuillantines was full of spring flowers; the sheets were spread on the beds; the roast hung before the fire; the cloth was laid; the weary travellers entered their home as though they had left it a few hours before for some country walk. Madame Larivière had taken care of it all. M. Larivière, with a Latin classic in his yawning pocket, stood there waiting for his pupils to begin to construe. And again the boys took their lessons in the old charming free-and-easy style, working under the spreading trees in the garden, or in their bedrooms, or not at all, as the fancy took them. It was a world away from Madrid, the College of Nobles — the monks with their discipline, and the young Spanish counts and marquises full of insolent disdain and humiliated pride. The delight of this home-coming prevented the boys from seizing the full national significance of their retreat from the Peninsula. But they found a new Paris, exhaling a grave unrest. It was no longer the splendid triumphant capital of 1809, full of kings and soldiers, where the glad crowds shouted when Napoleon went by in his old grey coat, “Vive l’Empereur!” and sang in chorus, “Veillons au salut de l’Empire.”

Napoleon had restored the prestige and re-established the finances of ruined and devastated France; but that was already a long time ago. He had conciliated the Church. He had given his country a civil code so supple and so strong that for fourscore years it was to serve with scarce a change, and even to-day supports solidly all our recent superstructures, while it stands as a basis for the modern conception of social organization in Europe. He had widened the limits of France and enlarged her boundaries to include the Scheldt, the Elbe, the Rhine, the Arno, the Tiber, and the Isonzo. But everything had been sacrificed to this dream of glory. There was a party in France which longed to resume — after the huge interruption of the Revolution and the Empire — the tasks and experiments in letters, science, industry which had occupied the France of 1789. The world had not stood still while France achieved her military triumphs. The steamboat existed already in America. George Stephenson in England was framing his iron horse, James Watt was a candidate to the French Académie des Sciences. There was a France intensely occupied with spinning-jennies and chemical experiments that dreamed of vast factories and the renewal of the world by organized industry. There was a France, expressed by Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël, that knew itself capable of a magnificent revival of letters — a France that felt itself the equal of the Classic Age, although so long curbed, and stifled, and silenced by the mailed fist of the Emperor. And there was a France of men and women who looked on their growing sons and trembled, knowing the price of universal victory, and noting the number of mourners in the streets, and all the halt and maimed and blind among their young acquaintances. Madame Hugo was of this latter party:

Ma mère aux doux yeux, qui souvent s’effrayait

En m’entendant parler guerre, assauts et bataille.

Brief — there was a party for peace at any price.

And there were the dissatisfied generals: the soldiers of the Republic who had fought for liberty, had snatched freedom and glory from the Coalition of Sovereigns, and now found that they had vanquished the dynasts of Europe only to found a syndicate of tyranny: a Bonaparte Emperor of France, a Bonaparte King of Holland, a Bonaparte King of Spain, a Bonaparte Queen of Naples, a Bonaparte GrandDuchess in Tuscany. In their eyes Napoleon appeared no demigod, but a monstrous monopolizer.

Three of these generals, imprisoned on a charge of treason, plotted continually behind their bolts and bars, and so successfully that for one day — the 24th of October 1812 — they found themselves the masters of Paris. They had spread a report that Napoleon was among the killed in Russia. And Paris realized the fragility of the Empire, and, seeing France without a chief, turned towards the exiled Bourbons. Had Louis XVIII been less gouty and less indolent, had his brother shown a more martial resolution, the coup d’État of General Malet might have succeeded. As it was, he founded by surprise a Provisional Government which lasted barely four-and-twenty hours. But this was near enough success to infuriate Napoleon, who saw in the rash attempt a sign of public disaffection — a lack of loyal attachment to his dynasty. He rushed back to Paris from Smolensk, vowing vengeance on his enemies.

