Towards the close of the First French Revolution, Joseph Leopold Sigisbert
Hugo, son of a joiner at Nancy, and an officer risen from the ranks in the
Republican army, married Sophie Trébuchet, daughter of a Nantes fitter-out
of privateers, a Vendean royalist and devotee.
Victor Marie Hugo, their second son, was born on the 26th of February,
1802, at Besançon, France. Though a weakling, he was carried, with his
boy-brothers, in the train of their father through the south of France,
in pursuit of Fra Diavolo, the Italian brigand, and finally into Spain.
Colonel Hugo had become General, and there, besides being governor over
three provinces, was Lord High Steward at King Joseph's court, where his
eldest son Abel was installed as page. The other two were educated for
similar posts among hostile young Spaniards under stern priestly tutors
in the Nobles' College at Madrid, a palace become a monastery. Upon the
English advance to free Spain of the invaders, the general and Abel
remained at bay, whilst the mother and children hastened to Paris.
Again, in a house once a convent, Victor and his brother Eugène were taught
by priests until, by the accident of their roof sheltering a comrade of
their father's, a change of tutor was afforded them. This was General
Lahorie, a man of superior education, main supporter of Malet in his daring
plot to take the government into the Republicans' hands during the absence
of Napoleon I. in Russia. Lahorie read old French and Latin with Victor
till the police scented him out and led him to execution, October, 1812.
School claimed the young Hugos after this tragical episode, where they
were oddities among the humdrum tradesmen's sons. Victor, thoughtful and
taciturn, rhymed profusely in tragedies, "printing" in his books,
"Châteaubriand or nothing!" and engaging his more animated brother to
flourish the Cid's sword and roar the tyrant's speeches.
In 1814, both suffered a sympathetic anxiety as their father held out at
Thionville against the Allies, finally repulsing them by a sortie. This was
pure loyalty to the fallen Bonaparte, for Hugo had lost his all in Spain,
his very savings having been sunk in real estate, through King Joseph's
insistence on his adherents investing to prove they had "come to stay."
The Bourbons enthroned anew, General Hugo received, less for his neutrality
than thanks to his wife's piety and loyalty, confirmation of his title
and rank, and, moreover, a fieldmarshalship. Abel was accepted as a page,
too, but there was no money awarded the ex-Bonapartist--money being what
the Eaglet at Reichstadt most required for an attempt at his father's
throne--and the poor officer was left in seclusion to write consolingly
about his campaigns and "Defences of Fortified Towns."
Decidedly the pen had superseded the sword, for Victor and Eugène were
scribbling away in ephemeral political sheets as apprenticeship to
founding a periodical of their own.
Victor's poetry became remarkable in _La Muse Française_ and _Le
Conservateur Littéraire_, the odes being permeated with Legitimist and
anti-revolutionary sentiments delightful to the taste of Madam Hugo, member
as she was of the courtly Order of the Royal Lily.
In 1817, the French Academy honorably mentioned Victor's "Odes on the
Advantages of Study," with a misgiving that some elder hand was masked
under the line ascribing "scant fifteen years" to the author. At the
Toulouse Floral Games he won prizes two years successively. His critical
judgment was sound as well, for he had divined the powers of Lamartine.
His "Odes," collected in a volume, gave his ever-active mother her
opportunity at Court. Louis XVIII. granted the boy-poet a pension of
1,500 francs.
It was the windfall for which the youth had been waiting to enable him to
gratify his first love. In his childhood, his father and one M. Foucher,
head of a War Office Department, had jokingly betrothed a son of the one
to a daughter of the other. Abel had loftier views than alliance with a
civil servant's child; Eugène was in love elsewhere; but Victor had fallen
enamored with Adèle Foucher. It is true, when poverty beclouded the Hugos,
the Fouchers had shrunk into their mantle of dignity, and the girl had
been strictly forbidden to correspond with her child-sweetheart.
He, finding letters barred out, wrote a love story ("Hans of Iceland") in
two weeks, where were recited his hopes, fears, and constancy, and this
book she could read.
It pleased the public no less, and its sale, together with that of the
"Odes" and a West Indian romance, "Buck Jargal," together with a royal
pension, emboldened the poet to renew his love-suit. To refuse the
recipient of court funds was not possible to a public functionary.