He found them condemned and executed. The first moment of surprise and stupor having passed, the Governor of Paris had seized the persons of General Malet and his confederates, General Guidal and General Lahorie. This last was Victor Hugo’s godfather — that friend whom Madame Hugo had so long concealed in the abandoned chapel of her great wild garden of the Feuillantines. She tried once more to come to the rescue. She had some influence at the headquarters of the Court Martial, not only as the wife of General Count Léopold Hugo and the sister-in-law of General Louis Hugo, the hero of Eylau, but as the intimate friend of a family called Foucher. M. Foucher, an old crony of the General’s long before either of them had married, was head clerk of the Board of Recruitment, and was lodged in the Hôtel de Toulouse (a handsome seventeenth-century mansion only recently destroyed) in the rue du Cherche-Midi, which was the seat of the Councils of War. Madame Hugo obstinately haunted that tribunal of military justice; she besieged with her appeals M. Foucher, his brother-in-law M. Asseline, Clerk to the Council, and another friend of hers, M. Delon, Reporter to the Committee. The dauntless woman gave no thought to the risk she ran in crossing the path of Napoleon’s vengeance, nor to the effect that her action might produce on her husband’s career. These officials received her with perfunctory politeness, some kindly, some coldly: M. Delon, an ardent Bonapartist, was more than cold. They could hold out but little hope of mercy. It was intolerable that three generals, confined in three different prisons, should have contrived so nearly to upset the most despotic of governments. They could expect nothing but anger from the police whom they had fooled. The day of judgement dawned. And all day long Madame Hugo sat, hoping against hope, in Madame Foucher’s parlour. The three conspirators were condemned to death and were shot before sundown.

The next day — it was the 29th of October — Madame Hugo’s two boys were strolling past the Church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas. Victor noticed a new bill placarded on the wall and went up to read it, being attracted, childlike, by a familiar word printed in large capitals: Soulier. For once it had nothing to do with boots or shoes; it was the name of the Governor of Paris. Victor read out:

Empire Français — Par conseil de Guerre, ont été fusillés en plaine de Grenelle, pour crime de conspiration contre l’empire et l’empereur, les trois généraux Malet, Guidai, et Lahorie.

The names meant nothing to Eugène and Victor. They had known the refugee of their garden under a feigned name, the pseudonym he used during those years of concealment. But, just then, their mother came up and, pointing to the last word on the list, she said to Victor, “Lahorie. That was your godfather!”

And the child remembered the chapel in the garden, and the friend who used to share their games and studies, the warm pressure of his hand upon the little shoulder, and the ring of his voice as he said, “Avant tout, la Liberté.”

Madame Hugo had never greatly loved the splendours of the Empire. She was Countess Hugo on the address of her letters, and there began and ended her grandeur. A woman of an ardent, virile type of character, she was happiest in retirement, sowing and planting in her garden or superintending the education of her sons. After the death of Lahorie she appears to have withdrawn still more from social life. Her boys and a few tried old friends sufficed her. Her austere, reserved, yet tender devotedness was masked by an imperious manner; she was intimate with few people, familiar with none; she brought up her sons with the utmost freedom as to details, relying on their honour and obedience in a way which we consider more English than French, but with a strict and absolute discipline in essentials: her word was law. Although a Royalist in politics, there was little of the Catholic about her; like many women whose girlhood had been passed under the shadow of the Revolution, her religious opinions were as vague as her morality was sincere. Her creed, if she had one, was a Deism, in the manner of Rousseau or Voltaire. She encouraged her boys in a great latitude of reading, debating with them the most serious and difficult subjects. Such was the vigilant guardian whose eager and absolute love, if it brooded passionately over all three brothers, was concentrated yet more tenderly on the youngest, the most fragile, the most gifted, Victor Hugo.

Chapter 3 — Royalist Paris

Madame Hugonever forgave that Bonapartist official who had refused to extenuate the crime of General Lahorie. She struck the name of Delon from her visiting-list; she forbade Eugène and Victor to have any further dealings with young Delon, a fine lad, who had been one of their favourite friends — a dozen years later he was to die in Greece commanding Lord Byron’s artillery. On the other hand, she felt a closer bond finking her to the Fouchers, who had shown themselves helpful and compassionate. She became a frequent visitor at the official mansion that sheltered the Councils of War: the old Hôtel de Toulouse in the rue du Cherche-Midi. The Fouchers like herself were Royalists by birth, tradition, and training, Imperialists merely by default, as preferring any form of order to a revolution. For years Madame Hugo had choked down her political opinions, stiffing their expression out of deference to her husband and regard for his prospects; besides a monarchy had seemed a beautiful myth of a bygone world, as remote from reality as the Golden Age. But, after the execution of Victor’s godfather, the ardent woman turned in loathing and contempt from the despotism of the Emperor, and all her loyalty revived towards the king across the water. By the Fouchers’ friendly fireside she could tell her stories of the war in Vendée; could make her boys and Madame Foucher’s weep for pity of the poor lad named Louis the Seventeenth; could inflame them with enthusiasm for her own girlish and heroic adventures:

...ma mère en Vendée autrefois

Sauva, dans un seul jour, la vie à douze prêtres.

Les Contemplations, v. 3. Écrit en 1846.

Madame Hugo had never been of the same opinion in politics as her husband: Victor Hugo loved to point out the antithesis between

Mon père, vieux soldat, ma mère, Vendéenne.

And doubtless these dynastic antagonisms helped to swell the sense of differences, of small hostilities and divergences, that gradually separated the absent husband from his wife. General Hugo was a brave soldier, something of a martinet, with a soldier’s weakness for a petticoat. Madame Hugo, ardent, implacable, high-minded, full of views and ideals, was not the woman to make allowances or concessions. Little by little, absence ended in a complete estrangement.

The hour was unfavourable to the glory of Napoleon. For eighteen years all had gone well with his armies — the French invaded or annexed Belgium, Holland, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Russia. It seemed unthinkable that France could be invaded in her turn, while Napoleon was alive at the head of his troops. But here were the Allies on all her frontiers, in the proportion of four to one, and the country found itself unprepared, insufficiently protected, beaten. In 1814, by the last days of March, the foreign armies were in Paris, and on the 12th of April the Count of Artois made his solemn entry into the capital of his brother, King Louis XVIII, still in England. The Uhlan sentries stood on guard before the Louvre; the Cossacks watered their horses in the fountains of the Tuileries Gardens; General Blücher proposed to blow up the Jena Bridge, named in memory of a Prussian defeat; and the Royalists of Paris cried “Vive le Roi!” for the return of the Bourbons brought peace.

The Royalist Party in France was not composed entirely of Royalists. Naturally, the Émigrés, who little by little had filtered through the frontiers, were the nucleus; but Napoleon’s persecution of the kidnapped Pope had added a large contingent of indignant Catholics, who were anti-Bonapartists rather than Monarchists; and after 1807, when the Emperor suppressed the civil courts of law and refused to convoke the legislative bodies, composing the national budget and levying rates and taxes by his own authority and at his own sweet will — after 1807, I repeat, these acts of despotism estranged the Liberals and many families of the professional classes. Even among the Imperial officials there were those who thought, with Talleyrand, that the Emperor was mad, and many more who considered that, at least, his day was done and that it would be wise to leave the sinking ship. The increasing disaffection of all that was intellectual in France, inspired by Napoleon’s growing autocracy, prepared for 1814 the unkindest cut of all, which was the treachery of the Marshals. Marmont, Soult, and Ney compelled their master to abdicate and made for themselves friends of the Mammon of the morrow.

Thus, on the nth of April, the Emperor, perforce, bade a sad farewell to his Old Guard in tears, and left Fontainebleau for his new possessions, no longer Master of Europe, but Emperor of Elba. Louis XVIII. was King of France. And little Victor Hugo, while he rejoiced in all his mother’s royalism, was perplexed, and rather humiliated, to find himself the subject, no longer of “L’Empereur,” but merely of a king: it seemed a come-down. The upheaval of a world shook the Hugos’ modest hearthstone. King Joseph’s crown had been the first to fall of all those Corsican royalties, soon to be reduced to exile. After a terrible battle at Vittoria, at which Abel Hugo had fought under his father’s orders, all had been lost in Spain. General Hugo, with his son, returned to France, but he did not linger in the capital, merely passing through it on his way to Lorraine, where he had been charged by Napoleon with the defence of the frontier-fortress, Thionville. The defence of a small fortress like Thionville was a modest office for the man who had administered Madrid, but the General’s pride was of the sort that accepts any task if it be possible to accomplish it in perfection. France had fallen, peace was signed, and Thionville still held out; when at last General Hugo was compelled to negotiate (since obviously Thionville is not in the domains of the Emperor of Elba), he left his citadel a free man, his sword at his side, with all the honours of war.