M. Foucher consented to the betrothal in the summer of 1821.
So encloistered had Mdlle. Adèle been, her reading "Hans" the exceptional
intrusion, that she only learnt on meeting her affianced that he was
mourning his mother. In October, 1822, they were wed, the bride nineteen,
the bridegroom but one year the elder. The dinner was marred by the
sinister disaster of Eugène Hugo going mad. (He died in an asylum five
years later.) The author terminated his wedding year with the "Ode to
Louis XVIII.," read to a society after the President of the Academy had
introduced him as "the most promising of our young lyrists."
In spite of new poems revealing a Napoleonic bias, Victor was invited to
see Charles X. consecrated at Rheims, 29th of May, 1825, and was entered
on the roll of the Legion of Honor repaying the favors with the verses
expected. But though a son was born to him he was not restored to
Conservatism; with his mother's death all that had vanished. His tragedy
of "Cromwell" broke lances upon Royalists and upholders of the still
reigning style of tragedy. The second collection of "Odes" preluding it,
showed the spirit of the son of Napoleon's general, rather than of the
Bourbonist field-marshal. On the occasion, too, of the Duke of Tarento
being announced at the Austrian Ambassador's ball, February, 1827, as
plain "Marshal Macdonald," Victor became the mouthpiece of indignant
Bonapartists in his "Ode to the Napoleon Column" in the Place Vendôme.
His "Orientales," though written in a Parisian suburb by one who had not
travelled, appealed for Grecian liberty, and depicted sultans and pashas
as tyrants, many a line being deemed applicable to personages nearer the
Seine than Stamboul.
"Cromwell" was not actable, and "Amy Robsart," in collaboration with his
brother-in-law, Foucher, miserably failed, notwithstanding a finale
"superior to Scott's 'Kenilworth.'" In one twelvemonth, there was this
failure to record, the death of his father from apoplexy at his eldest
son's marriage, and the birth of a second son to Victor towards the close.
Still imprudent, the young father again irritated the court with satire in
"Marion Delorme" and "Hernani," two plays immediately suppressed by the
Censure, all the more active as the Revolution of July, 1830, was surely
seething up to the edge of the crater.
(At this juncture, the poet Châteaubriand, fading star to our rising sun,
yielded up to him formally "his place at the poets' table.")
In the summer of 1831, a civil ceremony was performed over the insurgents
killed in the previous year, and Hugo was constituted poet-laureate of the
Revolution by having his hymn sung in the Pantheon over the biers.
Under Louis Philippe, "Marion Delorme" could be played, but livelier
attention was turned to "Nôtre Dame de Paris," the historical romance in
which Hugo vied with Sir Walter. It was to have been followed by others,
but the publisher unfortunately secured a contract to monopolize all the
new novelist's prose fictions for a term of years, and the author revenged
himself by publishing poems and plays alone. Hence "Nôtre Dame" long stood
unique: it was translated in all languages, and plays and operas were
founded on it. Heine professed to see in the prominence of the hunchback
a personal appeal of the author, who was slightly deformed by one shoulder
being a trifle higher than the other; this malicious suggestion reposed
also on the fact that the _quasi_-hero of "Le Roi s'Amuse" (1832, a
tragedy suppressed after one representation, for its reflections on
royalty), was also a contorted piece of humanity. This play was followed
by "Lucrezia Borgia," "Marie Tudor," and "Angelo," written in a singular
poetic prose. Spite of bald translations, their action was sufficiently
dramatic to make them successes, and even still enduring on our stage. They
have all been arranged as operas, whilst Hugo himself, to oblige the father
of Louise Bertin, a magazine publisher of note, wrote "Esmeralda" for her
music in 1835.
Thus, at 1837, when he was promoted to an officership in the Legion of
Honor, it was acknowledged his due as a laborious worker in all fields of
literature, however contestable the merits and tendencies of his essays.
In 1839, the Academy, having rejected him several times, elected him among
the Forty Immortals. In the previous year had been successfully acted "Ruy
Blas," for which play he had gone to Spanish sources; with and after the
then imperative Rhine tour, came an unendurable "trilogy," the "Burgraves,"
played one long, long night in 1843. A real tragedy was to mark that year:
his daughter Léopoldine being drowned in the Seine with her husband, who
would not save himself when he found that her death-grasp on the sinking
boat was not to be loosed.