A year later, when Napoleon’s return from Elba brought his old officers back to their allegiance, General Hugo hurried to Paris, and speedily was again in Thionville, defending that place for the Emperor. The Hundred Days hurtled by in a clatter of war; peace was restored, and Napoleon Bonaparte dispatched to the island of St. Helena. And still, like Casabianca, Leopold Hugo refused to quit the fortress that had been entrusted to him. The troops besieging Thionville were Hessian and Prussian; the General would not surrender to Germans. He hoisted the white flag of the Bourbons, but he refused to budge. At last King Louis sent him a Royal command to hand over the keys of the fortress to the German general on the 20th of September. On the 13th of the month Hugo decamped, incapable of surrendering to a foreign commander.

During his stay at Thionville the General had received a visit from his wife in August. Now that the couple had decided to dwell apart there were matters of interest which it was necessary for them to decide together. While she was at Thionville, Madame Hugo received letters from her children. And here we find the first letter of Victor Hugo’s.

2 August 1815.

À Madame la Comtesse Hugo, à Thionville.

My dear Mamma,

Since you went away we are very dull here. We often go to see M. Foucher, as you told us to do. He suggested that we should share his son’s lessons; we have declined with thanks. Every morning we work at our Latin and mathematics. M. Foucher has been kind enough to take us to visit the museum of Natural History.

Come back soon I Without you, we don’t know what to do or what to say; everything is uncertain and difficult. We never cease thinking of you. Mamma! Mamma!

Your respectful son,

Victor.

I find this little letter touching — especially that final cry: “Nous ne cessons de penser a toi Maman! Maman!” Madame Hugo soon returned to her little brood, and they were doubtless happy together although their days of poverty had dawned. General Hugo’s obstinate defence of Thionville had ruined his chances at Court; he was a marked man, dismissed from active service on the half-pay of a retiring pension, requested to settle at a certain distance from the capital. Blois was suggested, and the General bought a square white house on a hill above the Loire, and a small estate and shooting-box in the neighbouring marshes of Sologne, consoled in his retirement by the presence of a lady to whom he had transferred those domestic affections which the continued absence of Madame Hugo had too long left unemployed.

The General was a poor man. His estates, as Count of Cifuentes and Marquis of Siguenza, with King Joseph’s gift of a million francs, remained on the farther side the Pyrenees, confiscated; all his Imperial emoluments expired with the Empire; the Government of Louis XVIII did not even recognize his rank as a General of Division; he had obtained that rank in Spain in the service of King Joseph. In his disgrace at Blois the ex-governor of Madrid received the half-pay of a French major’s retiring pension, which at that time was something under forty pounds a year.

Naturally this state of affairs affected the situation of Madame Hugo. On his return from Spain, the General had made her an annual allowance of 18,000 francs — £720 — which in the Paris of 1812 was a comfortable income. Her portion was now diminished, and narrowed means no longer permitted her to rent the house and garden of the Impasse des Feuillantines — the garden, indeed, was expropriated by the town of Paris; the present rue d’Ulm occupies the site.

On the first fall of the Empire she had rented a ground floor and garden opposite the Hotel of the Councils of War, where the Fouchers had their home, in the rue du Cherche-Midi; and, after a few years, a still smaller apartment on a third floor in the rue des Petits Augustins, which is now called the rue Bonaparte. In spite of many cares, Madame Hugo was not wholly an unhappy woman. Her unfaithful husband left her in full possession of her beloved sons. The restoration of the Bourbons filled her with delight. Little Adèle Foucher never forgot that feverish and overweening gladness; many years later, when she undertook to write an account of Victor Hugo, she described the attitude of his mother during those early years of the Restoration:

The restoration of the Bourbons was for Madame Hugo an exceeding joy. Her hatred of Napoleon, long contained by the dread of injuring her husband, now burst forth unrestricted. He was no longer the Emperor, only “Buonaparte.” He had no sort of genius — not even a talent for military affairs. He had been beaten all over Europe — in Russia, in France. He was a coward. He had run away from Egypt and again from Russia, leaving to the tender mercies of the plague, or the snows, the unlucky soldiers whom his ambition had dragged so far from home; he had blubbered like a child at Fontainebleau when he took leave of his Old Guard; he had murdered the Duke of Enghien in cold blood.

But the Bourbons had every merit and every grace.

The monarchy revived the memory of her early days, of her beloved Brittany. And in fact she seemed to have suddenly become quite young. She missed no one of the rejoicings and festivities that marked the accession of Louis XVIII. Her dress was the flag of her opinions — all white — pure white. A white cotton gown and a white straw hat trimmed with tuberoses. The fashion of the hour was to wear green shoes so as to tread the Imperial colour underfoot. All Madame Hugo’s shoes were green.

On the day of the Royal entry the Count of Artois — the third of those three brothers, all destined to be kings of France, of whom the eldest was Louis XVI and the second the newly restored monarch — had sent to the three young Hugos the emblems of the Royal Order of the Flower-de-Luce, with a diploma signed by his own hand; the lily was in silver and hung from a white moiré ribbon. Who was so proud as Victor Hugo, twelve years of age, when he entered the Church of Notre Dame for the solemn rejoicings of the Royal Te Deum, with this decoration pendent from his button-hole and pretty Adèle Foucher hanging on his arm?

From this date the young Hugos were almost completely separated from their father. The General interfered from time to time in order to maintain some sort of discipline and routine in their education. But they seldom saw him; they were more and more englobed in the orbit of their devoted mother, and they moved, with her, in the system of Royalist society.

Victor Hugo has left an admirable sketch of that society in the Third Part of Les Misérables. It was a little world, quite devoid of the glory and the grandeur of Napoleon’s Empire, but with traditions of its own, a courteous urbanity, a charming impertinence, a delicate raillery. The Émigrés of the Revolution had not yet received their indemnity, so that most of the persons composing this society were narrowly circumstanced; and indeed they had so long been poor in exile that the patent evidence of wealth appeared to them as a rule in rather dubious taste. But in those scantily furnished and shabby drawing-rooms there reigned an exquisite refinement of tone; no one was loud, coarse, obsequious, emphatic, rank, or rude; and the dukes and marshals of the “Corsican Ogre,” if they could have penetrated there, would have appeared as strayed revellers from the servants’ hall. It was not a bad world to be bred in.

Nowhere (wrote Chateaubriand in his Mémoires d’outre-tombe), nowhere else could one find gathered together so many persons, equally distinguished although different in rank, whose conversation was as delightful in recounting the details of everyday life as it was elevated in its loftier flights, being marked by a simplicity which sprang from a fine selection and not from lack of means, and inspired by a courteousness that good breeding and long usage had transformed into a mode of feeling — into a part of the character.

Not all the members of that little society were of noble origin: the sharply-defined differences of rank which ten years later under Charles X will pigeon-hole Paris in compartments of rigorous strictness were gracefully veiled by the similarity of political or religious opinions. Men like the Marquis de C. d’E. — to whom Victor will address his retractation in 1846 — captains from Coblentz, pages of their lamented Marie-Antoinette, admirers of the Comte d’Artois, mingled with men of the upper middle class, like M. Foucher, like M. Gillenormand, dignified old bourgeois who felt no lessening of their own importance implied in the acknowledgement of a neighbour’s superior rank. And of course there was a sprinkling of abbés — though the Countess Hugo was not particularly pious, rather lax and Voltairean in her views. But then, perhaps, so were the abbés!

Among them all, no woman appeared more interesting than Madame Hugo — still young, so fervent a Royalist, the mother of those three gifted and handsome boys, deserted by her husband — “one of B.P.’s Generals, my dear.” It was the thing to call Napoleon B.P. — the short for Buona Parte. And we remember the murmur of sympathy that greeted little Marius (the hero of Les Misérables) as he stirred among the circle of ancient dowagers seated round the fire — we remember the hushed comment of refined and interested voices:

“Such a pretty boy!”