For distraction, Hugo plunged into politics. A peer in 1845, he sat between
Marshal Soult and Pontécoulant, the regicide-judge of Louis XVI. His maiden
speech bore upon artistic copyright; but he rapidly became a power in much
graver matters.
As fate would have it, his speech on the Bonapartes induced King Louis
Philippe to allow Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte to return, and, there
being no gratitude in politics, the emancipated outlaw rose as a rival
candidate for the Presidency, for which Hugo had nominated himself in his
newspaper the _Evènement_. The story of the _Coup d'État_ is well known;
for the Republican's side, read Hugo's own "History of a Crime." Hugo,
proscribed, betook himself to Brussels, London, and the Channel Islands,
waiting to "return with right when the usurper should be expelled."
Meanwhile, he satirized the Third Napoleon and his congeners with ceaseless
shafts, the principal being the famous "Napoleon the Little," based on the
analogical reasoning that as the earth has moons, the lion the jackal, man
himself his simian double, a minor Napoleon was inevitable as a standard
of estimation, the grain by which a pyramid is measured. These flings were
collected in "Les Châtiments," a volume preceded by "Les Contemplations"
(mostly written in the '40's), and followed by "Les Chansons des Rues et
des Bois."
The baffled publisher's close-time having expired, or, at least, his heirs
being satisfied, three novels appeared, long heralded: in 1862, "Les
Misérables" (Ye Wretched), wherein the author figures as Marius and his
father as the Bonapartist officer: in 1866, "Les Travailleurs de la Mer"
(Toilers of the Sea), its scene among the Channel Islands; and, in 1868,
"L'Homme Qui Rit" (The Man who Grins), unfortunately laid in a fanciful
England evolved from recondite reading through foreign spectacles. Whilst
writing the final chapters, Hugo's wife died; and, as he had refused the
Amnesty, he could only escort her remains to the Belgian frontier, August,
1868. All this while, in his Paris daily newspaper, _Le Rappei_
(adorned with cuts of a Revolutionary drummer beating "to arms!"), he and
his sons and son-in-law's family were reiterating blows at the throne.
When it came down in 1870, and the Republic was proclaimed, Hugo hastened
to Paris.
His poems, written during the War and Siege, collected under the title of
"L'Année Terrible" (The Terrible Year, 1870-71), betray the long-tried
exile, "almost alone in his gloom," after the death of his son Charles and
his child. Fleeing to Brussels after the Commune, he nevertheless was so
aggressive in sheltering and aiding its fugitives, that he was banished the
kingdom, lest there should be a renewal of an assault on his house by the
mob, supposed by his adherents to be, not "the honest Belgians," but the
refugee Bonapartists and Royalists, who had not cared to fight for France
in France endangered. Resting in Luxemburg, he prepared "L'Année Terrible"
for the press, and thence returned to Paris, vainly to plead with President
Thiers for the captured Communists' lives, and vainly, too, proposing
himself for election to the new House.
In 1872, his novel of "'93" pleased the general public here, mainly by
the adventures of three charming little children during the prevalence of
an internecine war. These phases of a bounteously paternal mood reappeared
in "L'Art d'être Grandpère," published in 1877, when he had become a
life-senator.
"Hernani" was in the regular "stock" of the Théâtre Français, "Rigoletto"
(Le Roi s'Amuse) always at the Italian opera-house, while the same subject,
under the title of "The Fool's Revenge," held, as it still holds, a high
position on the Anglo-American stage. Finally, the poetic romance of
"Torquemada," for over thirty years promised, came forth in 1882, to prove
that the wizard-wand had not lost its cunning.
After dolor, fêtes were come: on one birthday they crown his bust in the
chief theatre; on another, all notable Paris parades under his window,
where he sits with his grandchildren at his knee, in the shadow of the
Triumphal Arch of Napoleon's Star. It is given to few men thus to see
their own apotheosis.
Whilst he was dying, in May, 1885, Paris was but the first mourner for all
France; and the magnificent funeral pageant which conducted the pauper's
coffin, antithetically enshrining the remains considered worthy of the
highest possible reverence and honors, from the Champs Elysées to the
Pantheon, was the more memorable from all that was foremost in French art
and letters having marched in the train, and laid a leaf or flower in the
tomb of the protégé of Châteaubriand, the brother-in-arms of Dumas, the
inspirer of Mars, Dorval, Le-maître, Rachel, and Bernhardt, and, above all,
the Nemesis of the Third Empire.