“Poor child!”

They called him poor child because his father was a monster, a bandit, the man at Blois. “Ce sabreur.” “Ce brigand de la Loire.”

These time-worn ladies in their garments of another age; these good-natured old Émigrés with a bonbonnière bigger than their snuffbox, in which there was always a pastille for Victor, were fossils, no doubt, but very charming old fossils — loyal, brave, chivalrous, devoted, warm of heart. If the poet of Les Contemplations, if the author of Les Misérables, smiles sometimes as he retraces their image, it is with a fingering affectionate smile. The young Jacobite of 1819 will become the Liberal of 1829, the Jacobin of 1848, the demagogue of 1852, but he will never find a word of reproach for that world of his youth — save that he had outgrown it. It was a good and charming world — for a child,

Quand j’étais royaliste, et quand j’étais petit.

Tenderly, nobly, it had sheltered his youth. It was his mother’s circle —

Et, souvenir sacré! ma mère rayonnait.

A world one might smile at, yet not without its dignity and moral grandeur. “C’était la France d’autrefois!”

The France of yesterday! The France that one day Victor Hugo’s genius will endeavour to transform; a classic traditional France, in which he was to grow up, so different, so humanitarian, so romantic; a France whose inheritance was a certain exquisite self-effacement; a France whose acquirements were taste, culture, order, vivacity, a penetrating common sense — admirable qualities which Victor Hugo certainly appreciated, but which he was never to acquire.

Good heavens, what would have been the future of Olympio had he not known at least those years of delicate social discipline in the old-fashioned aristocratic drawing-rooms of Royalist Paris!

Chapter 4 — The First Gleams of Glory

General Hugohad interrupted the pleasant easy-going lessons with M. de La Rivière and had insisted that his two younger sons should enter as boarders in a large boys’ school: the Pension Cordier. Eugène was fifteen, Victor thirteen years of age; they were infinitely more original, brilliant, travelled, and amusing than their school-fellows; they had the honour and glory of a room to themselves, whereas the common herd slept in the dormitories. Soon they were the kings of the school — the rival kings — and the Pension Cordier was divided into two nations perpetually at war: “les Veaux,” who owed allegiance to Eugène; and “les Chiens,” who were Victor’s people.

One day a “Calf” in a particularly boisterous game threw a stone at the king of the “Dogs,” which struck his knee, resulted in synovitis, and our Victor is laid on his back for weeks, if not months, to enjoy the lonely privilege of a bedroom to one’s self:

Et que faire en un gîte à moins que l’on ne songe?

In similar case, La Fontaine’s hare was plunged “dans un sombre ennui”; but Victor Hugo amused his interminable convalescence by reading and re-reading, with the delightful unwearied patience of a child, the whole collection of Voltaire’s Tragedies which had been given him years ago by his godfather, General Lahorie. Thus Voltaire, who had stimulated the poetic gift of Lamartine, now fired the poetic genius of Hugo. For when the lad knew these plays almost by heart, he thought he might try his hand at an imitation. It is interesting to note his age: thirteen. I do not mean to suggest that the origin of genius may be organic and glandular, that sexual development is at the back of its creative force. I am sure that explanation is too short and simple to account for the most mysterious and divine of gifts. Yet it is certain that, from first to last, the poetic faculty of Victor Hugo was intimately connected with his sexual sensibility. Not consciously so at first. Until some while after his twentieth year, no youth was ever purer or more severe than Victor Hugo.

Hitherto the methods of the Pension Cordier had left him little time to dream and muse. But now that blessed stone had lodged him safely on Parnassus. The habit of verse grew upon him, became a second nature — he had discovered an invaluable resource against dullness, distress, despair. Even when restored to health and Euclid he continued to write poetry with unabated joy. During the three years (1815-1818) that he remained at the school in the rue Sainte-Marguerite he tried his prentice hand at every possible form of verse: odes, satires, epistles, poems, tragedies, elegies, idylls; imitations of Ossian; translations of Virgil, Horace, Lucan, Ausonius, Martial; fables, tales, romances, epigrams, madrigals, acrostics, charades, enigmas, impromptus, and even a comic opera. He read them all to his appreciative mother, to Eugène, to any one who would lend an ear. This is the poet’s own account (Victor Hugo collaborated largely in the confection of Victor Hugo raconté...), and he has taken us so far into his confidence as to afford us a glimpse of some of these “bêtises que je faisais avant ma naissance” — some of this nonsense that I talked (he says) before I was born. Other poems have been exhumed by M. Gustave Simon. These first essays of Victor Hugo’s are no more remarkable in themselves than the earliest poems of Shelley. They indicate a bent; and the habit of verse-making encouraged an extraordinary aptitude. From the very first they reveal a methodical system of work, a clearness of purpose, a vividness of representation — of mise-en-scène — which will always characterize our poet. M. Gustave Simon, who has had the golden opportunity of comparing two long poems on the Deluge, one composed by Victor, one by Eugène, in the same year, 1816, notices, as the chief difference, this faculty of representation, peculiar to Victor. But, so far at least as one can judge from the fragments and the analyses that he gives in his Enfance de Victor Hugo (Paris, 1904), I should be inclined to say that Eugène — poor Eugène — shows a more romantic fancy, though of a nervous nightmarish sort. While Victor describes the spectacle of Nature — the tempest — the procession of animals entering the Ark, Eugène shows the earth opening in a vomit of fire, terrible phantoms issuing from their sepulchre, while the angels sound their inexorable trumpets, and the earth sinks in the abyss of the Flood. It is at once the Deluge and the Last Judgement — horror piled upon horror.

Genius is a bird that makes its nest before it lays its egg. In these early poems, brilliant, facile, and elegant as they are, there is nothing that bears the stamp of our modern Euripides; nothing of that prophetic imagination, that romantic touch, those revelations of cosmic grandeur, those sudden passages of tender simplicity — nothing, in short, of those qualities which — new and fresh and strong as a wind from the sea — were to revive and invigorate the poetry of France. But the child of fifteen knows how to express himself with clearness and facility; how to draw out a plan, how to develop it, dispose the scene and combine the effects; he has acquired the technical management of verse; he has cultivated a critical faculty which reviews every line and weighs the value of every word; he is master of a method, and already knows how to look at his subject as a whole before putting pen to paper. The Victor Hugo of 1816 has pondered all these things in his heart, knows how to meditate, how to reflect. Already he sees his goal; and on the 10th of July 1816, writes in one of his copybooks: “I will be Chateaubriand or nothing” — “Je veux être Chateaubriand ou rien.” Victor Hugo is preparing to become a great writer. But poetry is still for him a task, an exercise in virtuosity, a canvas to embroider, a test of skill, not the deep impulse of an interior spirit, not the rending of the veil of the Temple and the flash of the eternal flame behind. But the child who, in the years of his manhood, was to write that the secret of all triumph is resumed in one word, Perseverando, had learned already the use of a long patience. Day and night he toiled at his craft of verse-making. And he does not neglect his duties at school. His exercises in Philosophy and Physics for the year 1817 show the care and regularity with which he pursued his studies. He was, in fact, preparing two careers at the same time. He hoped to be a great poet, a dramatic poet; his mother was in the secret and gave him all her sympathy. But Victor’s long head had calculated that he might miss that supreme ambition; so, in a sort of understudy, he got up the examinations of the Polytechnic School in order, if all else failed, to become an artillery officer, as GeneralHugo wished. Science, algebra, mathematics alternate with Virgil and Chateaubriand in the busy round of his schooldays. Nor were these severe studies in the least against his bent. Victor Hugo possessed in the highest degree the principal quality of the geometrician — which is the faculty of imagining figures in space with exact precision, whether they be on the instant invented or recalled by a sort of intuitive remembrance. The algebrist, like the poet, is a visionary, and Euclid no less than Aeschylus sees the unreal objects of his thoughts painted on the air before him — ώς ἐν γραφαἵς. Doubtless, if he had been less gifted with the dramatic sense, with the passion and music of the lyrist, the son of General Hugo would have been a great Polytechnician; an eminent philosopher (Charles Renouvier) has declared that France lost in him “un géomètre de première ligne.”